Happy Thanksgiving ... and I was robbed

Last Friday started off well enough, but it came to a crashing (literally) end. My house was robbed.

I was up at work when my wife called and told me that the woman who looks after our daughter after school called her and said that our house had been broken into … and that was all she said. So, freaking out, I quickly grabbed my stuff and ran out the door, thinking that I needed to get home as quickly as possible. I only live about 2 miles from where I work but it still took an agonizing 15 minutes to make the drive. The police had been called and we were told to NOT go in the house until they had arrived. Do know how hard it is to know that you’ve been robbed and NOT go in the house? It’s almost impossible.

All I could think of as we all stood around, first waiting for the police to arrive and then for them to walk the house to make sure it was clear – was how much of my stuff had been taken and how much vandalism damage I was going to discover once I got in the house. The good news was that when we were finally let in, I realized this was only a very thorough smash-and-grab job. They robbers did not slash my furniture, break whatever they could, or spray paint any of my interiors. They did, however, pull everything out … they dumped over drawers, cabinets, and pulled everything out of the closets. They were looking for whatever they could reasonably carry out of the house without drawing too much attention to themselves. This means they stole all our small-ish electronics and jewelery. My wife got the worst of it because they stole jewelry that can not be replaced – fancy things that have been in her family and passed down for generations. It’s valuable stuff but since it isn’t anything we’d ever sell, we don’t think of it as diamonds, pearls, and opals … it’s her grandmother’s diamonds, pearls, and opals.

Our house is generally kept in very tidy order – I can’t think straight when there’s stuff all over the place. Walking through the house only to see all the contents from the drawers dumped out all over the place was extremely disconcerting. Clearly the people who robbed us were looking for jewelry in the picture above … which they found. In addition to all my computer stuff, my wife’s jewelry, they also stole my daughter’s piggy bank … that has got to be some seriously bad karma.

I generally choose to believe in karma – you do good things and good things will happen to you. I also like to think of myself as a “glass-half-full” type of person. Normally, you might think that I must have done something really bad because karma decided to smack me down with a home robbery, but I would rather like to think that karma kept things from being worse than they turned out. Nobody came home and discovered people in the house, none of our pets – 3 cats, 1 dog, fishes, rats, etc. were bothered, lost, or damaged. Additionally, our house wasn’t spray painted and our furniture wasn’t slashed. For the most part, other than a few pieces of sentimental jewelry, none of the things that were taken were items that can’t eventually be replaced. Just wondering … do I have a fan that works at Apple since all my ‘Life of an Architect’ post producing computers and electronics were stolen …? If I have to write these posts on my phone, I can promise you that I won’t be doing this much longer. Anyone? Okay, never mind.

All things considered, I really don’t feel too bad. I’m glad that it’s the Thanksgiving holiday this week because rather than dwelling on my misfortune, I’ll have the time to think about all the things for which I am grateful:

smart and beautiful wife who is better than I deserve
a healthy and creatively brilliant daughter who makes me laugh
a passion for what I do for a living
a job throughout one of the worst recessions in my professional life
this website which allows me to pursue creative outlets not otherwise available to me
good friends who came over to my house to help sweep up glass and drop off treats
and the where-with-all that gave me the ability to buy all the stuff that was stolen in the first place

I know not everyone who reads this site celebrates Thanksgiving but regardless, we all have things to be thankful for – it just takes a minute (or a tragedy) to think about them and put the things that really matter in perspective.