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Goodbye August, you were an interesting month.

We finally moved into the new rental place the first weekend of the month. What a relief! The house is very close to campus, centrally located for all three roommates to get to work. We were a little concerned because the previous tenants had rented yard space for football tailgating. We don't know the ropes and didn't want to deal with a big party our first month here.

Little did we know that disappointed tailgaters would be the least of our worries.

The yard was pretty trashed from the previous years' festivities. The first couple of weeks I spent a lot of time weeding the flower beds. They'd been badly overrun with Virginia creeper, morning glory, and the ever-present poison ivy. I wore my gardening gloves and thought I was invincible until I woke up with my forearms and legs covered with blisters. My grandma used to be able to pull that stuff up barehanded, but not me.

After several days of suffering, I got a prescription for Prednisone. It's a trade-off -- itching misery, or emotionally erratic, insomniac, aching-joint misery.

Then, on Aug. 21, the first day of fall semester, I got an early morning e-mail telling me not to come in to work. William Morva had escaped from custody at the hospital, was accused of killing a hospital security guard and leaving a police officer in critical condition, and was thought to be in our neighborhood.

One roommate was already at his bakery job; the other roommate and I spent the day in the house. There were fellows with automatic rifles behind the trees across the road. There was a big yellow earth-moving machine parked sideways across the road blocking automobile traffic.

We obsessively checked e-mail and listened to WUVT and WVTF via the Internet.

Our roommate couldn't get back home when he finished his shift. We couldn't leave. Helicopters were constantly over the house. Peeking out the front windows, we saw pickup trucks with camouflaged men in the beds.

Eventually, I looked out the back window and saw two men with big guns in the back yard. Then there were a dozen, then 20 of them spreading out through the lawn.

The front doorbell rang. A man in an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms uniform and body armor introduced himself and asked if there was any way that Morva may have slipped into our house.

We were pretty positive there wasn't, but it was obvious that these guys would feel a lot better if we let them take a look, so we invited them in.

About eight fellows in blue came in with their rifles and began methodically searching the house. Upstairs, closet doors slammed. "Clear!"

They searched the attic, the downstairs, the basement. They scared the cat -- and me. Eventually, they were satisfied that there was no one hiding in the house and all trooped back out.

The men were perfectly nice; I'm just not used to people with guns.

I thought about my friend from high school who is currently in Iraq. I remembered the e-mailed situation reports he's been sending, and wondered if I was having a taste of what it is like to constantly live with guns and all the possibilities they bring.

Eventually, we found there was a Wikipedia page about the Morva manhunt. It had a link to an online feed of the local police scanner. The Web page was being constantly updated, and when the police scanner came alive with the news that Morva had been caught about a quarter-mile from our house, Wikipedia had the news almost instantly.

I looked out the front door and saw a Blacksburg bicycle police officer getting his bike out of the truck. I called out and he confirmed that Morva was back in custody.

The roadblocks were lifted, our roommate was able to come home, and we tried to understand how two peace protectors were dead and the guy we used to see downtown and call "Hobbit," because of his bare, hairy feet, may be heading for the death penalty.

This week I got another e-mail from my friend in Iraq. He has a remarkable ability to see the humor and beauty in the dangerous and horrific circumstances he is in, and is still as lyrical a writer as ever. I never know how to answer, but I'm glad to hear from him.

I find myself checking the fatality details on icasualties.org when I haven't heard anything for a while.

My daily battles with poison ivy and football feel awfully small.

Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.