So… here’s the latest round of headaches with regards to our stolen car.

The police were done with it, so we called the local dealership, where we have all our repair work done. They were going to send a wrecker down to Winterport to pick up the lady and bring her back to Bangor. However, the garage where it is currently being held will not release it until his bill is paid — for towing and storage, nearly $500. The dealer won’t cover it for us… until that gets paid, we can’t get the car fixed.

Not having that kind of cash, I got on the horn to our insurance company. Our adjuster (April) spent the better part of the afternoon on the phone with the dealership, and the garage in Winterport. The final fall-out was, she is overnighting a check to Winterport (which will arrive Monday). When he gets the check, he releases the car, and we have to have it transported up to the dealership that day… or we’ll get another day’s worth of storage that needs to be paid before we can transport it again… *sigh*

Anyhow, this is all in the midst of overtime at work, and all the other regular day-to-day stresses of life.

And there’s still no sign of my keys. What a pain.

In an amusing note, one of my wife’s co-workers made the ludicrous insinuation that we faked the whole thing in an affort to get a new car.

Yeah… we intentionally drove our car into a gravel pit, called it in as stolen, and are now dealing with the headaches of police and insurance reports, not to mention the rest of this delightful saga — all in order to get a new car, which will replace the car we bought new last summer, and had just over 6000 miles on it when it was stolen.

I’m amazed the police haven’t exposed our brilliant scam by now.

They found our car!

Yesterday evening, we got a call from the Bangor Police Department that our lady had been found about a mile off into the woods on a snowmobile trail by Waldo County Sheriffs. They couldn’t pull it out that night, but it was towed out this morning, and we took the opportunity to drive down to Winterport and see the damage.

It wasn’t as bad as we had feared. When you learn that your car has been abandoned so far out in the woods that they couldn’t get a wrecker out there until they got a logging skidder to widen the trail… the worst goes through your mind.

The damage…? Well, the passenger side mirror was taken off, but it was recovered, and there are a few superficial scratches, but no serious (or even moderate) body damage was apparent. We don’t know what sort of condition the undercarriage is in — that’ll have to wait until we get it to the repair shop and up on the lift.

Anyhow… the perp left a baseball cap in the back seat, so there is some hope that other evidence was left behind. Also — in what may be a classic insight into the lunacies of the criminal mind — the burned CD-Rs we had in the car were taken. Real CDs? Sure — you can pawn those for cash or something. But CD-Rs? I don’t know of any pawn shop or second-hand store that will deal with them, and our musical tastes are… eclectic to say the least.

I guess they wanted mix discs of Wierd Al Yankovic, ’80s Hair Metal, and They Might be Giants.

Anyhow, I took some pictures, but lacking a digital camera, I need to get the film developed and scanned in before I can share them with you. Stay tuned!

On the car thing, some good news from this past weekend. While picking up in preparation for our Sunday night Earthdawn game, I found our leather CD case — which we thought was in the car. It turns out it had been taken out a couple weeks back, and had gotten buried under a pile of papers on my desk.

In the end, we only lost a couple of actual CDs — everything else that was in the car was burned CD-Rs, and those are easily replaced.

I’m still bummed about my keys, though.

My car was stolen this morning.

I woke up and noticed it was gone, along with my key ring — it appears the thief got into our house in the wee hours of the morning, grabbed my keys, and made off with our car. We haven’t even had it a year yet.

What I find most annoying about this, oddly enough, is not that my car was stolen, but rather that my keys were stolen along with it. Not only did I need to replace the locks on my front door, but the spare key to my grandmother’s house, the key to my locker at work (which I fortunately do not keep locked), the key to my bike lock, my steamer trunk, our luggage… all of these keys are gone (unless, through some miracle, the car and keys are found). Also, those convenient little key-ring tags from the video store and whatnot are gone as well.

Oh yeah, I should mention that our 30-disc CD wallet, full of CDs, was in the car as well. So now, we have to replace that gap in our collection (naturally, it was the stuff we liked, otherwise it wouldn’t have been in the car).

It’s a pain in the ass, and it’s generally not cool. So if, through some bizarre quirk of fate you see a black, 2003 4-door Chevy Cavalier with Maine lcense plate 5470 KC, tail it and give me a call. We’ll call in a strike force and take the lady back.