As if I didn't have enough things to stress over...

...our house got broken into last night.

Luckily, the guy was an idiot and my sister was home.

I left for work at 10pm. Kourt works until 11pm. My sister is always home during that time, but anyone watching people come and go via the driveway would think the house was empty because my sister parks her car in my parents' driveway next door and comes in the back.

Evidently, whoever this dude was saw my car leave at 10, saw that there were no other cars around, and decided the house must be empty. He pulled the window A/C unit out of the living room window and climbed in that way. So far so good, for him. Amy's room is in the very back of the house, and he was in the very front.

We guess that at this point he took the air conditioner and then came back, because it's nowhere to be found. After that, though, it's obvious he's not much of a criminal mastermind.

Our house is messy. Very messy. None of us are champion housekeepers, and it's worse since I have been working so much over the past three years. You know that episode of Friends where Ross is dating the girl that's perfect in every way except that her apartment looks like a trash dump?

We're not QUITE that bad.

The point is that it's not immediately obvious that we've got much of anything worth stealing in the house. And getting to that stuff requires dodging piles of laundry and such. And, honestly, what we DO own isn't worth THAT much. Just a few computers and a PS3 with all the Rock Band instruments and a few small personal electronics.

Seriously, I've had moments when I wanted to pawn anything we owned that would be worth even a little bit to try and pay bills before, and it's not worth the trouble. We've checked.

So, Mr. Brain Trust gets back into the living room and decides that the best course of action is not a) grab the PS3 and climb back out the window, or b) look around the house and find something else easy-to-grab like the laptop on my desk, but c) grab the largest object he sees and try to muscle it out the back door.

The largest object in the living room (well, besides the eliptical machine which is downright impossible for one person to move and didn't even cost $300 when it was brand new) is an approx 30" TV. Not a plasma or flat screen. A 10-year-old monster of an old picture tube TV. It's not worth anything. And carrying all 50+ pounds of really awkwardly shaped, front-heavy, nearly-wider-than-our-tiny-old-narrow-doorways TV is not an easy task. And not only does he decide that the monstrous ancient TV is the thing he really wants to take, but he also decides against the easy option of taking it out the front door that's 4 feet away. No, the back door seems like the way to go.

Yeah, I'm sure he was probably thinking that somebody might see him if he went out the front. Still, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see, even from the far side of the living room, that taking anything through the kitchen -- especially something of that size -- requires two tight turns in a space that's MAYBE 3 feet wide.

Our house, you see, is a tiny little thing that's probably 100 years old. The doors are narrow, the windows are small, and the rooms are practically doll sized. Kourt and I sleep in a bedroom that's smaller than the bathrooms or closets in most newer homes. The kitchen is even smaller. Beyond the kitchen is a laundry room. That used to be the end of the house, but when we moved in my parents put on an addition, which is where my sister's room is. There's a screen door that opens inward where the back door used to be, and then you have to turn again into a narrow entry way that leads to the "back door" (which is actually on the side of the house and opens onto the driveway). So, if he'd actually been alone, he'd have had to muscle the TV through the kitchen, set it down on the dryer so he could open the screen door, get it through the entryway, find a place to set it down again so he could open THAT screen door, unlock the back door, and then carry it outside and between the narrow space between the house and garage to get to the back yard.

Which is fenced in.

So, he'd have ended up having to either go back out front with the TV and risk being seen, or go through my parents' yard and down their driveway and then around the block and risk being seen, OR jump a fence. Carrying a gigantic TV.

Somehow, he managed to make it to the laundry room without really damaging anything else in the house. He was even so thoughtful as to take the time to detach all the cables that connected the TV to the PS3 and the DVD player and the cable hookup, get the TV unplugged from the power strip, and THEN steal it. However, once he got it into the laundry room, the noise of him muscling this stupid TV around got my sister's attention.

Now, she's used to noise in the laundry room. The cats hang out in there. That's where their litter boxes are. Ever heard the sound of cat claws sliding down the side of a washing machine? But the noises he was making were, of course, not like what the kitties usually sound like, so she comes out to investigate and finds a large black dude she's never seen before holding our 30" TV.

If he were smart, he'd have dropped the TV and ran right then. But he didn't. He stood there holding the fucking television set and tried to say that he saw somebody come into the house and that he was just checking to see if my sister was okay.

WHILE HE'S HOLDING A TELEVISION THAT PROBABLY WEIGHS HALF AS MUCH AS HE DOES!

I don't know exactly what the chain of events were over the next few minutes, but the TV is now sitting on the dryer (because none of us are strong enough to muscle it back to its place by ourselves) and he ended up running out the front door. I guess she called the cops first, and then my parents, and then me. It wasn't even 11pm, so all of this happened within about a half hour after I left for work.

We're lucky all we lost was the air conditioner. It took Kourt a while to find all our cats, but they're accounted for and fine.

My sister's first thought when she got to the living room after all this and found the front door open was that I must have left it unlocked. I spent a whole fucking hour trying to remember if I might have forgotten to lock it. I ALWAYS lock the door just by habit when I leave. But after freaking out for an hour I'd decided it was possible that in my haste I'd not gotten the lock fully engaged or something. I felt like shit about that until everyone (police included) came to the conclusion that he came in the window after he got the air conditioner out.

It still totally freaks me out, though, that he must have been watching for me to leave for work. I know there are some not-so-upstanding citizens residing around here -- I mean, we DO live in the 'hood for fuck's sake -- but still. Gah!

What's worst, though, is that my mom is now bitching about how messy the house is and she wants to come in here and clean. And the very, very last thing I need in my life right now is my mom pawing around in all our stuff in the name of clutter control and bitching at me all day.

Actually, scratch that. The worst part is that today is Kourt's birthday. "Happy birthday, honey! Hey, now that the TV is on the dryer, you can watch your shows while you fold laundry!"

Meh.