This is Staring to Irritate Me

We had it all perfectly lined up – an early Saturday run with some good friends – a double date kind of run with two couples. We had a babysitter lined up, at our house and ready to go, and we were even running on time! We’d actually made oatmeal for the kids the night before. Definitely our A-game.

Unfortunately, the first words out of our friend’s mouth when she came in the front door were, “Do you know Matt’s tire is flat?” I didn’t know. Neither of us knew – Matt had taken my car to pick up our sitter earlier that morning. I went outside to check it out, somehow already knowing what was going to be the cause – a knife slash right through his tire. And so it was. This had happened before, a year or so ago, to a few people on our block, us included.

So we got ready to head out, figuring we’d call the police and file a report later. Somewhere in there, the guys went out to have a look at it and discovered that a charming epitaph had been inscribed on the driver door, plus a bunch more keying. It started to feel a little personal and we wondered if it might be our midnight (2AM) knocker. On the way out of the neighborhood, we went around our block and discovered two more cars that had suffered the wrath of the knife. The second one we came on also had the same charming word inscribed on the door as well as the windshield bashed in and some sharpied-writing on it. How did we know it was a sharpie? The little miscreants dropped that particular instrument at the scene of the crime.

Not wanting the evidence to disappear, Matt called the police. They would be there soon and I volunteered to stay back and wait since Matt frequently waits out my runs with girlfriends. But my wrath for our vandals increased – not only had they damaged our personal property, THEY MADE ME MISS MY RUN. A run with friends, a run I’d hired a babysitter for no less!!! Hell hath no fury.

So I waited and met with the officer and showed him what we’d found and he took statements from me and the other neighbors involved and had another cruiser go through the ‘hood to check and see if there were any more vandalized cars. He did tell me that they could probably get DNA and possibly fingerprints off the Sharpie. I told him I was all for going CSI on their asses. All things considered, it was all over with pretty quickly. When everyone got back, the guys changed the tire on Matt’s car and we got on with our day. The rest of the weekend was very nice and fairly uneventful (though we did go to an AWESOME restaurant on Sat night).

So Sunday night after we stayed up too late watching the last ep of Season2 of Downton Abbey, I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep. Matt was nearby doing whatever it is Matt does on the computer, presumably feeding his Reddit addiction. Suddenly we heard our garage door open, seemingly of its own accord. Needless to say, after all the crap that’s gone on, we’re a bit on edge with weird stuff going down around our house and so we spent the next 30 minutes trying to diagnose if this was fluke or foul play. We still don’t know. It seems remote (haha) that it was a random remote causing our garage door to go up. There is something like 1,000,000:1 odds. BUT we also have a keypad on our garage and the code has been given to a few people who if they weren’t careful enough with it, may have gotten into the wrong hands. There are also three remotes, one from each car and one programmed into Matt’s car (he has the 2nd for backup I guess) and we were concerned it had been lifted out of his car by the vandals (it was, he tells me apparently unlocked). But all remotes were accounted for and we’re still unclear on what the cause was.

Think I’m about done with this variety of excitement for quite some time.