Speaking of safety, my neighbor thwarted a burglary attempt into the garage of our 7-unit townhouse building this morning. One good thing about our location, I guess, is the quick response from the police. The thieves were able to walk away once they heard my neighbor, but the police were on site within three minutes of her call to 911.

When my unit was broken into three years ago, we had the same quick response-and caught the thieves red-handed with a lot of my stuff in their car.

I've mentioned before that I'm not a city girl. That point was well made when I moved here from a house (disco cabin, actually) in the slums of Magnolia. I thought I was being efficient when I decided to move some of the bulkier items that I don't use everyday into my new townhouse. Although blinds had not yet been installed on my windows, I figured that as long as anything was out of sight, I wouldn't have a problem.

Chuckling to yourself yet?

Missoula has it's own share of problems–as a college town, burglary is not nonexistent–but in the last few places I lived, we were lucky that people bothered to shut the door half the time, let alone lock it! (Sorry , Mom)

Anyway, so I loaded up my golf clubs, my skis, my kayaking gear, my laptop and printer and some jackets and tucked them away in closets.

Now I KNOW you are laughing at me.

So a few mornings later at 2:30, I get a call from the police, who asked me to come down and I.D. my stuff. I find all of my things sprawled out on the precinct floor with a cop rifling through all of it. The funny thing is, out of all of the things they stole, the cops were fascinated by a brown leather jacket that lay there on the floor.

Not just ANY brown leather jacket. I bought my "Starsky and Hutch" jacket at Carlos' One Night Stand, though it looks more like something Shaft would wear. Flared lapel, double-stitched detail and a fly buckle belt meant to be tied, not buckled.

I guess the jacket didn't look like something I'd wear to the cops, as I stood there in a fleece pullover and a baseball cap. Mostly, they were interested in the wallet they found in one of the pockets, that had 5 or 6 drivers' licenses, medical insurance cards, and a credit card–none of which matched my name, the thieves names, or each other.

"Are you SURE this is your jacket?" one of them said as he looked at me suspiciously.

"Absolutely."

The next day, a detective called and asked me again, "that jacket is really yours?"

For a second, I started to get a little nervous. They couldn't think I had something to do with that wallet, could they? Somehow, it ended up in my jacket, but what I would do with a bunch of IDs for middle-aged African-American men? After all, I was the one dumb enough to fill my empty townhouse with a bunch of pawnable items and then tra-la-la all the way back to Magnolia.

City girl, I am not.