BURGLED! (The Musical)

Or - Things We Lost in the Break-In. (There is no music available, as my iTunes library was on my stolen laptop)

For those of you who hadn't guessed from my not-very-cryptic status posts on Facebook, our house was broken into on Friday the 13th. Seen came home early, he had a bad reaction to some nuts (tee hee) and wasn't feeling very well at work. At 2:23 pm, he called me and said "I have some really bad news..." The blood left my face, I feared that our old lady Munchy, 17 yr old tabby, who is in moderate health, had passed-on while we were at work.

"Somebody broke into the house, ransacked the place and stole a bunch of stuff...They got your laptop." He sounded stressed, I flipped out and said "I'll be right home" and proceeded to run about the office telling everyone I had to leave. I'm certain that I was moderately insane in my goodbyes.

The 45 minutes it took me to get home in the rain made for the longest commute in history. I got home, and was relieved to find Seen and all the cats in good shape. In the 5 hours we waited for the cops to show up and photograph the place and take our statements, we called our banks, credit cards and did an inventory of what had been taken. Of course the Wii that was all of 2 weeks old was gone, the PS3 we'd splurged on for our Xmas present was gone, Seen's birthday iPod Nano - gone, as was my 4 yr old iPod, all the cables to the old XBox were gone, but the XBox was still in residence. The biggest loss was my Mac Powerbook laptop.

Now, this laptop needed replacing, in the 4 years we've had it I'd knocked it on the floor one too many times. The power source was bent and needed seriously finagling to charge properly (which was probably a fire-hazard) The case was cracked slightly, so the CD/DVD drive no longer works. It was on it's last legs and we'd discussed getting a new laptop once we get out of our mortgage. It wasn't the loss of the physical laptop that is hard to bear, it's the loss of all the pictures and music and writing on the thing. And, of course, it hadn't been backed up for 6 months. Every couple of hours, it hits me again that I've lost captured memories.

Gone are the last pictures we ever took of Weasel, the day before she died. I managed to video her with my phone (we didn't have a video camera) 3 days before she passed. I had transferred all that info to the laptop when we changed phones and carriers over the holidays. Those videos are gone. So many pictures were in iPhoto, deemed unworthy for Flickr, but now completely lost to some punk-ass kids.

All my writing over the last 4 years was on there, luckily, I usually write long-hand before transferring over to the computer, so all that is lost is revisions and a few family stories that I can try to re-create.

The last thing we've lost is the iTunes library, on the laptop AND the iPod. We can rebuild that, but where am I going to find the Paul Moyers v. Ann Martin meltdown byte??

The thing that incensed me the most was seeing Weasels ashes, still in the bag, tossed onto the bed and her little clay footprint thrown down on the floor because they thought something valuable was in her cedar resting box. Douchebags.

Aside from the memories and the things, we've lost a sense of security. It's weird to see your dresser drawers all open and all your underpants pushed to one side. Somebody, other than me & Seen, was in our house, pushing through all our personal stuff, scaring out cats. But we're all safe now. After the fingerprint cop left Sat morning, we set the trauma aside and had a good weekend of tennis and a run in the park.

I refuse to let a couple of idiot kids have power over me (other than just irritating me because I have to listen to crappy sound system music at the gym now.) Bite my hiney burglars. You suck.


UPDATE!!! Just got off the phone with insurance company. Our losses total $2200 and we have a $2,500 deductible, which was chosen by our escrow company. So the theives f'd us in the A. We have to get out of this house...