And The Goddammit Beat Goes On.

Our house is a one-man crime wave. Oh, and fuck metaphors.

We had a break-in a week ago. Late Sunday night. We were out like the proverbial LED fixture, maybe 1:30am. Jaxson started barking. This is not unusual, he’d been squabbling with the cats earlier, but he’d gone upstairs, Sweetie and I were vaguely conscious now, so she went up to let him out or yell at the cats or let the cats out and yell at him or it was 1:30am, who the hell knows.

Sweetie got to the top of the steps and noticed the door from the house to the garage was open. Her first concern was the cats getting out so she checked the main garage door, it was closed, phew, she could get some treats to get the cats back in.

Then she noticed one cat was still in the kitchen and the passage door from the garage was propped open with a gallon jug of distilled water. Very uncatlike behavior. Her brain was defuzzing now, and she checked the other house doors, a light was on in the living room but the door was closed – the back door of the house, out to the yard, was wide open, yard lights were on. She came down and got me, said “I think someone’s been in the house”, suddenly now I’m quite wide awake, I grabbed a bat*, we went upstairs, Jaxson staying with us, house is devoid of bastard, into the living room, both laptops were gone, she’s already calling the cops. I, in retrospect stupidly, alone, went out to check the vehicles. Both were fine but my truck was unlocked, I suck at life, by the way, fuck me, the garage door opener was gone, along with an old iPhone I was using basically as an iPod. My wallet had been gone through but only about $15 in cash taken, the wallet was left with all cards and ID, another $20 taken off the counter. Jaxson is a goddamn hero. He has been treated and treat-ed really damn well for a week. It was pretty clear Jaxson had chased he/she/them off and they just grabbed the most obvious shit. Why didn’t Jaxson react immediately? He/she/they did have a couple minutes, to open a second door, turn on some lights. Our guess is that because we have a rather jangled family lifestyle, someone coming in at 1:30am is not always particularly unusual, at least, it used to be not particularly unusual, and he wouldn’t go nuts immediately, but he undoubtedly dragged hisself up and went upstairs expecting skritches and found it was not someone we knew. Jaxson is a goddamn hero, is what I’m saying. He was up there with Sweetie while I was still trying to figure out what socks are. Goddammit.

So the police came, I used my phone to change every password for every site I used for my laptop, I didn’t do any business on it thank FSM because I don’t trust electronic business practices, and hers was password protected, so I’m not extraordinarily worried, just ordinarily worried, about ID theft. So very angry at myself.

Many steps are being taken, we are getting a monitored system and I’ve done some security upgrades and doing more, but mostly we have to use caution. How do we do that without feeling like prisoners within our own homes? Don’t know. I have had a week of poor sleep, paranoia, savage revenge and booby-trap fantasies in my brain, and I don’t like it, really don’t like brain right now. It could have been infinitely worse, I’m under no illusions, there is some #privilege speaking, I know, we have good lives. By the way, you can’t buy razor wire commercially. Life continues, we’re relaxing some. Watched a movie called ‘Ogre’, so our sense of humor is returning. She’s been through this before, many years ago, I have not, she’s hardly overjoyed but I’m taking it worse and angrier, she’s just pushing the solutions. I married well out of my league.

Dammit.

*I work with any number of gun-nuts, and haven’t told them about this, because I don’t want the conversation with them that I had with a friend who CC’s, but he’s not a sociopath. I don’t have a handgun. Still ain’t gonna get a handgun. Hate the filthy things, don’t want them in the house. The furthest I’ve even thought in that direction is getting a beanbag barrel for the shotgun, still not entirely out of the question, but she really doesn’t like the thought. A big part of the reason I don’t want a goddamn gun in the house is exactly the situation we had that night. Sleep-fuzz plus confusion plus sudden adrenaline burst plus artificial penis equals fucking disaster. And suppose the other party had a gun as well? With them wide awake, alert, and having the, to use a stupid term, ‘drop’ on me? To my friend, I started to say “When you have a gun, you have to be prepared to-“ and my friend finished “-use it.” “No”, I said, “to kill.” I’m not prepared to kill over a couple old computers, and if he/she/they had hurt my wife or pets, I don’t care what they are armed with, with my last breath I would have shown them their own throat. This criminal was just looking to grab and go, it seems there is a (professional?) ring of these bitches hitting the TCs right now, people in the house, people not in the house, always looking to go in through the garage, and there are detectives working on it, we’ve found out, so they’re taking it quite seriously, our stuff is long gone but everyone is safe. A gun would only have escalated the situation to very conceivably deadly proportions. Fuck that and fuck gun-nuts and fuck guns.