Welcome to Houston...SMASH!

Last night, I had what they say is my "official Houston welcome". Yup, that's right...my car was broken into. The bizarre thing is I didn't even know. Someone from my apartment building told me in the elevator.

"Hey, I think your car was broken into," says my neighbor.

"No, really?"

"Yeah...little blue car. Florida plates?"

"Yeah, that's me."

Now this makes me sad. I love my car. It's small and cheap, but it has taken me on many road trips. In fact, my friends call it 'The Roller Skate' as it looks more like that than a car. But even though they make fun of me, they all want to ride shotgun at the end of the night - go figure.

Anyway, I make my way to the parking garage to check out the damage. Deep down, I'm hoping the guy has it wrong and it's someone else's car.

I get down to the garage and I see it. Someone has smashed the passenger window and opened the glove compartment. I look through the stuff lying on the floor to see what they took. Turns out they left my GPS (which I now keep in my purse), but they took my cheap $20 sunglasses and a really bad techno CD from two years ago, so the joke's on them with that one.

I go up and report it to my building manager. He laughs and says I got off lucky. When his car was broken into, it cost him over $1000 to fix. Another girl I spoke to said someone stole all her tires and she swore she saw them being sold a couple days later in a parking lot. One other person said her entire Jeep was stolen, then found gutted a couple weeks later. Instead of getting a new vehicle, insurance made her pay the deductible and fixed it up, but she says it's not the same.

It turns out that every person I spoke to at work, at the grocery store and at the dealership, has had a break-in at least once while living in Houston. Even the cop who did the police report said it's fairly common and mine was the third call he had that week just for my apartment complex.

I know it sounds weird, but finding out I wasn't the only one was rather comforting. It seems you're not a Houstonian until your car has been broken into.

Anyways, for the next few days I won't have a window, which makes it really hard for me to sing in the car when driving, as I'm not exactly a candidate for American Idol. So if you see me driving around, you might want to plug your ears.