Fear Number 1

It's Saturday morning and I should be picture hanging or desk organising. But I have a full cup of coffee to drink and the sun is shining just so on our dining room carpet, somehow reminding me of all the blog topics accumulating on my brain (and the fact that I've been wanting to write at all, full stop). Two have to do with unnecessary fear, one has to do with the theft stories I hear daily.

For those of you who don't know the central valley area well, let me just tell you that for the first time in my life we're getting renter's insurance. I'm taking my CD player out of my car every time I go into the grocery story. This is all a bit unexpected (although I had heard about the crime rate before we arrived--thankfully not violent crime, but still theft) but it doesn't help when I try to rationalize my fear away while in conversation with a local, expecting them to do the same, only to have them validate my fear by telling me more stories about their mother who lives in a nice neighbourhood near church who has had four break-ins in the last week. Then I turn on the news and hear about the nice church-going people in Stockton whose cars are being robbed while they're in the services and it all just makes me wonder how I'm going to set up a life here. We should not have to live in fear of our computers being taken every time we leave the house!

Not to deter people from visiting, of course--we do live in a gated community which helps a lot, and the people who lived here before us were never robbed, and they lived here three and a half years...