Criminal mischief

I wish this were a cutesy title in reference to something I designed that goes against traditional design ideas. Unfortunately, it means actual criminal mischief.

I went to the house this morning to work a little bit and found this:

Yes, I know we need to cut the grass.

We found a broken beer bottle on the sidewalk outside, so we're guessing somebody got drunk and stupid. This is the third criminal act we've been aware of since we bought the house. The first was when we put an old toilet outside for the trash, and somebody came along and smashed it to bits. That wasn't such a big deal, since it was garbage anyway. Cleaning up porcelain shards out of the yard wasn't fun, but it didn't cost anything but time. The second was when we found a purse in the side yard, tossed behind the condenser for the HVAC. Again, not such a big deal; we simply had to turn it in (which took several days and a bit of my time, but really cost us nothing). I really hope that once we're moved in and it doesn't look like an abandoned property, this nonsense will stop.

But two things went surprisingly right with this situation. First, only the outside pane was broken. For a beer bottle to have done that to the window (which, for scale, is about 4' wide), it had to have been thrown pretty hard. I'm guessing that the screen helped slow the bottle down enough to where the inside pane was left untouched. So we don't have to worry about figuring out how to keep the house secure without a window there. Secondly, I told the cop that came over to make a police report that it would probably be about $400 to replace. Vandalism isn't covered on our insurance (the premium to have that would have been an additional $900+), and we were worried that this would be another out-of-pocket expense. As it turns out, the damage has to have a replace/repair cost of $500 before it's classified as vandalism, so insurance might help after all. I still have to call our insurance company and check our policy, but hopefully we won't have to pay much if anything.

And after all that, I still wasn't able to get done what I wanted to do this morning. Maybe tomorrow.