Crime of Opportunity

What would you do if you heard the door shut in the middle of the night? Would you jump up and see what was going on? Would you yell out, "Who is there". Would you kick your partner and tell them to go see what is happening? Or, would you think it was nothing and fall back to sleep. Guess what I did.
With that introduction, you will probably not be surprised to hear what happened in our house last night. Yep, we were broken into. Not only did a stranger enter our house while we slept but they had the audacity to take both of our laptops and dave's wallet and then leave the Seattle Times on our coffee table.
I almost puked.
I've only had one thing stolen in my life before today and that was my blue bicycle. It was stolen out of a garage in Victoria the day after I moved there. I thought that was bad. This is a little different of a feeling. Not only did they take our most valuable material goods...they took our pictures, our writings, our thoughts, our feelings of security in our new house, our sense of safety.
I partially am writing this because I have a wierd inkling that the sicko who stole our stuff may take pleasure out of searching our favorite list on our computers. My favorites contain links to other blogs, links to the bank, links to my work website and a link to this website. If he/she/they are reading this I have this message:

I hope you know that you are a coward and that your Karma is going to run out soon. And if you think that you are justified in stealing our stuff and more importantly violating our home because of the harshness of your life, you are sadly, sadly mistaken.

Now that little rant is out of my system, I am very happy to say that both Dave and I are unharmed, we are alive and not lying in some hospital bed bleeding from gunshot wounds. We are left making plans for more secure windows and more bolts on our doors and a little shooken up. I keep going to that dark place that says...What if we had woken up? What if they had hurt us? What if we had children in the house? The whole thing is freaky.

I hope none of you have similar experiences as it is not fun. Remember to lock your doors and windows and don't leave your laptops out where they can be snagged. A crime of opportunity it was but as the Seattle Police Officer said to me this morning, "You live in a good neighborhood, you have a nice house, there is no reason this occurence should make you live in fear. 1/10th of 1% of the population are thugs. You unfortunately came in contact with them today, this does not mean it will happen in the future".

The police officers who came to our house to look around (our phone line wasn't working so we thought someone had cut the line, this remains a mystery...the line isn't cut but the phone still isn't working...), were awesome. They were very kind and empathetic and helpful. I couldn't have been more pleased in my shocky state that to have had them as our protectors. As I said to them, "Give me someone who is bleeding and dying and I do fine, give me crime and I'm a mess".

Lock your doors and windows.