Burglarized

Apparently "Good will toward men" was not on the creep's mind who burglarized our house this week. His fa la la la la was checked at our kicked- and pried-in basement door.

It was an epicly bad day for the McCallens this Monday. David was home alone/working while Noah and I visited with my family for a delayed Christmas celebration. He was also freezing. In true McCallen style we had inadvertently run out of fuel oil (again!) and were using space heaters to tide us over until the oil man could come fill up our tank.

Sometime on Monday, the oil man came and left behind a receipt. About that same time, David's truck decided to have a meltdown in his office parking lot. The power steering went out (hello $400 repair), and he had to have it towed. At that point, David was without a vehicle, one hour from our house that needed its furnace restarted lest our pipes freeze, and I was three hours away in NE Ohio watching a movie with my family.

After the oil man came, another man came... but he wasn't exactly invited. When David caught a ride home with his coworker, Chris, he returned to an open entry door and a messy house. Some jerk had taken our living room TV, my jewelry box, some cash, my iPod Touch and an old laptop. Happy flippin' holidays.

But, there's a bright side—several of them, in fact. No one was home when it happened, so no one got hurt. As a bonus, it wasn't me who discovered the situation, therefore there was one less terrified and frantic woman in the world dialing 9-1-1 and running wildly out of a house with a three-year-old in tow. We have insurance, and it looks like everything we lost will be covered at replacement value (we hope). David's truck is fixed and in use again. Our house is once again warm. My husband cleaned up the break-in mess before I got home, so the house looked relatively normal when I saw it, with only Christmas tornadoes to clean up. And speaking of Christmas: not one gift was stolen (guess they weren't cool enough, or the guy was just not a Buzz Lightyear fan).

Oddly enough, so far this incident is less troubling to me than the local murder a few months ago. That crime resonated on a different level than this one—what I assume is a local meth addict who needed some quick cash to feed his addiction... or something like that.

It will, however, mean that I take a closer look at who comes up our driveway, and who drives slowly by it. I imagine when I return home after dark, my usual cautiousness may ratchet up a notch or two. And, in light of what we thought was once not a threat but now has come true, David and I taking some small measures to add more security to our home.

But after an initial meltdown over the loss of my personal property—namely the jewelry given to me over the last 25 years from lots of folks that I love—I feel... okay. Really and truly okay. I assumed that would not be the case, or rather that I would be a basket case. Bless the Lord, I'm fine (we're all fine).

I'm also thankful that Noah's clueless. I told him on our drive home that our TV was gone. "Why is it gone, Mama?" My answer, "Because sometimes they go away" was good enough for him. And so was my response to his keen observation on our way through our splintered door frame: "What is our house breaking?" Me: "Because sometimes houses break. Daddy will fix it." Voila. Innocence intact.

I was about to end this post with the age-old adage, "Things can only get better from here." But literally as I was typing this, the news came in that David's folks just returned home from a short hunting trip to find their pole barn had been burglarized. Geesh.

Still, I refuse to kowtow to the tyrants of the world. This stunk, it really stunk, but we're already on the mend and looking forward to a better and brighter new year with a shiny new TV, a fancy new laptop, the latest iPod touch and a tasteful selection of fine jewelry. Like I said, there are some silver linings.