Careful What You Wish For.

You may have noticed at the end of my last post that Monday was my birthday.

I've had better.

First of all, Monday birthdays are inherently lame. Everyone is burned out from the weekend and groaning their way into the week, so Monday birthdays are barely acknowledged as people reenter the daily grind. I was kind of bummed that there wasn't more going on for my birthday.

I had a bunch of errands to do. We left the house at 11:30 so the girls could go to their first day of swim lessons. It was great. They both did a good job, and no one had a time out. We looked for boxes on the way home, and then pulled into the driveway at 12:30.

To find that someone had knocked a hole in my house.

At first, I thought it was a motorcycle, because the hole was only about 2 feet wide. They managed to hit right where there was a wall stud, though, so it carried the hole up the wall about 6 feet.

I called A. I called the police. My husband got here first and he was able to figure out from the tracks that it was a 3-wheeler, and from some paint that was left behind on the wood that it was red. He went over and talked to a neighbor who told him he'd heard it happen, but by the time he got out to see what was going on, the people were already driving down the street.

The police showed up and took a report and canvassed the part of the neighborhood where the people had gone, but they couldn't find them. There are two dead end streets in that part of the neighborhood, so they were there somewhere, but they'd had plenty of time to get the 3-wheeler put away by the time the police showed up.

We have photos, but I can't find the camera at the moment. When I do, I will add them to this post. It was pretty impressive. On the inside of the house, the drywall and everything was pushed about 18" inside.

There are upsides. Because we're moving, the mess isn't nearly as bad as it could have been. They hit where our homeschool shelves used to be, but those have been gone for a month now. All that was there were some half-packed rubbermaid containers and they just barely managed to miss those. There was an old rubbermaid container with some stuff from the shed in at the front of the house that they did hit and destroy, but everything inside it was ok, and the container was missing it's lid so I was going to have to throw it away anyway. Also, our car was out of the way when it happened. We still NEED the car for several more weeks, so I'm glad that we were gone when it happened and it didn't get crunched up instead.

Also, the woman who crashed into our house is lucky that she hit the wood addition and not the block part of the house, because she had apparently mixed up the brake and the gas and hit the wall really, really hard. Had she hit the block, she'd probably be dead.

So, you know... It could have been worse.

Still, it put a damper on the day. There were other negatives to the day, too, but the people involved may not want that included in my blog, so just trust me when I say that the day was really bad. With a capital B. Bad.

We had cake with the girls. They got me a Mickey Mouse watch, which was very cute. A got us a sitter and we went out for dinner. We ended up just driving for an hour through parts of town that we frequented when we were first married, but haven't been to much since we moved to this house. We finally settled on Benihana's for dinner, which was pretty good. I've never been to a knife-slinging-Japanese-grill place before, so it was a good time.

When we got back from dinner, the woman who had crashed into the house had come back and left her information with our sitter and restored my faith in humanity. It's nice to know that some people still do the right thing. She probably could have gotten away with it. It's not like the police could have gotten a search warrant to search every house in that part of the neighborhood to find out who had a damaged 3-wheeler. But she came forward anyway, and that made the day better.