Recovered

It's been a long couple of weeks.  Getting broken into has had a few effects in our family.  It seems I feel the need to lock doors now.  I don't feel "crazy" about it, but still...when Tracy isn't there I don't feel quite "safe".  We've been ok for the most part now that Sarah is back to sleeping better.  She had some problems getting her work in at school and paying attention, but it seems to be mostly back to normal now.  Life is starting to go back to how it used to be.

We did have an interesting experience yesterday.  We went to two pawn shops with the local police to look for some of our things.  Evidently we are unusual in that we kept some pictures and information on things taken.  We have been pretty good about keeping boxes for laptops, phones, etc for at least a few years as well as receipts for major purchases.  Funny enough, the camera we just got the day before the theft was one of the things stolen.  We had the receipts and serial # handy and were able to get it back yesterday!  Luckily we had only taken a few test shots with the camera so I wasn't worried if we received the chip back.  The biggest thing is not having a good camera to take pictures with.

The visit to a pawn shop can be an interesting experience!  There were some pretty unsavory folks in the pawn shops we visited.  I know this may not be the case everywhere, but personally I wouldn't have gone in these by myself.  They had some great merchandise by the way...I looked around while we were waiting for the managers.  The one police officer indicated that although the shop is required to take and ID from each seller...because people don't always have a great description of their property...much of what was there will have been stolen but can't be proved.  Did you know that a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds, and that more than 12,000 laptops disappear each week from U.S. airports alone and only 3% of laptops are ever returned.  I saw that evidenced in these shops.  As tempting as these deals were I don't think I could buy them from there, knowing that there was a possibility that I was benefiting from someone else's loss.

Oh...revelation:  criminals are really that stupid!  The people that stole our camera took pictures of themselves and people they knew with our camera...sometimes in front of our stuff...and left the chip in the camera!  We were also told that this is not an unusual thing!  Some of the pictures were pornographic in nature so I didn't actually look at all of them, but Tracy was able to pull them off and supply them to the police and the insurance company.  Crazy, right?

So basically...I'm feeling better about things.  We will be getting our lost list into the insurance company and hopefully getting some reimbursement for that...and I've learned some interesting new stuff.  I'm sure more will follow :)