St. Valentine's Day. Just when we got bored with winter, things got real exciting around here this week. We had a little earthquake, a big snowstorm, howling winds, strangers ringing the doorbell, a terrible noise that scared me half to death ... and a fight with Sam, a big, black, noisy dog!
Miss Jerrianne and I were sound asleep when a terrible noise began to screech in my sensitive ears ... not the clock radio alarm, mind you ... I'm pretty used to that now ... but this was different. It wasn't the smoke alarm. It wasn't the new carbon monoxide detector, either, Miss Jerrianne decided. She got up and turned on the lights.
Miss Jerrianne decided to let the burglar alarm ring for a minute and think this through. She contemplated whether a picture hanging crooked on the wall right above the keypad might mean we'd slept through an earthquake ... or that I had playfully pushed just the right buttons. Blame it on the cat! That seems to be her first response to anything out of the ordinary around here.
She put on her headset phone and opened the bathroom door to slip on her Birkenstocks. I bolted for the closet and took up a defensive position at the very back, behind some belts. Miss Jerrianne disabled the alarm and the noise stopped. She listened carefully. Nothing. She opened the bedroom door as the phone rang ... an expected phone call from the alarm company dispatcher.
"Is everything all right?" he asked. She said she was trying to figure that out.
"Do you want me to send someone?" he asked.
"Not yet," she said. She kept him on the line while she looked around a bit. She walked to the sunroom and saw the back door standing open.
"That's not a good sign," she said. If an intruder had opened the door, the alarm might have scared him away ... or he could be hiding somewhere in the house. But then she remembered that a telephone installer had been here and had made a couple of trips up and down the back stairs. She had wiped up the snow he tracked in each time. Had she secured the deadbolt after the last time? She wasn't sure. Could the wind have blown it open? Possibly ... though it didn't seem at all windy outside.
"Do you see tracks?" the dispatcher asked. Well, yes, the phone guy had left lots of tracks, but the icy back deck is not a good indicator, and there were moose tracks all over the yard. In the dark, she couldn't see the tracks on the back stairs well enough to be sure whether any of them were fresher than the phone man's.
With the dispatcher still on the line, Miss Jerrianne checked each room and the garage without finding anything. She seemed fairly convinced that everything was really OK and that there never was an intruder, so she let the dispatcher go back to work. After she rescued me from the closet, she said it still felt really creepy! She said the worst was showering later and closing her eyes to shampoo and rinse. She never saw that old Hitchcock movie, Psycho. She said you couldn't pay her enough!
By the time the sun came up, a Chinook wind had started to kick up in earnest and the thermometer shot up to 45 degrees. A random gust out of the south before a Chinook really starts howling isn't that unusual. Alaska's infamous snow eating south wind brings warm weather in with hurricane force ... gusts of well over 100 miles per hour can easily rip shingles off our neighborhood's roofs (if they aren't covered with snow) and can melt two feet of snow in a day.
Miss Jerrianne readily admitted that this morning's problem was her own fault ... for not making sure the door was locked ... and an ill wind did the rest. Good practice for a real emergency, she said. She tried to blame the cat, but the truth is, she messed up and got Chinookered!
It turned out to be a beautiful day in the neighborhood, so after she fell asleep at the computer with a cup of coffee in her hand, she put me in the pouch and we went for a windy walk. By midnight, the driveway was so slippery she needed her ice grippers to take the trash to the curb.
I guess I'll have to tell you about my encounter with Sam some other time ...
