A Weekend of Unfortunate Events

This weekend, the usual pleasant lazy routine of socialising and just chilling was painfully shattered by a number of incidents.

To start off with, I went into the weekend feeling horribly down, irritable and anxious to the point of being tearful. Why, I don’t really know. What I do know though is that comments like ‘Put a smile on your dial’ and ‘Sound more cheerful’ do not work at all in terms of cheering you up. In fact, the make you feel worse because you realise just how far you are from happiness. I cheered up as the evening progressed, but I really hate how emotional I’ve become.

I was woken on Saturday with a phonecall that there had been a break-in at home. More specifically, during that windy, noisy Friday night (or perhaps earlier during the evening when my sister was being dropped off, and the gates and garage door were open), some opportunistic bastards had broken into our garage and stolen my CD frontloader and CDs from my car. They had also smashed the driver’s window of my sister’s car but not taken anything.

There are things to be grateful for. No cars were stolen. My door was unlocked so they did not break any windows to get in –that’s an automatic expense of around R600. The stolen CD pouch contained only CD copies and no originals.

All of those are things that can be replaced. It’s not an issue to me. What does make me both simultaneously very frightened and furious is the fact that my family’s private space was invaded. Having had success once, who’s to say that the thieves might not come back? They pried open my fuse box and got into the engine of my sister’s car. They have a pretty good idea of the cars’ security measures. They might take things further and try to get into the house itself.

Plus, I’m extremely pissed off by the manner in which they ripped out the frontloader. In a car that is just over a year old, there are now horrible screwdriver grooves around where the radio sat. It’s a butchered mess. I don’t know if the insurance will cover the repairs.

So for much of Saturday, Paul and his father were at our place putting bolts on the inside of our garage doors and advising us on what kind of security measures we could take.

Saturday evening was the one real bright spot of the weekend: Paul and I met up with Gareth and Mark for dinner at the Pavilion. We then went bowling. Apart from bruising my thumb, I achieved my best ever score of 108, beating even the Ladies Best Score of the day. I even beat Gareth and Paul. Mark (such a jock ;P) was unchallengeable, of course.

Just before heading home, we received a call from Gareth saying his car had cut out by Spaghetti Junction (one of the highjack hotspots of Durban). Once again, it was the Redheads to the rescue, and Paul and his father towed Gareth back to their place.

The rest of Saturday evening (apart from a long, largely forum-related chat before going to bed), and much of Sunday involved car repairs and problems: first, Lionel couldn’t work out what was wrong with the infamous Toti Uno. Second, it took hours to repair the tow bar on the Landrover, which, as we discovered, was missing half of its screws. In the much belated afternoon drive to Toti, towing Gareth, the Uno’s front left tyre gave off a cloud of smoke and shredded itself. Queue a tyre change just off the N2.

When we eventually did get back to my place in the evening, I found that my parents’ cars had flat tyres as well. It seems most likely that they drove over one or two of the screws, or rivets, left from yesterday’s DIY job.

So that was the weekend. All plans of other fun activities (including a cycle in the nature reserve), and university work just didn’t happen. I’m hoping for an uneventful week ahead.