As I may or may not have blogged previously, my in-laws have essentially moved out of town for the next few months. My father-in-law is working for the next three months in Akron, OH and my mother-in-law, who has just retired, is taking a long vacation. We’re not sure when she’ll be back, other than it’ll be before Thanksgiving. They’re planning to be away so much that they’ve moved the cat up to Akron to live with Vince.

Since they’re going to be gone for so long, they allegedly had hired a housesitter, someone from Abby’s work, to stay in the house and to keep Emma and I from having to get the mail, etc. daily. Actually, I think the mail is being forwarded, but that’s beside the point. I say allegedly because neither Emma nor I have seen any evidence of this housesitter actually being at the house. Neither of us have seen a strange car in the driveway and I never saw anybody at the house in all the hours I’ve spent working on the computer systems. I was even there after 9 one night, with no sign of anybody else being there.

Emma and I stopped by the house on Saturday morning after breakfast, because the router was acting flakey and Vince asked us (me) to reset it, when we had a chance. We stop in about noon and there’s still nobody there. This time, however, we notice that the house is freezing (the A/C was set really low) and Emma notices a bunch of odd food in the fridge. “My crazy mother,” she exclaims, “has left a loaf of bread on the counter and some really odd things in the fridge. Like lettuce. There’s no way that this isn’t going bad before she comes home. How crazy.” I may be paraphrasing a little there, but that’s the gist. And the bread isn’t even a kind that Abby would buy, which makes it exceptionally odd, given that we don’t think anybody’s living in the house. So we fix the router, make sure the computer is back online, and take the bread and a few Diet Cokes with us when we leave. The bread was going to go bad! At least it could go feed the chickens, right?

Yesterday morning, after breakfast and errands, we drove by the house again. This time an outside light was on. One that was distinctly not on when we left. Whoops. So now we’ve stolen someone’s bread (and eaten some, by that point in time) and Diet Cokes. More than just one or two…I had a couple when I was working late on the computer and we took a couple with us when we left and I think we split another one when we were resetting the router… At any rate, we’ve now stolen a bunch of this poor stranger’s food. What should we do?

I think that we’re going to replace the food, but be funny about it. We’re going to replace the loaf of bread with another, different kind. Something similar, but not the same. It was white bread, so I thought we’d leave some multigrain. Or maybe a box of crackers. And we’ll leave a two-liter of soda in the fridge. That’d be funny, right? Sheesh. We feel pretty bad.