Robbed.

A couple of hours ago, Ryan came home from school, and, lo and behold, our apartment had been ransacked.

The robber (henceforth known as Jerk) entered through the downstairs neighbor's window, and he/she went through all of his stuff. Then Jerk wandered upstairs, and, I'm sure much to his/her delight, discovered that our inner door was unlocked. We always lock the outer door, but sometimes we don't lock the inner door if we are in a hurry.

Won't do that again.

We are shocked, to say the least.

The good news: Jerk only stole my laptop (which was slow and old), my bike (which was cute but not expensive), and our digital camera (which is replaceable). He/she left behind EVERYTHING else including our passports, video camera (obviously didn't see that), and the real pearls that my dad bought for me in China (must have been a guy that robbed us).

The biggest loss of all is my laptop--and not because of the value of the actual machine. My laptop was our repository for all of our photos, and it had many many important and priceless documents on it: my journals, my annual Mother's Day letters to my mom, all of the documentation for the non-profit we work with...

I am so sad. Go ahead and steal my money--but please don't steal my memories. I haven't backed up my computer since we moved here, and I can't find the jump drive on which it is backed up. I don't know if I lost it or if Jerk took it.

I feel sick about this.

It could be way way worse--that's what I keep telling myself. What if our apartment burned down and we lost everything? What if Jerk had taken more of our stuff? Worse case scenario, what if one of us had come home while he was here, and he had hurt us?

Lessons I have learned from this:

1) Buy an external hard drive and back up my computer every week. Keep the hard drive in a hidden, safe place.
2) Always lock the inner door.

Ryan and I feel very violated that someone was in our home, and we are now going to go and try to process that as we clean up...