Shattered Glass Flies

The glass in our door was some special kind of safety glass (I guess) and shattered into a gazillion teeny-tiny pieces when the f&%*ers who broke into our house yesterday smashed it. And those gazillion teeny-tiny pieces went everywhere. Four rooms had glass shards to be swept and vacuumed up. They made it onto the desk on the opposite side of the room from the door. They were all over our washer and dryer, and even a few inside the washer lid.

And then there's the metaphorical glass shards. It's amazing how so much is affected even though so few things were taken. I have gone through a variety of emotions since walking up to the house to see the smashed window. My first reaction was a series of loud expletives and anger. My second, on seeing that a light was on in the guest room, was a momentary fear that someone could still be in the house. My third, while on the phone with the dispatcher two minutes later, was sadness at knowing that I was going to have to walk through the house once the sherriff arrived and see what else had been taken. There might have been a few tears.

As the sherriff observed, however, I am a glass-half-full kind of person, so I am back to that comforting sense of knowing that it is just STUFF. We might lose some photos that hadn't been backed up to the external hard drives. But the computers themselves and all their power cords and cables can be replaced. Our power drill can be replaced. The change bowl will fill back up as we empty our pockets over the next few months.

It won't be pleasant financially. It's not like we have piles of money sitting around waiting to buy new computers. I mean, we DID have one pile of money sitting nicely in a bowl, but the f*&%ers took that, too.

The day did end well, however. Michael went to a call-back for a community production of Willy Wonka at 6:30 and went straight to his office afterwards to work on changing account passwords and finding specifications of our stolen stuff to give to the sherriff's office and our insurance agent. He called from his office around 11 to say that the cast list had been posted and, despite never having been in a play before, he is going to be Willy Wonka! He's going to be GREAT, but it will be a lot of work from now until March.

Today, we are taking turns being home so that the house isn't empty. I'm at work and I'm hoping to pick up a borrowed laptop on my way home later this afternoon and then we'll have internet, but still no land-line phone, at the house.