telophase | (no subject)

For

sartorias, who wanted to hear the full story of a comment I dropped in one of my "Ten things..." meme posts. It's not an incredibly long story, but it is amusing.

During our time in the Serengeti, our house was burgled by the most courteous burglars ever. We were away for a few days on a supply-run to the town of Arusha, and didn't notice anything strange for a while after we got back. About the same time Mom was putting me to bed, Dad was washing his hands in the bathroom. He found that the towels we'd left on the towel racks were missing. Mom found that the sheets on my bed were missing. Thinking this was odd, they both headed to the linen closet to discover that almost all of the linens were gone. At this point, they toured the house and took inventory.

The thieves had, basically, taken everything we didn't need. They left one set of sheets for each bed. They left one towel for each of us. They took only the dirty sheets and towels and left us the clean ones. They took some of our clothes, but left us some. (We'd taken a bunch of clothes with us on the trip, so we never really noticed the lack.) They didn't touch the kitchen equipment Mom needed to cook with. They didn't touch any of Dad's scientific stuff. They took some extra luggage that we hadn't taken with us to Arusha. They took some food, but not much, and took some beer, but left one bottle for Dad and one bottle for Mom.

The authorities found a note on the bathroom floor about firewood, which they figured was from someone on the station to Amrodi, the general handyman-type person who worked around the research station, and they arrested him but later let him go for lack of other evidence. Mom and one of the other women on the station were positive that it wasn't him because that was way too much of a red herring and Agatha Christie wouldn't have written it that way, but the Tanzanian authorities just weren't as devious as us Westerners. :)

The thieves took Mom and Dad's Earth shoes, and they joked for weeks that we'd be able to find the thieves by following the footpritns of the distinctive soles.

Anyway, it's not like you can get really angry at thieves like that. They obviously figured that we had too much stuff and wouldn't be hurt by it, and took what we didn't need. When you compare our lifestyle to the lifestyle of the average third-world resident: they were right.

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I had a quite nice L. L. Bean backpack that was stolen in college when I had left my bag in the classroom before class started. Everything in my backpack was carefully piled on the table-- including some stuff that had contained money, amusingly. Not your thieves, surely, but they saved me a lot of dough by not ripping off my books too.

Have you been to fandom_wank yet? Death Note hit the jackpot today. :)

Someone appears to have written the name

fandom_wank in a little black notebook...

(Now returning to Butterfly Kick.

Yeah, it moved over to Journalfen (http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/) after getting TOSsed from LJ.

Excitingly enough, I even wanked in that thread, though I was pretty polite 'cause I was new. :)

Heehee. True to my usual wank behavior, I read only enough of the wank to post some amusing stuff to fandom_wank.

sub_divided found it and nitified me about it and asked me to post since she didn't have a JF account. I like to pretend I'm not in there wanking so that I don't have to post it to i_wank instead, but frankly I prefer the fandom_wank comments to actual wank, most of the time.

Amazing. They probably watched the house, too, and timed it for you were all gone, so there wouldn't be any violence, as well.

Yup. Well, they didn't really have to watch it - the station was fairly small, and everyone took turns going to Arusha for supplies and buying stuff for each other[1], so it'd be fairly easy to learn when were were gone and when we were expected back.

[1] We bought toilet paper on the black market - you'd go into a store with your list of stuff including toilet paper, and they'd give you a few rolls and tell you that's all they had, and you'd ask if they had more in the back, and they'd tell you to drive up to the back of the store after dark and then load cases of it into your car. XD

When I lived in Europe, I had to have my relatives send me toilet paper. (The landlords tore up newspaper for us student renters to use. Their toilet paper wasn't much better--it crackled, and had bits of wood splinters in it)

Yeeowch! *winces*