phik

I listened to a voicemail this week, around midnight.

“I hate to be the one to tell you, but your car is missing a window.”

It actually wasn’t missing at all, it was still there, it was just all over the interior.

exhibit a

After the boys down at the crime lab were finished with it, I got the rock back.

exhibit b

It’s a very good throwing rock, they chose well. Heavy, fits nicely in your hand; a really good rock.

They were thorough, which is to say they appear to have examined every nook and cranny in the vehicle with some haste. As some kind of cosmic reward for their comprehensiveness they were able to locate (and abscond with) my GPS, which is a shame. They apparently weren’t aware of how expensive airplane headsets are, because they left both of those behind in plain sight.

Unfortunately they also took my backpack, which was not something I usually left in the car. It had a lot of little things that are annoying to replace, like remote controls and cables for my camera and laptop, and my Australian SIM card. On this occasion it also contained a cordless drill, two boxes of drill bits, and a stud finder. I’m a handyman now, or something.

It also contained my passport, which is the real drag. A pain to replace, although my next trip to Canada is two days before the US passport exemption expires. Unfortunately, the passport office keeps your proof of citizenship during the process, so I have to get another birth certificate to get into Canada.

I learned that although safety glass is pretty awesome, it does create the tiniest of glass slivers, like you might find in fibreglass insulation. My doctor said not to get them in my eyes.

This is bad, but it could also trivially have been much worse. I usually leave my flight bag in the car, the contents of which would be fantastically annoying to replace (though it drives home the backup value of a digital logbook). The aforementioned headsets, of course. Not to mention that my backpack usually contains an expensive camera and a bag of assorted foreign currency, which I just happened to have removed.

Good times.