Last week, Susan noticed the ram skull that sits in our front flowerbed was missing.
When someone steals something from your lawn, it’s not always easy to tell exactly when it disappeared. When neighborhood kids broke into my truck at our previous house, I came out the following morning and found my truck door ajar, my battery dead, my glove compartment open, and my GPS missing. I knew exactly what had been stolen, and when.
Lawn ornaments — of which ram skulls are a subset — are different. It’s not like we kept our spare house keys in the ram’s eye socket, or greeted it every day when we came home from work. We have no point of reference as to when the skull actually disappeared. It’s just gone, and it disappeared either last week or six months ago.
In the front yard of our old house we had a large concrete horse. It belonged to Susan’s grandpa, and when he passed away we inherited it. It stood 3-foot tall and weighed roughly the same as a real horse. One day when we came home from work we noticed one of those fly-by-night lawn service trailers parked in front of our house instead of the neighbor’s. The next day, we noticed the horse was gone. I hope whoever took it hurt their back carrying it.
There are several things that bother me about the disappearance of the ram skull. First, unlike the horse from our last house, you couldn’t see the ram skull from the street. Whoever stole it must have seen it while walking up to our front door. That doesn’t mean it was somebody we know — it could have been the mailman, the UPS guy, the pizza delivery guy, or any number of solicitors who ignore our “no soliciting” sign and knock anyway. But it wasn’t someone who noticed it while driving past our house.
Another thing that irks me is that we bought the skull from Rhonda McCanless, an old neighbor of ours who has since passed away. I don’t know why that makes the theft seem more egregious, but it does.
I guess what bothers me the most is that I have four security cameras mounted on the front of my house. The system stores slightly more than a month’s worth of video. If I had the time, I could watch a month’s worth of video on Fast Forward and try and spot when it disappeared. I haven’t completely ruled it out; I just haven’t had the time to do it. It pisses me off that having a bunch of security cameras is not enough of a deterrent.
Stuff like this seems to happen this time of year. Several years ago, we caught a high school kid trying to steal a patio chair. Just one of our four beat-up patio chairs. We told him to put the chair back, get out of our yard, and stay out.
I think kids steal stuff as part of some kind of peer initiation. It’s a shame when the stuff they steal has sentimental value, such as in your two cases.
Theft always leaves a really bad taste in the mouth. I’ve had stuff stolen from various cars (sometimes it’s valuable – like a Nakamichi stereo and Boston speakers – and sometimes it’s not – like a box of tissues, 2 windshield wipers, and a stock Toyota AM radio). I had clothes stolen from a fraternity house when I was in college – by a fraternity brother who didn’t live there. It’s just bad. And it’s not like you want the stuff back after he’s worn it.
Bad taste all around.
I had something similar happen. The transmission from my car disappeared. It’s not the awesome heist that it appears to be though. It’s a project car that I work on once every fews months (or years). The engine was in the garage but the car was outside. Still kind of ballsy to come into someones yard at night and remove a transmission, in a residential neighborhood where the houses are 50 feet way from each other. How long was it missing before I noticed? Days… weeks… months? No idea.
That sucks man. That was a cool skill! Either I’ve lucked out over the years or no one tried that at my place because it looks like the Addams family lives here due to dead foilage and such.