Really, skip this entry. It will be nothing but whining, despite the fact that everybody's healthy, we're threatened by neither hurricanes nor wildfires, and plenty of people would be glad to have problems as dumb as this. I don't care. Just ignore this post.
Something woke us both at 3:30 AM. By the time we were fully awake there was no clue as to what had done it. Probably, I figured before I dozed back off, a last rumble of a storm that had peaked earlier, around midnight.
Woke at 7AM with a whopper of a migraine. Whimpered. Took stuff.
At 8, Larry marches into the room. "Somebody broke into the car. That's what we heard."
"Uh-oh! The gas tank!" My first thought. Gas theft is running rampant, often obtained by a costly gas tank puncture.
No, thank heaven, apparently they were just looking for money or small valuables.
But: "Did you leave any mail from banks or credit cards out there?"
The headache's better but I struggle to think. "I don't think so, but maybe we'd better call the police before I touch anything."
"Don't bother, they won't fingerprint the car for something this minor." I struggle to my feet. Dress. Go down to inventory the car junk.
It's really funny. We have nothing that anybody would want to steal. They'd gone through every pocket, glove box, trunk, all for nothing.
This reminds me of one of my long-ago moments of amusement, circa 1982, when I owned my AMC Pacer. Exited my apartment one morning to go to work and found that someone had considered stealing my car radio, until he discovered it was merely an AM radio and not worth the trouble. He was apparently so disgusted by my poor taste in electronics that he forgot his screwdrivers. A standard and a Phillips, there on the driver's seat. Nice quality set. I used them for years. But I digress.
So Larry calls the sheriff's dept. in case they want all the reports. And oh, they sure did. This is happening a lot. Kids, they say, just looking for money, credit cards, iPods, other things that people Much Less Intelligent than we are leave in their cars. They steal CD's too, she said. This also amused us, since, for some reason, they had left Mozart, the soundtrack to Lord of the Rings, and Norah Jones. I'm sure they really wanted them. They must have gotten interrupted. Yeah, that's it.
Anyway, I mix my protein shake and sit down to read comics online while we await their arrival. Larry goes out to meet them. Comes back in.
"Boy are you in trouble!" he says, but he's grinning. Turns out they did want to print the car. Turns out he told them "his wife" had opened the door and examined things. (Actually, he admitted his own examination of the car to them, but that wasn't the story I got!) Turns out he failed to mention that I wasn't going to until he scoffed at the idea. (Must...plot....revenge...). They dust and depart.
As this pseudocrisis winds down, we are informed that EIGHT out-of-town guests will arrive, starting tomorrow, in overlapping shifts.
And this while we have a flea infestation.
There's no excuse for having a flea infestation, with these cool hi tech monthly treatments. But...
(Here's something AA members are cautioned not to do: whine about how they're singled out for problems, "Oh I'm so special, nobody has it as hard as me-e-e-e!" )
But I swear, if Frontline, ordinarily a fantastic product, makes one bad batch a year, we will get it. Murphy's Special Law Just for the Pleistocene Family. But we did get a batch that did nothing, might as well have been Aquafina. (Yes, I'm going to tell Frontline, when I remember to bring the box upstairs for the batch number). And poor Scooter infested the whole downstairs with fleas he was not supposed to have. We switched to Advantage, he's flea-free, but the downstairs has become a biting nightmare. It's been professionally treated once, to no avail. Needs another treatment, but with small children arriving and Scooter needing someplace to escape the heat.... Well, we'll work something out. Scooter is fine in the foyer at night, so daytime, he can be out and about while the garage is...being dealt with.
At least the fleas aren't in the upstairs living space but I'm complaining anyway, o-KAY? Time for Excedrin.
So that's the news and the prospects for the week ahead. I want chocolate.
8 comments:
Live in it then.
(I'm soooo tempted to just stop there, but I can't, because I sympathize 'way too much, and because it's a great post that doesn't deserve it. But I was tempted.)
Concerning flea treatments: the Ft. Harrington vet has our menagerie on something called "Revolution," a relatively new monthly dot-on that treats not just fleas, hookworms, roundworms, and ear mites, and is a canine and feline heartworm preventative as well. It also slices cucumbers in novel patterns and increases your gas mileage by 20%.
My worst theft happened when I was living in a second-floor apartment in Oakland. It had a deck, where I would frequently hang my laundry out to dry to save the expense of the building's basement dryers. I came home one day to find that someone had gone to all the trouble to climb up to the second-story deck to steal some of my clothes. I didn't know whether to be ticked off more at the theft or the fact that the thief left more than half of my stuff. How insulting.
Once had my car and my high-school aged son's car rifled through. It was a grab-and-go, and they took a gym bag with his soccer gear from his car, a box of tapes (this was a while ago) from mine and a few other things. It being a small town, someone called with the soccer gear, which had been tossed into the bushes once it was examined, and the tapes were all copies. He found a few of his other things strewn down the road near where the soccer gear had been.
What frosted my shorts was that they took my sunglasses -- a very nice pair of Serengetis. Which were prescription trifocals, and utterly useless to them. Those never turned up and were never replaced, since, expensive as they were, it was still under the deductible.
Awww, I know just how you feel. Doesn't it just suck that you can't just be annoyed, you have to feel guilty about feeling annoyed?
We had the opposite experience last week... realizing on Saturday that the passenger window in the car had been left wide open at least since the previous Tuesday. And nothing was taken (there were sunglasses, LOTS of CDs, and some gadgets like an electronic tire pressure gauge), and we're right in the middle of the downtown core.
Go figure. If we'd carefully locked it up tight as a drum on Tuesday, someone would've busted in and sold the CDs for $2 each to a second-hand store...
So sorry about your disruption in sleep - same thing happened to us last night, sort-of. Kids running through the neighborhood at 2am decided to ring doorbells. Scared me to death and I couldn't go back to sleep. Thankfully ours were just pranksters as opposed to your criminals.
Hope you get good rest tonight!
Sorry to hear about your bad luck, Ruth. If it is any consolation, you don't sound the least bit whiny to me.
wait
....
for
....
it
....
but then again, I'm in Michigan.....perhaps if I was in someplace closer like Nashville??
[grin]
I hope you have better days coming real soon.
What a great outpouring of sympathy/empathy! It's great to know about Revolution - our little Feral As He Wannabe Scooter needs all that protection - will look into it. Mike prompted me to go back out to the car and check on my prescription sunglasses which live hidden away between the seats - but yep, the thief didn't want those either!
The new bike bridge connecting us with the state park across the creek is gonna bring more of these problems. The getaway is quick and silent now - they could always take the highway but now they can nip down the path and gain the cover of the woods over there more quickly. I've warned our houseguests about leaving stuff in their cars while they're here!
your life doesn't sound that bad. get over it.
Yeah, get over it, and what's this stuff about revenge?
Is that why the car's seat back was all sticky?
Or does this have to do with that waded up orange hairball jammed deep into the toe of the left shoe?
Or maybe it's about the teetering pile of obscure why-would-anybody-bother-reading-these books left like a burglary trap where even cats must walk around them to reach their empty food dish?
Geez
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