Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Blow-by-blow (without any REAL blows): Part 1

We'd been on the streets longer than usual, but traffic was relatively good, so I arrived home at about 7:30 pm. Walking up the street, I could see that my bedroom and outside lights were on, which bothered me, as I was sure they were off when I'd left the house. And a window opened that I'd definitely closed. Not good. I slipped halfway up the stairs, saw the wide open door, and asked the next door neighbor: hey, have you seen anyone here? No...I just got home.

So I ring up the landlord, who lives in the house across from me and promises to rush right over. Which he does, along with his brother, and there they are, two slightly stooped, courageously nervous Portuguese men with shockingly white hair. The brother, by day a used car salesman with the personality to match, is gripping a broom handle like he's going to beat the living daylights out of someone. The wife and daughter and mother and aunt are all standing on the balcony across the street, watching the goings-on. Since my house is slightly larger than a matchbox, it takes 30 seconds to verify that no one is there. But, yes, someone did come in.

The first thing I do with my sinking heart as I climb the stairs is imagine how I'm going to replace all the things that I was too stupid to have backed up on my laptop. That is, until I walked in the door and realized my laptop hadn't been touched. Sitting in its usual place, protected from dust, crashing ceilings and now burglars, my love/hate relationship with the PC just inched a couple notches towards love.

There are some drawers dumped out on the floor and cords scattered. He didn't like Boggle, nor Uno, though he was sure I'd hidden something in the boxes. The nice cordless phone still sat in the same place, as did the regular cheapo phone. An ancient cellphone was gone, as well as my US TracFone, both rather useless in the resale market, I would imagine. The sound recorder that the Advocacy Dept. gave me was gone as it must have looked like a cellphone. And my camera, which is my own fault because I didn't put the soap dish in the bathroom like I thought I should have right before I left the house. But all the chargers, cords, my little speakers, etc...were all left in a tumble on the floor. He hadn't rifled through papers or books, didn't open my office boxes or the cabinet where all the cds are stored. My chocolate and my mixer were still intact.

In the bedroom, my underwear drawer and t-shirt drawers were opened and rifled through, but he was kind enough not to dump them on the floor. (It's been a few weeks since I swept in there...) My jewelry boxes on the dresser were dumped out, but I looked and looked and can't for the life of me think what he might have taken. The silver and gold necklaces hanging in the closet, along with money, perfume, sunglasses and other relatively valuable objects, weren't touched.

I always leave a little cash lying out, burglar money, if you will, and that was gone, along with all my change, though he didn't see the US coins, and left the Indonesian carved box they were kept in. Thankfully. That was a present I've cherished since I was a child!

So it took all of about five minutes to make up this list to take with me to the police station (I called right away, but after an hour and a half, it was obvious that the cops weren't going to come to the house. I'm glad it wasn't an emergency.)

What was Stolen:
1 old cellphone
1 foreign, supercheap cellphone
1 camera
? jewelry
approximately R$ 57 in coins and cash

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Oh, Jenna, I am *so* sorry your house was broken into, but at the same time I am even more relieved that it wasn't too serious and that the thief broke in while you were out of the house.

:(

The bread sounded divine, btw.

LeAnne Hardy said...

I think I would be nervous to sleep there after a break in. How are you doing?