Dazed and Praning

I’m swamped and overwhelmed with work. I’ve been walking dazed in the office this past week. Last night my writer started calling me the walking dead. Turns out our department’s workload has been piling up steadily for the past few weeks starting last December, and when I got back it looked like a killer tsunami bearing down on us. This work wave will continue to swamp us until the middle of February, so by that time expect me to be in ICU.

Man oh man, that’s why I’m guarding my weekends more jealously than ever, because that’ll be the only time I’ll have for myself.

Meanwhile, yesterday morning I woke up to hear a strange man’s voice outside my window. Turns out he was a policeman being toured by my mom around our house. Sometime in the early morning someone broke into our house. He first tried to steal stuff from my mom’s room by prying open the window and reaching in to grab hold of whatever item he could steal; fortunately for us, no expensive stuff was within reach. Then he went around to our kitchen, broke the door lock, and got as far as our living room. He rifled through some small containers, boxes which look like they may contain jewelry (luckily again they were empty.) He didn’t attempt to steal any big appliance (our 27-inch TV would have been too heavy, and the DVD player is too conspicuous), and he passed over our DVDs (including the special extended edition of The Return of the King—thank god he has no f**king idea just how precious that is to us!) My brother was worried that the burglar didn’t steal anything; why go through all that trouble to destroy our kitchen door lock and not steal anything? My theory is that he heard a noise and left in a hurry.

Anyway there are now new double locks installed in our doors. That means a new set of keys for me; I still have to have duplicates made. Before I’d leave my car in the garage locked but with the alarm off; now I switch the alarm on. We also replaced existing lights outside with brighter wattage.

Meanwhile, I warned everyone at home to keep an eye out for people who may be hanging out in front of our house for no reason. They may be staking us out, taking note of our movements. They might decide to hit us when there’s no one at home.

Nakaka-praning, pero mabuti nang handa. You’ll never know.