Dumb and Dumber

My leg all of a sudden was so much better today.  I went to work and then was going to lunch at La-Tea-Da with Anna.  We drove down, had a delicious relaxing lunch and lots of chatting.  While we were sitting there I said, "Oh look, my bad leg is crossed over my other one."  My leg did it without me even being aware of it since it was so natural for me to sit that way before my meniscus tear.


We were leisurely sitting over the last of our coffee (after several servings of tea with our meal) when the owner of the restaurant came into the room where we were sitting and said, "Does anyone in here have a red Toyota truck parked int the lot across?"  It went over my head, I mainly heard the word truck and I don't have a truck.  Then all the other words came into the picture, red, toyota, lot across the street and I said I do and she said that someone called and said it was broken into.  Well, I went flying over there and sure enough, there was my poor red RAV4 with a totally smashed window on the passenger side of the car.

So I was the first DUMB one.  I completely forgot to take my Garmin GPS off the window.  Shouldn't leave things like that out to tempt the evil gremlins lurking around parking lots behind doctors offices in the middle of the day.  Fortunately I had the sense earlier to take my work bag out of the car and leave it at home because that had over $100 in it.  I usually always leave it in my car from Thursday to Friday since I work both days but today I did think that I probably didn't want to leave it in the car while we were going into the city neighborhood.

I called 911 and they transferred me to the police.  I thought for sure they would come rushing down to take a look at the damage that was done.  Even the man from the restaurant who went out to the car with me told me not to touch anything in case they wanted to get fingerprints.  When the policeman started asking me questions I said "Aren't you going to come down here and get fingerprints?" and he said they just take a report over the phone and gave me my Case # when we were done.  There I was, left on my own and it had started to rain.  Anna went back in the restaurant to get my umbrella that I left behind in the rush and I pushed most of the glass that was on the seat onto the floor.  I drove across the street, picked Anna up and we took the side roads home so that none of the glass left in the window would blow off into the car.  Anna sat in the back and it started to rain a little harder, but at least it was warm out since the window was wide open, well actually not open, just not there.

I don't know why I didn't take a picture of the mess while we were in the parking lot.  I thought of it and then thought it might be inappropriate and I had to file my report and then call Larry too and then I was anxious to just get out of there.  After all, it was 3:10 and I was supposed to meet Audrey at 3:30 to go to the vinegar store.  On the way home Anna commented that the tea was good but we really could use some wine.  How prophetic that was.

After dropping Anna off I was able to assess better what was taken.  My GPS was gone along with the window holder.  The GPS was 5 years old and no longer worked with the attachment to power it in the cigarette lighter, or whatever that recptacle is called now since it doesn't have a lighter in it anymore.  But it did work plugged into an electric outlet and my car happened to have one of those.  Well the lousy thieves took the cord that was attached to the GPS but probably yanked it out of the socket so hard they broke off the prong part and I found it on the floor.  They also took the cord that I do plug into my cigarette lighter to charge my iPhone but they left the part that goes in the lighter :-)

They went through my glove compartment and the box between the seats.  They did take my favorite pair of sunglasses, which probably cost me $10 and the $10 case they were in.  They did leave behind my car registration and insurance card which has my address on them.  Of course, I did what you're not supposed to do and had my address in the GPS that they could access by pressing GO HOME, but at least they didn't take my garage door opener which was on my visor.  And thankfully, other than the window, they didn't do any other damage to my car.  So were they DUMBER?  Maybe not, unless something evil happens to them as a result of what they did.  They're just not going to benefit from what they took.  Sort of reminds me of whoever stole my spiral Christmas tree many years ago that I had outside at Mt Airy.  They yanked it out of the ground and tore off the part of the cord that plugged into the electricity.  Just malicious meanness.

Below are the pictures I took after the car was home in the garage and most of the glass was cleaned out of the window.

 They really had to smash at the window to get it open because it was thick shatterproof glass.

Once I saw that all my ID papers were there, I got into the car with Audrey who was waiting for me and we started heading downtown.  On our way across the Bay bridge it started to rain so hard that we decided that maybe tomorrow would be a better day to go.  I invited her over for some wine instead and called Anna and said we'd pick her up on the way and she'd have that wine after all.

The glass people are coming to the house Monday to replace the window - car insurance has full glass coverage, no deductible.

The End