Fortunately, he also loses his sunglasses a lot.

Someone STOLE the goshfucked CAR.

Okay. I admit. I can get a little lazy when it comes to warding things. I didn’t do anything to protect the car. I’m not even sure I could’ve made that much of a difference, considering my Handsome Assistant apparently owns what could be considered “the most stealable car in America.” Now, there are aftermarket updates to make cars more secure, but we only buy used cars and were unaware that this particular model came with the equivalent of a flashing neon sign that says HI!!! STEAL ME! :)))).

I’ll be honest. I don’t like cars. I never have. I love road trips, but if it was possible to do them entirely by train, I would. There are multiple reasons for this:

1. My first significant experience was my mother’s Oldsmobile Firenza that used to stall out at every intersection, once got the interior rained on so bad that it smelled like vomit for a decade, and used to make me dizzy and carsick the second I sat in it. Even when it wasn’t moving.
2. My second was wanting to eat/play with icicles like the big kids could. The only one my tiny little five-year-old hands could reach was a kind of lumpy, grayish one growing on the muffler of my grandma’s car. I snapped it off, licked it, and became violently ill for three days.
3. My third was the time I thought a car accident had turned my dad into a zombie.
4. My fourth most significant experience with motor vehicles was being run over by one.
5. My fifth was dating someone who managed to wreck multiple cars over the course of a two-and-a-half-year relationship.

Cars and I have always had a wary, distant, reluctant alliance, at best. It has never really worried me, though. If anything, it seems appropriate. I’m too blind to drive, and I’m strongly against the idea of car-centric societies. It makes sense that cars’d have it out for me.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I was gently woken up early Wednesday morning by my Handsome Assistant going, “Hey, Jeccas? Do you remember if I… did anything weird with my car yesterday?”

“Buh?” I replied.

(Because I have been mind-poisoned by the internet, I did not initially think “did anything weird” meant “parked it somewhere unusual.” My imagination went somewhere far worse, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyway, it turns out someone’d stole it. If there’s a thing I dislike more than cars themselves, it is having to have basically any contact with police ever. Now a car was making me do that thing. Even if all we wanted was for insurance to cover the loss, we needed a police report. Butts.

The whole process pretty much turned my Handsome Assistant into Liam Neeson from Taken. He took his motorcycle out for a ride, half to calm down and half to see if he could find the car himself.

“They say that most stolen cars are found in the same area,” he pointed out.

He was only gone for a minute or two before he came back.

“You know, I just remembered something…”

My Handsome Assistant is both handsome and helpful. He’s very smart, good at his job, and a caring, attentive, equitable contributor to our relationship. He is, however, extremely forgetful. Between that and my own memory deficiencies, it’s amazing we haven’t burned the house down making pancakes yet.

Take his sunglasses. When he started working for his current employer, he had to make a few wardrobe upgrades. Not just suits and ties, but smaller things — a watch. Nicer shoes. Sunglasses. He started with a pair of Ray-Bans, which he constantly lost. Once, they were found in the attic by Pye, who firmly insisted on pointing out these weird, boring objects that very obviously did not belong in his play space. Now, he’s also got a less-fancy-but-paradoxically-much-more-expensive pair of prescription sunglasses.

To avoid losing them, he invested in some trackers. As long as they’re nearby, or at least near other trackers, he can see their location on his phone.

Since he only really uses his sunglasses for driving, he keeps them in his car.

The car that got stolen.

Within minutes, he had found an entire location history tracking the car’s journey to an adjacent county. On the highway. Every house it had parked in front of.

After a few more minutes, he was triangulating locations and planning a sneaky drive past some of the places where the car had been.

“Please tell me you’re not going to try to steal it back.”

“No, no,” he assured me, “That’d be a bad idea. Besides, then I’d be driving around in a car that’s reported stolen, which would cause problems.”

He didn’t find the car itself, but he came back with a map of all of the places it could’ve conceivably been hidden overnight. A cluster of bushes. A covered driveway. Under a bridge over a small creek bed.

Anyhow, the car was found yesterday morning. We also still have the (very fancy) rental that the insurance company provided for 50 days, so that’s neat. It’ll be a few days (the police still haven’t processed the original report) before he can fill out the paperwork to get it back, and we don’t know what kind of condition it’s in, but it’s found.

The tracking tag tracked the car all the way to the tow lot.
Thieving jerk never even noticed the sunglasses.