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I've been afraid to go out anywhere with my van window smashed. I'm afraid that if I park and leave it anywhere I'll return to find the whole van gone. So until I figure out how to get the window fixed I've been stuck at home. On the night that my window was smashed a guy came sauntering up to me in the driveway to chat. He's staying across the street and I guess he was bored. It turned out we'd been in the same class in sixth grade, and we ended up chatting for a couple of hours. On a normal night when my van hadn't just been broken into I would have probably excused myself and gone inside immediately but it was just one of those weird nights.

My former classmate had trouble placing who I was at first, until I mentioned that I was partially Asian to explain to the Asiatic features of my daughter. Apparently that was all it took for him to remember me. "Oh your eyes were more slanted back then, huh? You had dark curly hair." Once I confirmed that was in fact me, with a horrible early 90s perm, he told me I hadn't liked him, and that I had been really stuck up and full of myself. I told him that I had been really shy, but he said that I always had a sour expression on my face. That part could have been true.

The guy turned out to be a mechanic, and he offered to fix my window for me but when he got home Miguel was wary and told me that he would figure out how to do it himself. The thing about Miguel is that he can figure out how to do just about anything given an Internet connection and enough time. The flip side is that it always takes a whole lot of time. It was a slow process, of finding a compatible window at a junk yard and trying to figure out how to get it out of the old car's frame and then how to get it into my van's frame, made all the more fun by the fact that it was an automatic window in an old car that didn't even have a motor any longer.

It took about a week to get the window in from the night the old one was smashed out. On the night that the above photo was taken the kids and I were still stuck at home and I was still feeling down about the fact that someone had taken my possessions from me. It's funny how attached people can get to material possessions, but some of the things I lost along with my purse had accompanied me on my adventures for over a decade. I hadn't been up to taking many photos on this day, and the baby was making it no easier by dodging the camera lens whenever possible so this is what I was left with, a photo of my daughter sharing her stinky toddler toes with her father.