sorry i'm not home right now..

sooooo. if you follow me on twitter, you already know this story, but if not.. hey! interesting night last night! it's a pretty long story, so i'm basically just going to copy & paste from an email i wrote to some friends this morning.

last night when i got come, oliver wasn't in the apartment. it's immediately evident when this is the case, because he always sprints to the door to greet me / see if there's an opportunity to escape into the hallway. bella typically cannot be deigned to get up from wherever she's napping for something as pedestrian as greeting a human. so when BELLA came to meet me, and oliver was nowhere to be found, i knew there was a problem.

(part of the) long story short, i eventually found oliver OUTSIDE, which is impressive because we live on the 3rd floor of a condo building, with huge heavy doors leading into and out of the stairwells, so oliver either got through 2 sets of those doors just by waiting for neighbors to open them.. or he took the elevator down with someone, which i derive great amusement from imagining was the case.

anyway, i naturally blamed chris for letting oliver out, because oliver was locked in the bedroom when *i* left, and chris is the only other one who uses the door after i leave. (FORESHADOWING!!)

anyway, ages after we'd both been home for the night, chris went to take the trash out and noticed the door didn't shut right. then he noticed that the deadbolt wasn't actually WORKING. then he noticed that the metal plate on the doorframe was bent completely out of shape, and that the front of the door next to it had pry marks bent into the surface.

so then we start looking around in bewilderment, like... wait.. if someone broke in... why is all our stuff still here...? i had my macbook, ipod, both of our little point & shoot cameras, etc all sitting out on the coffee table/kitchen counters. all of our electronics were still here. then i went to check on my passport.. and noticed the drawer i keep it in was slightly open. as was the same drawer on chris's charger station. and actually... hey... all the drawers to the dresser were slightly open (which drives me NUTS, so i am super sure i didn't leave any that way).. and there are clothes on my bedside table which are now closed INTO the drawers under it, which i definitely didn't do.

so. someone had been in, had been through all our shit, and had let oliver out, but apparently hadn't taken anything. they'd been in the drawer with my checkbook.. but it was still there. chris's nice watch was sitting on display on top of his charging station.

we called a locksmith to come out ASAP to replace the broken deadbolt.

eventually we also called the police, just to file a report, which we almost didn't do at all since.. you know.. nothing was GONE. but the police took it pretty seriously, sent a cop out to take our statements and get all our info; eventually 2 other cops arrived and took pictures of our busted door frame and actually canvased our neighbors to see if anyone had seen/heard anything suspicious. apparently there have been several reports of "suspicious activity" in the neighborhood and they're trying to crack down.

by this point, we were pretty creeped out by everything. someone had gone through the trouble of breaking into our house - and ours specifically; we checked other doors on the hallway and none had pry marks around the bolt - and then just to.. what, touch our stuff?? it was around then that i finally realized what WAS missing: my lovely nikon dslr. waaaah. also: EXTRA CREEPY OMG. they came in SPECIFICALLY searching for MY CAMERA? WHAT THE HELL?

(the police totally hinted at crime show motives, too, like.. had i taken any pictures recently that when i was looking back through them, i found something... odd? or maybe suspicious? in the frame? you know, like, did i accidentally catch a crime on camera and someone broke in to steal back the evidence?!?) (i noticed no such thing, btw.)

so no matter how you slice it, it's disturbing. the camera was one of two places: either sitting on the dining room table, the first thing you see when you come in, or else i'd managed to actually put it away (which = in a camera bag, deep within the closet of the guest bedroom). so dude either reeeeally wanted the camera - which means he knows who i am, where i live, and that i owned that specific camera - and went through our shit until he found it, without taking *anything* else of value... OR, he found the camera right away, and then still felt compelled to go through everything else in our house just to.. what.. touch it? OMG I HATE BOTH CHOICES.

anyway. we're feeling pretty lucky that whoever this creep was didn't actually take more things, or tear up our apartment or anything. we have a new, expensive, much higher quality (double) lock on the door now. and we're probably going to invest in lifelock, or one of those id theft security programs, just for peace of mind.

we also changed the sheets, just in case. shudder.