later that same day...

March 4. Funny, I didn't realize the beautiful hoar frost happened on the same day as this disaster until now when I went to blog about it. This is what we came home to after work on the same day we saw the beautiful trees:

Yup, that is our front door smashed in. Sigh. Our tenant was actually the first one home, so he called Michael at work, who then called me. We both got home as quickly as we could to determine what was missing and file a police report.

Thankfully, our alarm system did it's job. The people who broke in didn't stay long and didn't have time to make a big mess. This is what it looked like, and our bedroom is the only room they touched. It was a strange feeling and I was a little creeped out by the fact that some stranger had been in my house. The police even came to try and take finger prints, but didn't find any.

The only thing they found was some cash on the dresser. It also just so happened that Michael's laptop was sitting on the floor in the green room next to the bedroom. They saw that and grabbed it. That is all they took.

The crazy part is that they walked back out the front door with the loot. We live across the street from a private school and they broke in at 1:30pm on a Thursday afternoon. This whole thing really shocked us, I mean we've always felt safe because our street has so much going on on it during the day and you can see it from the major road that we live just off of. Two people actually witnessed it happening and called in to the police to report it.

So, in order to be able to leave the house, Michael got creative and screwed the door shut.

Thankfully, because the laptop was unreliable, we don't keep anything saved on it, so we didn't lose anything important. Insurance was good to us, replacing the door and the cash and the laptop. Everything worked out.

What I learned was that it's important not to keep valuables out in the open where they are visible. The things they stole were the laptop and the cash, which were both out in the open, there were other things that they could've taken but didn't see. We could've lost our camera, which had been laying on the floor, but Michael just randomly decided to take it to work that day. It's also not a good idea to keep valuables in your bedroom, it's the first place a thief looks apparently.