Ever come out to your car in the morning and things aren't quite as you left them?

The other my family and I went out to a late dinner.  By the time we got home the kids were asleep, so I took our oldest son and my wife took the baby into the house.  It's a bit hard to hit the key fob to lock the car doors with your arms full of sleeping toddler, so I just left the car open.  Around midnight it started pouring buckets of rain.  The next morning I went out to the wife's Durango to grab something out of the back seat and noticed the driver's seat reclined all the way back.

Before giving me the lecture about not locking up the car, consider this.  I'm in a rural, upscale neighborhood and my property is fully gated by a 6-foot fence that's pretty difficult to scale.  Once over the fence, the house is a good 50-100 yards through heavily wooded fruit trees and sharp vegetation.  Just walking up to my house is pretty spooky in and of itself.  Once you near the house you're going to see an army of redneck vehicles ranging from my rusty, nasty looking M-715 to my ambulance to all the other things in my fleet.  To the untrained eye it looks like 10 people live at my place.  Add to this the fact that I normally leave the targets I use to zero in the laser sights and scopes of my varmint guns tacked to various trees at 20 to 75 yard ranges from the garage.  In short, it looks like a gun loving redneck weirdo lives at my place - because one does.

Back to the Durango.  There was a $20 bill on the center console, a cell phone charger, various CDs and DVDs, juice boxes, clothes, and so on.  All left untouched.  I'm guessing some illegal migrant worker camping in a nearby streambed got caught in the downpour and needed a dry place to sleep for the night.  On the one hand, I feel bad for the person.  I know 99.5 percent of the illegal workers around here are just trying to support their families back home in whatever country they come from.  It's a hard life and a lot of them live like animals when they're here.  On the other hand, they're here illegally.  Activists groups, ACLU hippies, and other bleeding hearts have us almost brainwashed to the point of giving them more rights than tax paying citizens.  And that .5 percent thinks nothing of committing a crime for a quick buck if it means making a year's pay in one night.

Regardless of the political argument, it's got my wife a bit freaked out, which causes me grief, which causes me to get pissed off.  You know these guys talk to each other - "so, where did you spend the night?" - and so on.  I'm not running a shelter and I'm not looking to invite any situation that may result in harm to my family.  So now the cars are all locked, the gate is double checked to make sure it's shut, the motion detectors are on, and I'm doing a nightly sweep of the property before turning in.  The next joker sleeping in my shed or one of my vehicles is going to wake up with a Remington 870 in his nose.

The funny thing is, if he'd just climbed into the ambulance and slept on the gurney he would've been much more comfortable and I never would have known anyone had been there.