Fun Times Pt. 6

The Fun Times category encompasses those unfortunate events that can be looked back on with anything other than horror. The prowler/burglar that became a flying squirrel chase. The TV turning itself on, prompting myself and my brother to do honest-to-God house-clearing.

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Went running yesterday around 4 maybe. Got home, showered, watched an episode of House. I notice out my bedroom window that's it's getting dark. 5:45 sees thunder and distant lightning. I shut my laptop off and unplug it at 6, as thunder and lightning start booming directly overhead.

I go down to the junkroom where my mom is using the computer and feeding the rats. At this point we've got torrential rains to the point where you can't see through the backyard, and the oak trees are waving like palm fronds. The sky is nasal-discharge green.

Mom says "hey, that'd make a good picture" goes to get her camera. Three things happen at once.

1.The back screen door is practically ripped open.
2.The garage door explodes inward (open) and something long flies in.
3.There's the noise of an explosion and all the lights go out.

Mom screams and dives to pull the backdoor closed. It's a fight against the wind. My first thought is "Someone just kicked the door in and I'm on the only end of the house without the appropriate equipment for shooting them." Second thought is a tree fell on the house and a branch came through the ceiling. It is dark as night in the house and I can't tell if there's structural damage, what's going on.

I go shut and lock the garage door. I go shut and lock the back door, run to the other end of the house and grab my Maglite and dad's weather radio. Mom's tripping on shoes and whatever flew in when the door burst open. Doorjam maybe?

I flick the light over the other end of the hallway - it's the curtain rod from over the window in the door. My brother's downstairs, taking a shower, and the next order of business is to get him light. No problem he yells up, there's an emergency light in the bathroom.

I'll expound on emergency lights in a little bit.

It still sounds like the end of the world outside, so we take the rats and the bird downstairs and set them on pool table, and I set about flipping the breakers to see which one will turn the power back on. None of them do. This wasn't a fuse that snapped, this is interruption of power to the house.

Twenty minutes later the worst of the storm is over. We go outside and find a tree branch snapped off, tore the powerlines down in the neighbor's yard. Later we discover that the powerpole in our backyard has been sheared off about five feet from the top, bringing the transformer down. No power for us for a long time. It's probably 7 at this time.

In the meantime we've lit candles, because it is DARK out and in.

We order a pizza and eat, and around 9 my brother and I go and get ice to keep the contents of the downstairs freezer frozen.

The power company gets here about 10:30 and commences wandering through the yards with flashlights, laughing and joking and looking around.

I go to bed in the junkroom around 11:00. The garage door won't close, so the house is pretty much open to whoever wants to come in. If you've ever watched Jericho, you remember the episode Rogue River, which ends with Jake sitting up in his family's livingroom with a shotgun waiting for trouble to show up. That was pretty much me last night.

Power was restored around 4 this morning.
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Power outages are not normal occurances, but they're not alien either. I remember big chunks of the US going dark due to too much traffic on the electric grid a couple summers ago. I remember NY having a similar problem I think just last summer. Those problems lasted long than 10 hours though.

Emergency lights are one of the best things you can have in your house. $5-10 at Menards/Fleet Farm/Home Depot, and they plug into your wall outlets. In the event of an outage, they come on, providing 1-3 hours of constant power. These should be in every room of the house and will provide enough light to get you to a flashlight.

We've got 3 good flashlights, and that's not nearly enough. You should have one flashlight per room, if not more. A decent Maglite will set you back $20, and by my estimate, will provide 4-8 hours of constant power. You should have a decent stock of batteries, and check the flashlights often to see if their batteries are leaking or are running down.

Once you've got the situation assessed, it's time to light candles in the main parts of the house and turn the flashlights off. You should have LOTS of big candles. We've got 8 hurricane candles, which each provide about 16 hours of meager illumination, as well as probably 8 big decorative candles and maybe thirty candles ranging in size from drinking cups down to tea-lights. Candles don't do a very good job of illumination, so you'll need more of them. By my estimate, those eight hurricane candles would've lasted us three nights.

When my brother and I went to Walmart to get ice, I bought 4 packs of chemlights. They're in camping section, Ozark brand. They come 2-3 to a pack, and come in multiple colors. Bend them till they crack and then shake, and they provide strong light for about six hours. I snapped one at 9:30 and it was still going somewhat strong at 4:30. As soon as I pay off the eight shotgun magazines I bought, I'm going to fill a .30cal can with chemlights.

First aid kits should be kept on hand, and should be capable of addressing decently sized wounds. One of the first things my mom did once the storm was over was to go and check on the elderly immigrant couple on the corner, and wound up coming back to get supplies to clean and bandage a medium serious gash on the man's leg that he got from tripping in the dark.

Here's what I keep thinking - we lost power for 10-12 hours. Our main concerns were light, and keeping the stuff in the freezer frozen.

Now imagine it's the middle of summer and the grid goes down because everybody's running 3 airconditioners. Businesses AND houses are dark. No more fans, airconditioners, lights, computers, whatever man, if it's plugged in, it's dead. Now imagine that going 3 or more days. I don't know if that would affect water pumping stations, but I suspect so. Suddenly I don't feel so paranoid. Every population center, major or not, is 24 hours of no power away from a breakdown of social order. We've got about 40 gallons of water downstairs and tons of canned food, and right now it doesn't feel like enough.

Or imagine a major blizzard lasting 3 or 4 days. Ice dragging down powerlines, whiteout conditions making the roads impassible. Such a thing is not unexpected here.

A little hardship, and suddenly, I feel vindicated.

Fun Times Pt. 5.5

So the night that this whackjob tells me to watch my back, the management cuts me loose early because otherwise I'll go overtime.

The night crew gets ready to leave at 12am, and they find he's been waiting outside for them, for an hour. Does the pounding on the door, demanding to be let in routine. Cops are called, they detain him while the employees leave, then the cops cut him loose after about 20 minutes.

Given that he threatened me, and then was waiting outside when I would've been exiting the building, I am taking his threats very seriously. I filed a police report, and the police will be talking to him presently. I'm in the process of trying to decide whether or not to buy a restraining order. He's already been banned, by management, from my place of employment.

The nut's name is Jonathan Miles Hensel. He lives at 820 Reed, Manitowoc, WI, 54220. He has 13 priors. Twice picked up for driving w/ suspended license. Multiple speeding/bad driving tickets. Two divorces, a restraining order, one Misdemeanor A for obstructing an officer, and a felony charge of torturing an animal to death. A regular freakin' choirboy. I'm also willing to bet he's spent more than his fair share of time as an inmate of The Enchanted Kingdom, aka The Hoo-Hoo Hotel, aka The Rubber Room, aka the looneybin.

Updates to follow. Fortunately or unfortunately, life is not like The Black Donnellys. You cannot drag a guy into the road and kick him into a coma, whether you have a good reason or not.

Fun Times Pt.5

Long story short, a certifiable loonytoon got fed up with my customer service today and told me that I need to watch my back really, really closely. Ordinarily, I'd laugh off the threats of some punk. This guy's as old as my father, and he hung around the store and b*tch*d at employees for 6 hours. The manager on duty at the time downplayed the incident and told me to make sure I didn't upset any future customers by letting my disdain for them creep into my body language. Letters of complaint will be requested from both the store and assistant manager, and a police report will be filed. If the guy whacks me, at least there's be a papertrail.

The lights in my house have been going on and off (and staying off permanently) without reason or warning.

The gent who was checking out our house at 2pm a week ago returned last night. Parked a car in front of the neighbor's, didn't get out, didn't do anything but just sit and look at my house and the house across the street. Then he drove down the street, turned around, and parked & watched again.

For the first time in my life, I'm going to bed with Paul Nelson within reach - with a round in the chamber. I feel like I've been awake for days. Doesn't help it's boiling hot here too.

Good night.

Fun Times Pt. 4.5

We're having a bonfire in the driveway last night, when around 8:30, a yellow cab pulls up between our house and the duplex next door. A hispanic man gets out and walks down the block, disappearing around the corner.

Half an hour later, he comes back the same way he left, approaches the cab in a wide angle, and says "Are you waiting for someone?" After some trifling conversation, he gets in the cab, and the cab speeds away. There's another hispanic man in the back seat who didn't get out, and who was sitting there with the driver for the full half hour.

At two this morning, a car pulled up far down the block, and a man got out and walked down to our house. He stood in the street in front of our house, and moved back and forth, examining our house, and the house across from us.

He did this again, twenty minutes later, parking much closer.

In the last two months, someone's shot something through our window capable of hurting us (and with the intent, no doubt), someone's prankcalled our house for 2 weeks, and has also lobbed a mudball at our front window.

With all that having happened recently, and with unidentified men scoping our house at zero dark hundred, I feel slightly less paranoid about having a Sig 220 within arms reach all night, and an assault rifle close at hand.

I will say this: If trouble comes, let it come here. I know my neighbors are unarmed. I would hate myself if someone attacked the elderly immigrant couple, or the single mom and her daughter, when two doors down there's a family who's prepared for an attack. Like the saying goes: If war comes, let it come in my lifetime, so my children will know peace.

I don't relish the thought of home invasions, or shooting at someone, but better our family than someone who can't fight back.

Apprehensive

So you all know some sick **** blew a hole in our front window a month ago with a 3/8 inch ball bearing. Either he was a really good shot or nearly really lucky, because he managed to put the ball through the space where heads would've been if we hadn't have been up for a commerical break.

Between then and now, someone's been prankcalling the house. They'll call once a day, and the answering machine will pick up either the sound of breathing, swallowing, or hanging up. It's been going on about 2 weeks now.

Yesterday morning, someone woke my mom up at 5 in the morning by slinging a mudball at our front window.

There is of course the possibility that all these things just happened to converge in the same frame of time. There's also the possibility that someone is or a collection of someones are trying to screw with us, and that has me slightly worried.

We've got deadbolts on the doors, motion lights, one hell of an alarm system in the form of our parrot, and lots of things close at hand that go boom. Unless you're the 68th Airborne, or Shiek Amadadoodie And The 101 Self-Immolating Neolithic Goatherders, getting in is going to be hard, and getting out is going to be harder and messier.

I still feel like I'm waiting for the other end of the hammer to drop though. I hope I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, I really do.

Fun Times Pt.Whatever

The Fun Times category encompasses those unfortunate events that can be looked back on with anything other than horror. The prowler/burglar that became a flying squirrel chase. The TV turning itself on, prompting myself and my brother to do honest-to-God house-clearing.

It is important to refer to Fun Times with an ironic, sarcastic tone in one's voice. The internet gun community calls what is to follow an After Action report. I can think of no better title for it.

Recently, it was implied that no one knows what they'll do when people start shooting at them.

At roughly 1 in the morning on Patriot's Day 2007, I now know.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Two days ago, I fell down a flight of stairs. Somewhere between 4-7 steps up, I twisted my ankle and gravity did what I had wanted to do, and I went downstairs rather quickly. Landed on the side of my ankle, fell into a wall...I'm lucky I didn't snap my ankle in half. I've been limping like Jimmy Donnelly ever since.

I've been sitting a lot, and putting my foot up, icing, that sort of thing. When I sat down tonight to watch Lost, I put my foot up on the entertainment center. I'm sitting in the chair next to the window, my mom's sitting and cross-stitching a few feet away, my dad's on his laptop on the couch behind us.

Previously, my mom had tripped over my dad's laptop cord, knocking a lamp over and snapping the bulb.

At the first commercial break, I get up to check something on the computer. Coming back into the hallway, I've got my hand on the refridgerator door, about to open it up and retrieve a Premium carbonated beverage. There's a crack, and a sound like the bulb snapping again, and about one second later my dad shouts "Get down! Someone's shooting at us!"

Not a thought crossed my brain for about two minutes. Complete blankness, like someone'd flipped a switch. No fear, none. No shock. Emptiness. I can't see bullet holes, I can't see any indication of that, but I drop to a crouch, and my shoe skids on a spray of broken glass. I had an impure thought. My mom's screaming and walking around trying to see where the shot/s came/are from, and my dad says "Get down!" again.

My brother's on the other end of the hallway with the living room between him and us, and he crawls across the hall.

I'm still not thinking at this point, but I remember knowing I was on the end of the house that didn't have the guns. Generally when I think of guns, I think of the pistols my dad and I keep near our respective beds. I remember I've got three assault rifles just down the stairs to my right, and I shout "Get the guns!"

My brother and I half fall down the steps (again) as my mom's calling 911 and my dad's trying to figure out just what the hell is going on. My brother goes to his bedroom for his rifle, I go the other way into the workroom.

Live and fight like you train I guess. Every time there's a gun in my hands, I chambercheck it and presscheck the magazine to make sure I'm safe. I remember (now) doing that as I headed out of the workroom.

At this point, I should remind you, I'm downstairs. I know that unless I've got the 108th airborne outside, I'm definitely better armed than whoever just fired into our living room, and I'm out of the line of fire. I'm safe as you can be when someone's just fired an unknown number of shots into your house.

I do not mean to toot my own horn, but...if I'm not supposed to know what to do when there's people shooting at you...I guess my body's defective. Same with my brother. Safe and armed, and we head back to the danger zone.

I went back upstairs. My brother's at the back door, checking the backyard. My dad's crossed the hall to his .45 and is scanning the front yard from a bedroom window. I drop down next to the living room window and look out. My mom shouts for me to get the birds from in front of the window. My dad shouts for me to get down. My mom shouts for me to get the bird. I got the bird.

I'm back to thinking again at this point, and I'm still stunned by the lack of bullet holes. Bird hitting the window maybe? But there is broken glass, and I trust my dad implicitly. I hunker down behind the couch and try and figure out where the threat is, what's going on, why would anyone shoot at us.

My dad gives the all clear - the front yard is empty. Same as the back according to my brother. My mom's crying and the woman on the other end of the phone is saying police are on their way. My dad says to put our rifles away. My brother and I ditch them in the basement, still loaded. I go upstairs, jack a round into my Beretta, and put it on safety in my belt. No way am I going unarmed right now. Coming down the hall from the other end of the room, I finally see the hole. It's the size of a rolling pin, and about a foot over where my head would be if I were sitting down with my feet up watching Lost.

My dad's gone outside, I go outside, he says the woman who lives across the street saw someone outside our house at the same time of the shooting, smelled smoke. I relay this information to my mom, for the benefit of the cop on the phone. I go back outside. The neighbor has left. Cop cars are blocking off the street. She comes back, and finally everybody's outside while the police are asking questions (they got here roughly 4-5 minutes after the call) and no one still has any idea what the hell is going on. She'd tracked the guy from the front of our house a couple of blocks in her jeep. The cops are on the radio trying to find him. The hole in our window looks even bigger outside than it does inside. At some point I don't remember, I've unloaded my Beretta so the police don't shoot me.

We finally found a ball about the size of a .38 round on the floor in the living room, matching a dent in our woodwork at the same height as the hole in the window. ****ing pellet gun...we think. At first we thought it was a slingshot...but the angle puts it about fifteen feet above the street, and when one of the officers shown his pistol laser through the hole back from the dent, the guys outside extrapolated it to a deck about a hundred yards away, through two back yards.

They picked up the guy the neighbor saw, frisked him and let him go. No gun, no slingshot, just a phone and a pack of smokes. I'm going looking around the neighborhood for the slingshot tomorrow.

About 10:30, roughly an hour and a half after this mess started, we put tape over the window, vaccuumed up the glass, and started trying to get ready for bed.

Now is when I'm scared. I had to pee something fierce for about half an hour after the cops left, and my arms feel like I've been lifting cinderblocks for the past six hours I'm so stressed. I can't walk in front of a window without flinching.

Some little human ****stain tried to HURT us. He used a weapon capable of causing harm to us, and scared us half to death. Either that or there's a worse possibility - that some little human ****stain gives so little thought to humanity that he'll pop off a ball bearing into someone's window, at RANDOM, for FUN. A threat I can deal with. Someone coming at me, someone means me or my family harm, I can and I will put them down without any emotion whatsoever, after tonight I know that. But RANDOM? Who the **** does this for fun? Who hurts random people for fun? Who scares middle aged couples and their teenaged kids for the **** of it? Who likes it, or maybe worse, doesn't care about it?

I'm pissed and a little scared and I don't feel safe anymore, and this little ***hole just further dimmed my view of humanity in general.

But now I know what I do when someone's shooting at me. It might've been a ball bearing coming through our window at 9:10 at night, but neither my mind nor my body knew that. I'm not proud or happy or elated or scared or anything else that when I could've stayed safe and armed I went back to the scene of the crime...it's just like "Ok." The only important thing though is that everyone including the pets is A-OK. That's all that matters.

Fun Times Pt3

The Fun Times series is dedicated to those little family crisises that get everybody all angry and frantic for a while, and just generally disrupt life. So far they have all had good outcomes, which is why I can ironically call them Fun Times™.

The very first "Fun Time" involved an intruder alarm that morphed from scaring away a burglar to chasing a flying squirrel out of the house with a spatula.

The second "Fun Time" was actually kind of scary - my mom was home alone and thought someone broke in, and my brother later performed his house-clearing duties admirably.

Last night was the third "Fun Time." I'm sitting downstairs, watching Deep Space Nine, when all of a sudden, thing seem...off...and not in any way that I can fully describe. The air has changed in some way. I ignore it and keep watching. After a few minutes, I'm sniffing the air...this is really weird...it smells like sulfur. Like really, badly rotten eggs. But just a hint of it.

Perplexed, I shut off DS9, and head for the stairs at the end of the long "family" room. WTH? It smells horrible over by the stairs. I run upstairs and tell my mom it smells awful downstairs. She heads down and just about chokes at the stench. We walk into the laundry room, and the smell is stronger, much stronger. We turn left into my brother's bedroom, and now the smell could knock a buzzard off a gut-wagon. This is, like, a panic situation. Something really bad's going down here.

My brother is not, ahem, the most...clean...person in the world, so the possibility of him leaving a meal under his bed and then having it decompose is not exactly an alien thought. We go back upstairs, and wake him up from where he's sleeping on the sofa.

And here is where the situation veers off into the absurd. Slightly peeved that one of her children may have just fumigated the house through carelessness, my mom tells my brother to open up the freezer and take a deep breath so he has a suitable control with which to appreciate the full awesomeness of the stench he is about to behold. Not in so many words though. "Stick your head in the freezer and breathe," is closer to the original wording.

He refuses, and asks what's going on. "Just stick your head in the freezer." This goes on a for a minute and we all finally troop downstairs. My brother can sniff this just as soon as he heads downstairs. Once in his room, we realize the smell has gotten exponentially worse. It is unholy on a thousand different levels. This is something that no decent human being should be exposed to.

Definitely not something of my brother's creation.We have an upright freezer in the basement, and my thought is maybe it came unplugged, the...meat...inside going rancid with time. But my musings on this are quickly derailed...my mom sends me to go get the carbon monoxide detector from upstairs. My protests that carbon monoxide is odorless fall on deaf ears, and I go get the thing and plug it in in my brother's room. It reads 0 to no ones surprise.

It is around this time that my dad ventures downstairs, just having noticed that there is A Fuss on under his roof, and he asks what the matter is. Very unflappable. My mom asks if he notices the smell, and he says yes, it's his bathroom.

Last summer we had a problem with plugged pipes. Varying brands of Drano wouldn't clear out the problem, wire pipe-snakes didn't do it...so my dad bought some industrial drain cleaner. Whereas most drain-cleaners are bases, this stuff was full-on sulphuric acid, diluted to the point where it didn't eat through the pipes (be very careful about not getting on the tub though, pour it straight down the drain). Half a bottle of that later, some very unpleasant odors started wafting out of the various drains in the house, as the sulphuric acid dissolved the biological growths that every household pipe system has. These odors were so strong that after opening all the windows, our house stood as the epicenter of a kind of funk that could be sniffed for dozens of yards in every direction.

Now let your mind wander, and grasp if it can, the full horror of unleashing such a pungent menace inside a house in the winter. With all the doors and windows closed.

YEAH.

My dad had poured some more of this industrial cleaner down his shower's drainpipe.By this time the stench has flooded the living area of the upstairs, and my mom's worried about our two pet rats and our two birds, one of which is a ten-year-old finch (finches are only supposed to live four to six years). They get hastily relocated to the bedrooms at the far end of the house, and we start turning on every fan in the house.

After fifteen minutes, the god-awful stench has not depreciated, and we start wondering what to do to render the air suitable for sleeping in. My brother sprays three cans of AXE in his room, lights a candle, and sets a fan to blow air out of his room - which results in mixing the heavy smell of AXE with the smell of rotten eggs.

We finally hit upon a solution - open all the doors and windows! I should comment that this is Wisconsin, and it is winter, and our median temps for the past few days have been 10 degrees in the sun. It is nine at night. It is damned cold outside. Soon it is damned cold inside. We watched Lost, made hot drinks, and wore hats and gloves.

Around ten we finally closed the house up. Despite cranking the heat to 90 to offset the cold air, the ambient temperature had dropped seven degrees. We ran a propane space heater for a couple of minutes to warm up the living room before going to bed.

Fun Times Pt2

Before I move on to the meat of the entry, let me just apologize in advance for the lack of content. My life the last few weeks has looked something like this:

Work, 11-7:30 Sunday & Monday
School, Tuesday 10-4:30
School, homework, and all the stuff I can't do after 7:30 at night, Wednesday & Thursday
Work, 11-7:30 Friday & Saturday

Anyhoo, onto the story.

I call for a ride home from school Thursday afternoon, and my mom sounds weird. On the verge of crying. It's easy to tell in the car that's she's freaked out. While I was at programming class, and my brother was at the Y, another set of voices started talking in the house, over the radio. She'd been out feeding squirrels and left the back door open, then went down to the opposite end of the house... and after turning off the radio, the voices persisted. She went from room to room, making sure all noise-making appliances were off.

They were.

The voices were still talking. Mom went to the top of the basement stairs. The voices were coming from downstairs. Someone had turned the TV on, while she was upstairs. No one else was home.

This is the very definition of A Bad Thing(TM).

She couldn't leave, because my brother was coming home, and she didn't want him walking in on a burglary in progress. Not only that, but I'd be calling soon. So, she went and retrieved my dad's newly restored 1911, and stood by the back door for 15 minutes. She didn't know how to make it operational, but the impulse to get a gun was the right one.

15 minutes later, my brother gets back from the Y. In his words, "there are few things scarier than being greeted at the door by your mother, who's holding a gun and going 'ssshhhh.'"

Brother doesn't know how to operate a 1911. Nevertheless, he takes it, stands at the head of the stairs, and tells mom to retrieve my CX4 (which he does know how to operate) from my room. She does, and he ventures into the basement.

A note aforehand. My brother's not quite the gunny I am. He has no interest in self-defense theory, doesn't read or watch tapes, or constantly surround himself with people who talk guns and survival more than they eat (slight exaggeration), like yours truly does.

Our basement is divided up into a long room running parallel under the front of the house, and a bedroom (my brother's), a laundry room, a bathroom, and a workroom running parallel to long room, under the back of the house. The stairs lead down to one end of the long room.

My brother sprinted down the stairs, got to the end of the long room, put the wall to his back, and evaluated. The lights had been turned on, and the TV was on. He quickly checks visible hiding places, and sprints to the laundry room, which is an intersection for the basement. From there, he moves fast to his bedroom, and trades the 9mm carbine for Nancy Pelosi, the battlerifle that he practically owns, and keeps in his closet. From there, he runs back upstairs.

I'd called by then, and he tells mom, in her words "Go get 'Vincent.' He's the safe one, he'll know what to do." My mom says it's a measure of the respect my brother has for me, that he'd rather rely on my judgement in a crisis than his own.

Let me tell you, there's nothing quite like coming home, and finding your brother sitting on the sofa with a battlerifle over his knees.

I jack a round into the 1911, and we go downstairs, check room to room. Nobody. Empty. Having thoroughly cleared the basement of all hiding places, we return our various weaponry to the places from whence it came, go upstairs, and begin the Monday Morning Quarterbacking.

My mom has since handled every gun I own, and does not possess the physical strength to draw back a bolt or slide. She just can't, and it's our practice to leave chambers empty around the house. So, I'm looking into a revolver. It'll cost as much as a battlerifle probably, and it won't have near the utility.

The reason I write this is to show my respect for my brother. It just keeps climbing. I've observed him and his actions now for quite a while, and I'm hard-pressed to come up with a better, more practical person, and not just when it comes to handling the household weaponry. I can't go into it here, but I find it humbling to see in someone else the qualities I WISH to see in myself, especially in someone who I've been told doesn't possess them. But let's look at what he did right in this situation:

Traded up from a handgun to a carbine.
Moved through a big empty space fast, and only stopped when he had his back to something.
Cleared the hiding places and intersection fast.
Traded up from a carbine to a rifle when the opportunity presented itself.
Waited for backup before going any deeper into an unknown situation.

I doubt he'll read this, but for someone who's spent zip for time around the gun culture, that's pretty damn good for a first try, and deserves a slap on the back.

Oh and, we have no idea how the lights or TV came on. My mom hadn't been downstairs for about half an hour before they turned themselves on. It's a mystery.

Gander Mtn. will be getting a visit from me this week, and I'm definitely coming back better schooled in wheelguns than when I left.

Scary Morning

I'm yanked from a deep sleep by the sound of something shattering.

It's 0-Dark-Hundred in my room. It's dark outside, I can't see a thing. Something in the rest of the house woke me up.

The first thought through my head is "How can this be happening AGAIN?!" The second is "They are NOT getting away with it this time!" Well, there were a few more cusswords in those thoughts, but this is a website for everyone, so...

I'm out of bed in a heartbeat, discard the idea of taking my carbine (even high as a kite on adrenaline at God-Knows-What-Time in the morning, I still allow for the possibility of another explanation), and hold my open knife down by my leg. There's light coming under my door and I think "That's bloody bold of them." I open my door, see my dad a few feet ahead of me, hurrying down the hallway - now I know something's up.

I follow him out into the dining room, see my mom in the kitchen, see the time on the clock (6:07) , and everybody turns to look at me. I said "I heard something shatter."

My mom had dropped something - that was the noise I heard. I return to my room (I get up at 6:30) and go back to bed. Won't be going to sleep though: My hands are shaking.

I absolutely hate the idea of being party to violence.

There's A Chipmunk Over There

I recently celebrated a birthday. My birthday day rocked. My birthday night...not so much. Two, count 'em two completely unrelated events that kept us up until the wee hours of the morning.

To understand part of the story, you have to know something of the geography of our house. My bedroom resides all the way down on the right end. I sleep next to an outside wall, on the other side of which there's a garden, a tree, birdbath, window wells, all the stuff you normally find in a side yard. The inside of our house, with the the exception of both ends where there are bedrooms, is open concept. The living room is open to the kitchen and dining room, and takes up the middle third of the front of the house.

Whew. Now that that's out of the way.

Last night I heard bump from outside my bedroom window. Sounds like someone tripped over the short garden fence or a window well cover. I think "squirrel" and forget about it. This is about 11:40, maybe. Around 12:25, I hear footsteps outside my room (I figure it's a parent), and then something from the main body of the house, it sounds like someone's trying to rattle our patio door against the block in the track, or maybe pry open a window. My curiousity piqued, I get out of bed, consider and then discard the idea of taking a knife with me (it was a weird noise, ok?), and stumble out into the hall.

My mom's out in the hall, looking confused. She got up AFTER the rattle (who's footsteps were those?) and thinks there might be someone in the house. One person hearing something suspicious is understandable - houses settle. Two people hearing it is not coincidence. This coupled with the sound like someone tripping outside my window (I explained this to her) leads me to believe we have either a home invader or a prowler on the premises. I go back to my room, briefly consider the advantages of a carbine against a pistol, and retrieve my 9mm from under my bed. Suitably armed, I return to the hallway, tell my mom to wake my dad, and watch the darkened rest of the house from the back of the hall. It's cold in the house, I'm wearing only athletic shorts, my heart sounds like a dang jackhammer, and I'm wondering how fast someone can get down the hall from the kitchen and if I'll get enough time to put a round in the chamber, aim, and find it within myself to fire.

My dad gets up, takes my gun and does a walkthrough of the house, turning lights on and examining the outdoors as he goes. All the doors and windows are locked, no signs of entry. That's good. From there he checks the basement, retrieves my freaked-out brother from his basement bedroom, and once we've made sure the house is secure, we all return our various weapons to their places of origin, and go back to bed, my brother choosing to sleep upstairs in his old bed in my room.

It's now about 12:45, and the fun is just beginning.

We have two birds. A parrot lives in front of the patio door in our kitchen. A 900 year old finch resides in a cage on a chest in front of the living room window.

At about 12:50, we hear the parrot freaking out. My mom and my dad get up to comfort him, and me and my brother follow.The parrot appears to be fine. My brother looks over by the finch and utters those infamous words "There's a chipmunk over there."

Yeah. The absolute LAST thing you want to hear at 1 in the morning.

This critter ain't a chipmunk. It's about the size of a rat, with a flat bushy tail as long as itself, big black bug eyes, and an angelic face, sort of like a squirrel/chipmunk/possum cross. Everyone's since commented that it looks like something out of Australia. He's sitting on the finch's cage. At our slightest movement, he transfers himself about 3 feet over and 3 feet up to the top of a potted plant. We grab towels, a spatula, and a laundry bucket and head into the living room. He jumps another few feet into the air, and proceeds to do upside-down hand-over-hand along the curtain rod, then runs the length of the curtain back to the plant he came from. By this time we've shoved towels under all the doors in the house, opened the front door, and are considering plans to remove the offending house-guest.

Using a long piece of wood, my brother pushes the plant-box over to the now open front door. From there, my dad, shielding himself with the laundry bucket, chases the animal down the tree with the spatula, and out into the yard.

We all got to bed around 1:30.The happenings with the animal are all funny in retrospect (The phrase "There's a chipmunk over there" will be a punchline for years to come, and we've got several photos of the furry guest that are quite cute) but at the time it was most aggravating.

Our theory is someone tried to break in, and then while we were clearing the house, we woke up the critter that had been come in (unknown to the rest of us) earlier in the day and had been napping under the couch. We know the 2 events were not connected because the noises we heard that we attribute to a human were A)Outside and B)Not capable of being made by a critter of the small four-legged variety.

This is just great - this is the second time in a year that someone's tried to break in.