well, hell

I got home late tonight-- a few minutes after midnight. After a day in the office, getting ready for next semester, I had dinner at a friend's house and got home later than usual. And when I got home, the door to my apartment (I live in an apartment over a two-car garage) was open, broken in, with the wreckage of the forced entry (the siding of the door frame) on the floor.

The apartment was a mess. Drawers had been pulled out and emptied. I didn't have much worth taking. Several years ago, I developed the habit of saving quarters, because the washing machine would sometimes break down and I would have to take the family's laundry to the laundromat. That's not an issue any more, but I never dropped the habit of saving quarters, and I had a huge bowl full of them--maybe fifty dollars, I told the police officer--on the bar separating the kitchen from the living room. They were all gone, as was my father's old pocketknife--a cheap knife, but damn it, it was my father's--and an 1896 silver dollar that I had bought a couple years ago, both beside the quarters. A bottle of Lotrel, a prescription drug for high blood pressure, was gone, as was a new dvd player that I bought just last week and a couple of dvd sets, one borrowed from our local public library, one borrowed from another friend. As far as I can tell, that's all that's missing, except for a considerable chunk of my peace of mind.

UPDATE-- I discovered later that several cans of chunky soup are missing from my little pantry. This isn't a complaint, just perhaps a sad explanation for what happened.