What day is it?

The Mr. Incredible band-aid makes almost anything better.




Oh right. It's Friday the 13th. Any day that you wake up to discover a note reading "625-5011 Seattle Police, Non-Emergency" hastily scribbled on a sheet of paper and taped to your door is likely not going to be a good day. I called the cops (my immediate thought is that I'm in trouble for something; from whence did I come by this guilt-ridden conscience?), they put me on hold, transferred me around, did the dial-tone jig, traced my name and address, blah dee blah, nothing. So I'm thinking whew, dodged that bullet, when I suddenly wonder if there could be something amiss with my car.

I head down to the "secure" parking garage, only to find that MacArthur's driver's side, back-seat wing mirror has been bashed in. Nothing's missing -- likely my alarm (or lack of interesting-slash-valuable property) has sent them packing. Back inside to call the police again. The police, as ever in genuine emergencies, snap into action. They bravely take down my name and number and heroically offer to call me back sometime today. Breathless at the selflessness of these, Seattle's finest, I retreat to the couch to wait them out. In due time they call me back, take a bunch more information, and then -- you won't believe it . . . wait for it . . . . they ASSIGN ME AN INCIDENT NUMBER! I know! It's incredible, isn't it? They don't pay these people enough!

All kidding aside, the police officer I talked to was extremely nice and sweetly apologetic that writing all this down was as much as they could do. I didn't actually expect to have Horatio and the Miami CSI crawling all over my car, finding hair (plenty of that in my car), torn off Press-On nails, tooth fragments, cigarette butts with epithelials clinging to the filter, all the usual detritus that criminals can't seem to hold on to when actually committing crimes (honestly, on TV those guys are like PigPen, with stuff just dripping off of them all over the crime scene), but I thought, you know, come lift a print (besides mine), poke around, you never know. I thought maybe Horatio could say something pithy like, "They realized this garage is not so secure. Well now, neither are they," and put on his sun glasses and dramatically walk away to that high-pitched yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaah from the Who song. Hey, a girl can dream.

Instead, I spent 20 minutes picking glass out of my Jetta. Did you know that bumblebees don't biodegrade? I swear that thing was knocking around in there two summers ago, and he looked just as fat and jolly (and dead) as ever when I plucked him from under some debris in the back seat. Weird.

Well, at least they didn't steal my impressive empty-Diet-Pepsi-can collection. Those are going to be worth serious bucks someday.

--R