Tragic Loss

It's a really angering feeling when you've have something taken from you. I remember being in Prague on Valentine's Day,1996 and having my daypack stolen right off my backpack in the storage room of the hostel we had stayed in - I lost my Dickinson College Ice Hockey baseball cap, some ornately decorated eggs that I had bought in Bratislava, some postcards from Vienna and Bratislava, a pair of shoes, and certainly some other stuff I've forgotten. I remember having $25 stolen from my wallet in the locker room in high school - money I think I had gotten from selling Blow Pops or some such crap for the German Club or something.

Last Tuesday I got home and discovered that the handle to the fence gate had been pulled clean off. I didn't think much of it - since the screws had worked themselves loose a while ago, and we were expecting our roofer to come by to give us an estimate for covering the soffets and facia in vinyl. I got inside the house, and noticed that the window shade on the back window was all askew. I though that Ray had messed it up raising it and lowering it incorrectly, and scolded him for it. Then we went out to the backyard, and noticed that the screen from one of the windows was missing entirely. At this point we started to realize that something - rather someone - had probably gotten into the house. The screen was shoved under the deck - quite clearly intentionally - and the window was open about 6 inches from the top. We have double hung windows that weren't latched shut - and it was really easy to open it from the outside. We checked around the house to see if anything was missing, and it didn't appear that anything was. The two laptops were still here, the digital camera was still on DH's desk, the DVD player and all the other little valuable things were still in their place. Hmm. Maybe whoever had gotten in had been scared off by the FedEx guy who had dropped off a package that afternoon, or the roofer who we were expecting to give us an estimate. Maybe they were just casing the house. Who knew. We were a little upset that someone had probably been in the house, but satisfied that nothing was missing.

Until last night, when DH started looking for his iPod. It wasn't on his desk, it wasn't in his backpack, it wasn't anywhere we expected it to be. We looked and we looked, until we realized that it had probably been the only thing stolen. The box that it came in, which he left on top of the computer monitor, was also gone.

Now, DH has had some really bad luck. In high school he had his new walkman stolen at a track meet. His newer Jeep Grand Cherokee was broken into at college (that was the night we fell in love, in fact), and only a couple of months after getting his new Jetta, someone keyed the hood at our old apartment complex.

It's all very tragic, and he's completely beside himself with anger and frustration. Of course, it was a video iPod, so I'm slightly more concerned about some slightly incriminating pictures that were on the iPod. Nothing nekkid - just somepics from his brother's wedding last May.

Poor DH.