hrj

The fingerprint guy showed up at 1:45 am,just as I was starting to drift off. One can always hope, although I recall a news item about budget cuts in the Oakland Police Dept pretty much eliminating the analysis side of fingerprinting. Having made all the finance-related phone calls first thing in the morning, I've been spending my lunch hour on-line printing out applications for replacement documents. This is the down side of keeping all your essential papers in a single location. I haven't tackled the insurance company yet. If sympathy were police action, I'd have the perp in jail and all my stuff back -- thanks for all the good wishes.

And sure enough, the only time I started bawling was talking to my mom about g-g-grandma's diamond ring.

More than sympathy, less than recovery. The woman who had stopped by came by again (with a very cute little daughter in tow). It turns out her mother had been picking up her car at the auto shop on San Pablo a few blocks away and had found an item that had been in my safe that had my name and address on it and looked important. So she offered to drop by with it to return it and give me the details. It's nice when someone goes out of their way to do the right thing like that. So this tells me: A) the safe has been opened; and B) the perp is probably local to the neighborhood where the object was found (which isn't exactly astonishing, given that neighborhood).

After she dropped it off, I walked over to the location and walked up and down that stretch of San Pablo but didn't find anything. (It was getting dark so I wasn't about to wander off and poke around too much.) Coming back home, I was reminded that there's a used computer store just two blocks from my place, so I stopped by and chatted with the proprietor and gave him a description of the laptop and my contact information. It was a bit of a ... delicate ... conversation, since I was implying that he might be in a position to be offered stolen property while trying not to appear to accuse him of being a fence.

Now to do some on-line research to determine where, in the neighborhood, second-hand jewelry might be fe... um, offered for sale.