finally. the story. it's not too exciting, but just, well, odd. let me explain...

two years ago, dan and i had just bought our house. he was working out of town at the time, and i lived in an apartment 1/2 mile or so from the house we bought. we moved a bunch of our stuff into the house the week before we were going to do the 'Big Move'. i continued to live in the apartment, because the bed wouldn't get moved until then. so, the house was empty with some of our stuff in it for about three days.

the friday of the Big Move, dan flew home early friday afternoon to start. when he went into the house, he quickly realized some of our stuff was stolen. almost all of our outdoor gear. tent, sleeping bags, backpacks, and a large amount of highly specialized climbing gear. dan is one of those nuts who climbs 'big walls' - like el capitan in yosemite. it takes about four days to complete the climb, and you need a ton of gear to do it, as well as a 'portaledge' or hanging tent. they took all of this. dan's snowboard and portaledge were in the exact same spot - and they took the portaledge and left the snowboard. so we suspected the robbers were climbers and had possibly watched us move into the house. they also took a bunch of cds. all our old 80s music - the old heavy metal. the left my phish and the dead and dmb. and they obviously took their time as they didn't grab the whole case of cds, just took what they wanted. climbing is something that means a lot to us. We had met because of it, and it is our main 'hobby'. i would have been happier if they took all of our stereo equipment, our television...but they went after our gear. needless to say, we were quite upset. and i was really disgusted that anyone could do this.

fortunately, we had arranged for homeowner's insurance that gave you replacement value for what was stolen. we had the policy for three days before the break-in. over the course of the next few days, we painstakingly compiled a list of all of the stolen equiptment. we had accumulated this gear over many years, buying much of it wholesale when we worked for cal poly's outdoor program. after adding up everything (8 or so pages of an excel spreadsheet) the total was almost $10,000. the insurance company did not believe it was possible for us to own almost $10,000 worth of primarily outdoor gear. we fought with them for over a month, and eventually received our check. (they dropped us the next year, though). we re-bought our gear, which we needed for our honeymoon in canada a mere two weeks after we finally received the check. we figured whomever had stolen our gear had likely sold it. what kind of idiot would climb with stolen gear anyway? you trust your life to it. bad karma. didn't think we'd ever see it again.

last night at the gym there was a guy we had seem once or twice before at the gym. we had chatted with him in the past. he had a dog named 'crash' (for crash pad, not the song). he set crash's leash on a bench and went to climb. dan sat down on the bench and noticed something interesting. the carabinier (biner - pronounced 'bean-er') on the end of the leash was an old MSR one like he had owned. and on the biner was the exact same tape that he had used to mark all of his old gear. the MSR biners are pretty rare - not many people use them. i had our only un-stolen biner from our old gear, and i always wore it on my harness (sentimental, i guess). i took it off and set it next to the MSR one. sure enough, the tape was identical.

so what do you do? did he steal our gear? we agonized over how to ask him how he had gotten this biner. we didn't want to imply anything, as well as not letting him know it is was our gear. if he did steal it, we didn't want him to think we were onto him until we had more proof, and an opportunity to get it back. dan asked him casually:

'where'd you get the MSR biner? you don't see those around too often.' (climbers LOVE to talk gear, so this was a 'normal' question)

dan said that the guy froze, and then quickly said, 'oh that one? oh, it was, uh, booty. yeah. found it at the base of a climb. it looked like it had been dropped from hundreds of feet above.' and that the guy seemed nervous. but what do we do now? we are 99% sure that was dan's biner. what if he has our gear? but, then, what if he doesn't and really did find it? we're not really sure what we are going to do now. hopefully we will end up climbing outdoors with him one day (many people from the gym go on trips together). then we can see if it was him. it's just a crazy thing. i can't believe anyone would steal all that stuff. radios and tvs? i can understand that more than our gear. just odd. hmmm. (yes, shep, i hmm'ed out loud)