The other day as I was walking through the parking lot at Stop and Shop to bring home the bacon for breakfast I noticed a man in a japanese car who appeared to be working feverishly at removing the radio. He was an african american man and I looked at him and he looked right at me when he noticed I was looking into the car. I thought about a bunch of things at the time. The first was that I could use my digital camera to photograph him and share the photograph with the police in case the radio was reported stolen in that car. At least they would have a way to locate the criminal from an eye-witness photographer. Then I got to thinking that I might be racially profiling the man in the car and he could just be rifling through his glove compartment looking for coupons. I also considered the possibility that if I were to take his photo and he was not too happy with it that I could find myself brained and out another digital camera as I walked home on Alton Place.

I finally thought that the means of production that disconnects the supply and demand for meat products like the bacon that I was carrying was likely to be a bigger crime. So given all of these thoughts rushing through my brain I decided to walk on by and returned home to burn the bacon to a crisp while trying to do too many things at once.

A few days back our neighbors came to our door asking whether we had signed for a package. They were in a panic because someone had signed for their airplane tickets but they had not arrived. They were looking for a thin package. We told them that we hadn't seen it nor had we signed for it. The woman was very frustrated because the place they had ordered the tickets from not only required them to purchase a new set of tickets but to also purchase them at a last minute price. We didn't think it was right and told them so.

Lately I have been cursing as I reported two of my NetFlix movies missing because they didn't arrive assuming that NetFlix was collapsing in their service and couldn't figure out how to deliver the movies. Now I have an open mailbox because I lost the key a long time ago so when any mail is delivered it is available to the world in the entranceway to our building.

Stephanie had given me her mail key while she was away last month when Sarah and I were taking care of Leelin. This mail key had caused some incident with her boyfriend because apparently I, an ex-boyfriend, have a mail key, and he does not. Furthermore I never used the mail key to take her mail in when she was away and left her mail to build-up.

So I figure I had a lot of bad karma building-up just waiting to burst and yesterday I put it over the top. When I returned home from work yesterday a set of shelves that Sarah had bought from Crate and Barrel arrived. They were sitting in the entranceway in six boxes. Rather than bringing them inside I rifled through the mail that I could find looking for missing NetFlix movies. Not finding any of them I reported that the movie The Office Season II was lost in the mail. I rushed back downstairs past the boxes at 5:50 to bike to my Java class.

After the Java class I went to Corrib to eat dinner with Sarah who was waiting there. She was sitting with Dick and Matt and the first question they asked me was whether I had seen the shelves that were delivered. I told them that I had seen them. Then Sarah told me that the shelves had been stolen by someone. She knows this because she also had walked past them on the way upstairs because she had gotten a call on her cell phone. When she went back downstairs excitedly to acquire the shelving they were gone. So we had been robbed of the shelves before we had even received them.

Whenever I have been robbed I think of terrible things to do to the criminals who did it. One idea I had was to give the criminals a bomb in a box that they could steal and then blow them up. I also considered putting a web camera in the entranceway and baiting them with attractive packages and then have the police arrest them. I also thought it would be good to give them the sentence of needing to fight in Iraq. Then I thought it wouldn't be such a great idea to train criminals to use modern weapons. Finally I just resigned to making a sign to put on the door to warn everyone that there had been mail stolen recently. Today I'll try to get the mailbox fixed, I'll start locking my door, and I'll warn people to be more careful with their mail.

I'll also try to be more active the next time that I see someone who looks like they are breaking into a car to steal a radio. On the bright side I learned that Jeremy's sister managed to get her stroller back from the front-door theives who stole it from her entranceway. Those theives had placed the stroller onto craigslist the next day and it was recovered from them. So another thing to do today is to hunt for shelving from Crate and Barrel on craigslist.