Flavor 8

I’m moving to DC (actually Takoma Park, Maryland, just North of the DC border but still inside the beltway.) Claire got a job at the Smithsonian (bones and such!) and John/Jim are obligingly let me telecommute, so it’s all action. I’ll be driving across the country, starting Saturday, via the desert route (I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon, etc.) I’ve made a little camera mount which will stick onto my dashboard, and my camera will be taking a picture every 3 minutes. Hopefully it turns out as a decent video / slideshow.

The break in – we hired a trailer, which we finished packing at midnight last night. It will be picked up at some point in the next couple of hours, and will be waiting for us when we arrive at the other end. We filled up Claire’s mom’s pickup with leftover crap that isn’t worth shipping (and which hadn’t aroused interest from the craigslist/free-stuff brigade), and left to do a dump run at about 2:50PM this afternoon. My laptop was right by one of the windows of the apartment (on the patio side), so it was visible if you’d already trespassed on the property. At 3:07PM my IM status went from “idle” to “active” on John’s computer; at 3:00PM gmail shows account activity in my session. So, somewhere between 10 and 17 minutes (depending on whose computer clock is accurate) after we left, the bastards were already in the apartment; clearly they watched us leave with a truck full of trash and figured they’d have time. They jacked my laptop, my laptop bag, and Claire’s portable DVD player. I guess whatever was easy to carry. Thankfully they skipped on our passports, my desktop computer (which is pretty bulky), and some of my esoteric hifi equipment which was also lying around. Another plus – we’d already basically moved everything out, so we don’t have to sleep there tonight. The cop advised me to keep an eye on craigslist…usually laptops turnaround pretty quickly. Hohum.