Well, against the odds, and probably due in part to the prayers of others, we managed to get a lot of the stolen stuff back. Wednesday at noon the Pico Rivera police called and said that they had raided some house and found a lot of stuff in a small basement that didn’t seem to belong there. Among the things were our credit cards and passports, H’s iBook, our videocamera and about 1/3 of her jewelry. Any more obviously valuable jewelry is still missing, as is all the jewelry she’d made by hand, so we take some pleasure in the idea that they liked the jewelry she’d made.

Wednesday afternoon I was playing with the kids in the front yard and an unmarked police car drove by slowly. There were two officers in the front seat, and a guy in the back. The officer in the passenger side waved at me, and I think I recognized him as the detective we’d talked to earlier that day. The driver was pointing at our house and talking to the guy in the back seat. They were probably taking the culprit on a tour of his jobs.

Late Wednesday night the detective called and said that they’d found my laptop at another location. Turns out it was a boyfriend/girlfriend catburglar team and the first recovery had been at his house, and that they’d found my laptop at her home. She’d already reformatted it and installed XP Home edition, according to the detective. I tried to pick up the laptop Thursday night, but the detective was out on “an operation.” I’m hoping that the girl also took all the better jewelry home with her too, and that we’ll find some more of that.