What a... what the... this is bizarre.
Aug. 19th, 2008 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaIt 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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-20 09:42 am (UTC)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.