What a... what the... this is bizarre.

[rivka]

It was Alex's bedtime. Michael and I got her into pajamas and brushed her teeth. Then Michael went downstairs and I read stories. Alex jumped out of bed to turn out the light all by herself. I reached down to turn on her lullabye CD.

The CD player wasn't there.

Ludicrously, I looked under the bed and even under a baby blanket lying on the floor, as if somehow a portable CD player could get up and walk. I called for Michael. He looked at the blank place on the floor and agreed that, yes, the CD player was gone.

As soon as I could detach from Alex I walked through the house. Nothing seemed out of place in our bedroom, the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. Michael checked the third floor and the basement. Nothing unusual. Our computers were untouched. The TV, DVD player, TiVO box, VCR, living room CD player, and all our CDs were intact. On my desk in the dining room, under some papers, my checkbook and my iPod lay undisturbed. In the bedroom, Michael's ceramic jar of coins was untouched. Several bottles of very expensive whisky remained prominently displayed in the corner cabinet of the dining room.

And yet, we were clearly the victims of a burglary. There is no other explanation.

Michael said that when he'd come home from work the door had been unlocked. (Since nothing seemed out of place, it slipped his mind until the CD player was missing; he's still not totally sure that he didn't just turn the key wrong, and unlock it without realizing it.) I know I locked the door when I left this morning. (Locking the door while carrying my work things and Alex's nursery school things is enough of a production that it doesn't slip one's mind.) Our bedroom window was closed but unlocked - there have been a few cooler nights this week, so we've had the windows open instead of using the air conditioner.

I think what must have happened is that someone accessed our bedroom window from the second-floor balcony. Our next-door neighbor was planning to have roofers in this week; it's possible that a ladder was left unattended. I think they walked through the upstairs, grabbed the CD player, went downstairs, and left through the door. They can't have spent very much time in our house, or other things would be missing.

What a weird thing to have happen. Honestly, it hasn't even really sunk in. Michael is incredibly jumpy, going over and over the house to check things. (And I checked in the closet and wardrobe in Alex's room before I left her.) I just feel... I don't know. I mean, we must have been burgled. And yet it seems so surreal, that a $30 CD player would be taken and nothing else, that someone was here and yet the house looks normal and undisturbed.

We haven't bothered to call the police. It seems like there's no point. I e-mailed the neighbor to ask if the roofers had been here with ladders, and we'll check with our neighbors on the other side tomorrow to see if they saw or heard anything. Although I think they'd have been over here immediately, telling us, if they had.

This is so... yeesh. This is just weird.

Comments

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

This is so... yeesh. This is just weird.

Many, many years ago I had an incident with a peeping tom (I was living in a ground-floor apartment at the time), and that weird feeling stayed with me for a very long time.

Edit: No, on re-reading, I think my weird feeling is different than your weird feeling. I don't think I can be more articulate about it than that, though.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

We had a previous burglary in which someone squeezed through the tiny kitchen window while Michael was sitting upstairs. That one left me feeling immensely creeped out and violated for a long time. This time it just feels... inexplicable.

[ex-serenejo.livejournal.com]

I hid things as a child. I think there's a chance Alex hid it. I kind of hope that's what happened.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

It's possible. She has never unplugged anything before, though. And she was pretty unhappy about having to go to sleep without music.

She may have, though.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

That was my first, hopeful guess, too.

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

well, in my house, that would DEFINITELY be the case. I find random crap everywhere b/c my kids play with stuff. Especially anything that plugs in like a cd player. In fact, I have found our cd player in the garden once. Not sure why it was out there, but it definitely involved anthony's rich, and very odd, imagination.

Here is to hoping Alex moved it someplace odd. If you find it under the bathtub or in the pantry, you know that is what happened. Much better than someone coming into the house.

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

btw, Andy's theory is that Alex moved the CD player and you will find it someplace odd, and it will involve peanut butter... ; )

He was just telling me the story of his sister hiding a pawn to a chess set down a plastic trumpet at age three - and she refused to admit she had done it for YEARS.

Oh, and when my kids do move something (like my wallet, once), they absolutely refuse to admit they have touched it and they can never tell me where they put it. They will even help us look for it! I prefer to believe it is a complete lack of short term memory than anything more nefarious...

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the burglar was startled and that's why more things didn't get taken. A little CD player seems like small change compared to the other things in the house.

I always warn new neighbors not to leave their sliding glass doors unlocked (or without a charley bar) because it's easy to get from the bottom floor balcony up to the second and third floors. My neighbors think I'm nuts to shut all the windows and lock the doors when I leave.

[lizzibabe.livejournal.com]

and it seems inexplicable to me that someone will leave their domicile unlocked w/windows open when they leave. I mean....*anyone* could walk in and take stuff!

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Depends on where you live. I often leave my kitchen door open, protected only by a latched screen door, when I'm making a quick run to the store or something. And all night, when it's hot.

Given that I have been burglarized (not in this house, but in this town), I don't know why I feel comfortable doing that, but I do.

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

Is there any chance that Alex might've moved it? Otherwise, yeah. That does seem really weird!!!!

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

So creepy to think that a stranger was in your house! Lucky nothing else was stolen. Probably worth notifying the police, in case they are hitting other homes in the neighborhood.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

It's actually useful to report it (even though, pain in neck) as policefolks do actually (sometimes) read each other's reports, and if there's rashes of things going on, they (sometimes) like to pay more attention to neighborhoods/do more patrols/whatever.

(I do ENDless freakin' data entry for police incident reports, so I'm not a police-person myself, but I pick up details.)

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I do sympathize. When we had been living here only a year or so, we ended up with a stranger asleep one night in our small front porch, and even that felt like a violation. (Our cat didn't mind, weirdly.)

A possible practical suggestion: My parents' house has a lot of ground-floor windows which are invisible from the street. As a security measure (decade ago), my father drilled 1/4" holes in the window frames and jambs and slid in deadbolts, which are about 6" long and basically make the windows immovable (at least, not without breaking the glass).

The thing that makes this clever is that there are two sets of holes--one set of holes to hold the window complete shut and one set to hold it exactly 4" open. This allows the windows to actually let in free-flowing air, but not unwanted humans.

It strikes me that this system would also keep them closed enough to keep in wanted small humans. But that might conceivably be a fire hazard.

[lizzibabe.livejournal.com]

that sounds like a wonderful idea.

[richtermom.livejournal.com]

I drilled in fairly small holes and slid in some four or five inch nails just a couple inches up from where the lower windowtop is. I think it's the same logic, but we actually had longer nails in the house that day, and it didn't use a freaky drill bit. We did drill the hole in fairly deep just to make sure it wouldn't easily fall out.

My mother enjoys telling the story about how when I was four we were all getting ready to go visit my grandparents about an hour away when my mom noticed that my pillow was missing. Hrm. She searched under the bed, she pulled out almost everything from the closet, she checked the outside garbage cans and the basement laundry pile, nope... By now we were definitely behind schedule, and she just started randomly checking everything.

She found my pillow in the fliptop schooldesk I used in the dining room.

I don't remember why I did that.

K is 4 and she's really getting into hiding herself.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i say do call the police-- they won't be able to do anything about it, i expect, but it's the sort of thing that i think should be tracked. (wait until tomorrow and call the non-emergency line, though.)

[platypus]

I wouldn't totally discount the possibility that Alex moved it, but if it was plugged in that does seem strange. When you first called it 'portable' I thought it might have been easy for one of you to move it and forget, but it doesn't sound like that's the case. It's more appealing than the idea of someone breaking in, though, and it's very strange that nothing else would be moved or taken. On the other hand, if you're sure it's a break-in, I'd report it on general principle, even if you haven't (yet?) noticed anything of large value gone.

[carbonel]

I had a situation a bit like that several months ago. I'd broken some ribs a few years ago, and had been prescribed oxycodone for the pain. I hadn't used all of them before I got better, so I saved them for a rainy day, as it were.

A few months ago, I had a killer headache and I didn't have to be functional, so I thought I'd use one of the oxycodone. The pill container was still there, but the bottle was empty. Someone had stolen the pills, and I hadn't noticed. They do have a significant street value, but this was just boggling. It had to have been either a visitor or one of the cleaning people. I hope it was the latter, because I hate to think that anyone I know would do that.

Now I keep the good drugs out of sight.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

That *is* bizarre. At least only the CD player is gone.

[aloha-moira.livejournal.com]

We had a digital camera just get up and walk away (the memory card was still in our printer, but the camera was just... gone. I wondered whether it might have been stolen, but I just couldn't fathom taking just the camera but none of the other piles of nice electronics, etc. (so I figured either CJ or I had moved it or taken it somewhere and lost it). But having read this... *shudder*

In Berkeley there aren't enough insects to warrant screens, so all of our windows are just open. We have hinges installed on the top windows such that when they're 'open' they keep the window from going any higher than 2-3 inches, but can be closed to let the window open entirely. It's a pretty good solution; not sure if it's as good as the bolting solution but probably easier to install!

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Did you say digital camera?

*searches*

...Shit.

[charlottezweb.livejournal.com]

Oh, man. I'm sorry. My digital camera was stolen from my desk at work a few years ago--we think I was in the bathroom and someone stepped off the elevator, saw it, grabbed it and stepped back in. It's still upsetting. I will keep my fingers crossed that any pics had been downloaded already or weren't very important.

[aloha-moira.livejournal.com]

Oh no. :(

On the bright side, we were able to use it as an excuse to buy a nicer, newer camera...

[ailbhe]

Wow. I agree with both the "report it" people and the "it's possible to likely that Alex hid it," though if she has imaginary friends of any kind it may also have been one of them. Linnea knows that her friends are pretend but also distinguishes clearly between their actions and hers.

Yuck. Not pleasant, anyway. I hope the night went ok.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's bizarre, all right.

When my brother was a tot, he was very interested in how things were put together. My parents left him at home alone one afternoon. When they returned, there was an odd lump under one of the sofa cushions. It turned out to be a rather large part of the sewing machine that he'd taken apart. When he discovered he couldn't put it back together, he decided to hide the parts so no one would know what he'd done. (Uhhh...right....)

Unfortunately, he hid many of the small bits in the furnace vents. Those parts were beyond finding. Which made the parts they did find rather worthless for anything more than a great family story.

If it was a burglar, it sounds more like an opportunistic neighbor kid who wanted a CD player than a professional. 'Cause as you point out, the burglary makes no sense otherwise. Then again, a burglaries aren't required to make sense. It's just that they usually do.

When Toad Hall was burgled in the mid-1990s, the locksmith who came over that night to re-key the doors did a lot to put me at ease by pointing out that the burglars had obviously had no taste, seeing how they'd left the really good stuff -- a few bottles of single malt Scotch -- behind. The parts that I was most annoyed by were that they stole a piece of luggage -- to carry the loot out in, no doubt -- and an afghan which I expect they used to wrap the various pieces of AV equipment and my camera that they took.