Hey - didn't we used to have a tv????

Thursday night, I came home after having dinner out. Opened the kitchen door, talked to the cat, fed the cat, gathered kitchen garbage. Jane came home as I was hauling the garbage can & recycling to the curb. We chatted, went inside. then it occured to us: didn'twe used to have a tv?? And why is the back door wide open?

Ok, we're sometimes not the brightest bulbs in the box. I shut the back door, ruining any chance at fingerprinting before we go to the neighbor's house to make the 911 call. Sheriff deputies came, searched the house but accidentally let the cat out. The cat, who was the only witness to the crime, was loose in a world of armidillos, alligtors & other alliterative nocturnal creatures. Yet he was there to be fed when I got home, after the back door had been left open for who knows how long. He knew his way home for dinner. I turn my attention to figuring out what was missing.

It wasn't the ransacking kind of breakin you see on tv. (what tv?) One reason we hadn't noticed right away was that the house was left very neat, albeit uncluttered Drawers, for instance, had been opened, then shut. Our jewelery boxes were emptied only of the few gold chains we had.. Intended targets, evidentally, were electronics and gold. We're teachers - no stockpiles of ingots here, just computers, cameras, tvs, electonic games and the odd necklace. Oh, no, where's my Simpson's Road Rage game - don't tell me I have to take my aggrivations out on the real road, instead of Lisa Simpson's Electaurus???

Am I the only one who thinks it's odd that a dozen or so musical instruments were left undisturbed? Grateful, but really - a dozen assorted flutes, saxophones, etc??? Not educated criminals, one coworker suggested.

We really began to worry about the cat. We'd each searched the house, the yard, the block. One of the deputies helped look for him, as well as one of the neighbors. Both left with overoptimistic reasurances. Oh, George.......

Around midnight, after we'd almost given up hope, Jane decides to check the back yard one more time, and there's George, ready to come home. Unperturbed, full of lizards, he was the most wonderful mood enhancer imaginable.

As upsetting as the discovery was, that's what insurance is for... Our feelings of violation will take a bit longer. But our george survived - apparently unscathed. We're not letting him out of our newly alarm-systemed sights again.