We were robbed...

Yep...you never think it's going to happen to you. Then, BAM! Reality slaps you in the face and you become yet another victim.

Since I live with two of my sons, there's usually someone at the house at almost all times. Not this last Saturday. They both had to work and I decided to go to the Outlet Mall. The $14.95 sandals I bought actually ended up costing around $5,000. I would have taken a picture of my new sandals, but the assholes took both my cameras in their brief raid through the house. I was gone no more than an hour, which makes us think that they were staking the place out...waiting for a time when all three of us were gone. When I returned, I immediately saw that all the doors were open in the house, the blinds on my bedroom window were messed up and the decorative glass ornament I had hanging on the latch was in pieces on the floor. After a quick run-through, I discovered they took my new Macbook Pro (which I had gotten on September 11th), my old laptop, my two cameras, both of my son's laptops, a Wii, Playstation 3, some games, and an old cell phone. I called the police and they dusted for fingerprints, but I don't foresee getting anything back. I also filed a claim with my insurance company, so I hope that works out.

So, what have I learned from this experience?

1) Fingerprinting dust is EXTREMELY messy and hard to clean up because once you get it wet, it turns into a liquid black mess.

2) You know how on CSI, the cops run back to the lab to run the fingerprints through the system to find the bad guy? Not so. They file the fingerprints and wait until someone is arrested, then check to see if their fingerprints match the ones they took at our house.

3) Keep your receipts for years for everything you buy, because you never know what can happen. I had them for my stuff, but my sons didn't keep theirs. Hopefully, insurance will accept credit card records.

4) Make notes of serial numbers as soon as you buy something.

5) I need to come up with a better job of organizing rather than just throwing things on top of a growing pile of records. (But, at least after some rifling around, I found everything I needed.)

This is the first time I've been robbed...and hopefully the last. It's a very violated feeling...and a helpless one. The thought of someone going through my stuff pisses me off. My son put it on his Facebook and got some responses from friends who have had it happen to them, too. The shame of it is that it changes the way you feel about your home. I've always been the kind of person to keep blinds open (not at night, of course) because I love the sunlight coming in. Now I keep them partially closed so that no one can see inside. And see how my back door has those little windows but no curtain?

My son hammered in two nails in the woodwork above the door and now we hang a towel over it in the evenings. It sucks.

The only good thing is that they did not take my external hard drive which was sitting right next to my laptop. About a month ago, I transferred ALL my photos to this drive so that I wouldn't lose any of my pictures if my computer crashed. Yay!

So, my son and I were talking about it later that night and he said, "Mom, I think we should get a gun." He was 'halfway' kidding. God, I don't even want to think about that.