Grinched

It’s been a long week.

And for once I have a semi-valid excuse for being absent from here for a spell.

I’ll say right off that it hasn’t been my favorite week of all time, but looking back on it I can’t say thats it was the worst by any stretch of the imagination. In fact it seems so far removed now that if I didn’t have a constant reminder of this weeks events when I wake up in the morning I’d have long forgotten about it.

I was burgled.

It makes me laugh when I say it that way. Maybe it has to do with some reference to ham-burgled. Or that burgled just doesn’t sound quite as bad at robbed or looted or cased.

What doesn’t me laugh quite as much is the fact that the burglary in question happened to involve a few things I hold, well frankly, quite dear.

My computer.

My camera.

And my MP3 players.

Gone.

Burgled. The day before Christmas.

That’s right. The day before Christmas I lost my little friends of the transistor persuasion. My notebook computer with all my work, photos and writing. Gone. My camera for taking all of those boring pictures. Gone. And even poor Tilly (she turned out to be a cute little iPod nano, in Chinese red none-the-less) is gone.

So here I am limping along with a horrid Windows box in the school lab. Not that that isn’t without experience that I can accept as interesting. If I hadn’t been burgled I would never have been able to spend my time listening to my fellow faculty playing strip poker and mahjong on their computers while raising the dead with their Mongolian love songs. Not planning classes or doing research, but rather playing anime strip poker ande being crooned to by a yurt-dwelling nomad on horseback. Wonderful.

And that’s just the start of it.

This last week Mother Nature also decided to play dog-pile with me. First some slippery thief and then a bloody earthquake.

In the Northern corner, weighing in at a slippery 95 pounds, The Caaaaatttt Buuurrgler!

In the South-Eastern corner, weighing in at a few billion tons, The Riiiiiiing of Fiiiiiire!

Taiwan decides it’s time for an earthquake. One that just happens to sever communications with, oh, the entire Western Hemisphere.

In the Western Corner, weighing in at 25 pounds, A Windows Computer!

Without my trusty MacBook Pro I’m left with a dog. A Legend PC running a bootleg copy of Longhorn.

So, after all that, that’s why I’ve been out of touch and haven’t been posting or uploading pictures.

Anyone want to send me a new camera and MacBook?