Rough Christmas Week

It was looking like it would be a nice relaxing Christmas week when I headed out for the airport Monday afternoon to pick up The Daughter. The flight was merely an hour or so late, Christmtas vacation started on Wednesday, and although the weather was warm and there was rain in the forecast, Christmas day was looking to be pretty nice. So I pick her up, drive home, and walk inside. She walks into the kitchen and comes back out asking, "are you doing work on the back door?" We'd been broken into, literally -- someone had kicked through the door panel. It's likely they were still in there when we drove up, because they had only gone through the bedrooms, stealing three laptops and a bunch of jewelry, but little else. Also, a woman had crossed the street and walked past us as we parked the car -- probably a lookout. The police department was there quickly, and after a quick look around they called in the New Orleans version of CSI, complete with the blue latex gloves and tackle box. They dusted for prints, took detailed notes, and seemed to have the idea that this had been done by the same person responsible for a few other recent burglaries. Not a very good way to start the holidays.

Tuesday morning I made it out for the morning ride, pretty much expecting to get rained on, but luckily we managed to get back well before the weather started to go downhill. The only problem was that the ride seemed really hard for some reason. Howard, Woody and Rob started attacking each other and I just wasn't in the mood to play that game. Even so, the second group was pushing pretty hard for most of the way out to the turnaround. Later that evening The Wife got a call on her cellphone from a bipolar homeless person who had found her stolen backpack while dumpster-diving. Since it had her passport and other various cards and documents in it, we called the neighbor to follow us for backup and met him at the Walmart parking lot where we got the backpack, which contained the power supply for The Wife's laptop, and he got some cash. The guy was very excited that she worked in Psychiatry and wanted to keep one of her cards so he could call her about his psychiatric problems. The next morning I saw a Toshiba M45 laptop on the local Craigslist that looked a lot like The Wife's stolen one - same model and specs. The ad mentioned that it "needs new power cord." Hmmm. We gave the information to the police detective, but haven't heard anything back from her. My own Toshiba M55 (both were purchased immediately after Katrina when we were refugees), that has about a thousand photos, race results, etc., will probably never show up. Most of the important stuff is backed up somewhere (I hope), but it'll probably be a while before I can get a new laptop, replace and reinstall software, and get everything working smoothly again. In the meantime, I'll be mostly stuck with the Blackberry until I'm back in the office in January. I spent a good three hours on Tuesday changing about two hundred passwords since I had Passwords Plus on the laptop. Naturally you need a password in order to open it, but I figured I'd better change everything just to be on the safe side. We also set up fraud alerts with the credit reporting agencies in case there is any attempt at identity theft -- better safe than sorry.

After the break-in on Monday, the cat started going downhill and we took her to the Vet on Tuesday. She was in acute kidney failure and had to be put down. Meanwhile I installed a little wireless alarm system just in case our friends decide to come back and finish the job over the holidays. After Christmas I'll need to get someone out here to replace the door, which won't be a simple task since it's from the 20's and nothing off the shelf will work. Luckily, I was able to ride Wednesday and Thursday, so that was good. I certainly won't make it out on the bike today, but tomorrow's looking pretty good.