My First 911

Around 4 a.m., the dogs barked and barked and barked. The little ones eventually came back and got in my lap. Polly wouldn't relax, but just sat at attention, looking down the hall, trembling. Lizzie stayed in the hall woofing and woofing. The light was on in the front hall, so I could see Lizzie's tail and she was barking into the living room, but I ignored her--dumb dog barking in the middle of the night. Big Scary Sheila appeared not to notice the commotion.

Eventually Lizzie came back in the family room with the rest of us and we all went back to sleep.

At 6:30 I got up, went to the bathroom, swept the family room floor of all the doggie debris, and then went into the living room to check for dog poop.

I picked up a couple of piles over by the dining room table and took them to the bathroom to flush. Then I got more toilet paper and went to check the other side of the living room, and I stopped short.

There was a man sleeping on my couch!!! His back was to me. I could see he was young and muscular. The dogs barked and barked and he didn't move. I was stunned (of course) and tried to figure out if maybe this was one of Tom's friends who decided to crash here for the night. I know there is a wedding of one of his buddies this weekend, and maybe there had been partying going on. I kept staring at the back of his head and his hairy legs poking out from his knee length pants, trying to find something familiar about him.

I finally went into the kitchen, got the phone, went into the laundry room where I could close the door, and called 911. All the while I was doing this, Polly was barking at the inert lump on the couch, who didn't move.

The dispatcher told me to go outside, which I did, and she kept me on the line until the police cars (2) showed up. All the while I was waiting for the police, I could hear Polly barking and could see that Lizzie had climbed over the guy and onto the table behind the couch to watch me. He never moved.

The police came in and handcuffed him. The guy was a drunk college student who apparently wandered into the wrong house. I probably forgot to lock the front door last night. I had the option of having him arrested or letting him go and, having had stupid kids myself, I decided to let him go.

So the drama is over, but I'm still kind of shaky. He must have been VERY drunk because it was about 30 minutes from the time I first saw him until the police arrived and Polly barked at him the entire time and he never even moved.

But it's funny how you react when your privacy has been invaded. I want to send the couch out to be cleaned. I want to put a chain lock on the front door (even though this was probably my fault to begin with because I probably forgot to lock the door last night). I want to build a blockade in front of the door before I go to sleep tonight.

One thing I learned was which of the dogs is the best watchdog. Big Scary Sheila was useless. I may have to adopt Polly.

And the measure of how upset I was by all of this was that I had a totally inert body on my couch for fully half an hour after I discovered him, with dogs running over him and barking at him and I didn't take a picture!!!!!

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This is apparently my week for police confrontations. I went to review a show at the University last night. The deal is that I put my business card on the dashboard and I can park for free in the parking lots. Only occasionally there is an enthusiastic traffic cop who doesn't know that. When I got back to the car there was a ticket on the windshield, a $40 ticket.

Fortunately I know how the system works (or has worked up until now). If I get a ticket, I just have to call the parking office, show them my business card and the thing gets expunged.

At least that's how it's always been before. Let's hope that still works!

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I'm also trying to get to AT&T. We have such horrendous static on our telephone line that you can just barely hear the person on the other end (try giving a police report through that heavy static!). I tried calling AT&T and was told they preferred that you give complaints on line. Well, I'm an on-line kinda guy, so I went on line to the AT&T web site and after MUCH searching I found out where you can report problems.

I've reported problems before. They send a guy right out and it's fixed in a jiffy.

Now, I filled out a complete form and they led me to a complicated page of instructions for what to do to fix it myself. Maybe.

I haven't tried it yet. After the parking ticket and the guy sleeping on my couch, I just wasn't up to tackling a bit of electricity repair. I'll just use my cell phone until I'm ready to try it again.

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And finally, I decided to tell Walt about it anyway...we finally have wifi!

I called Davis Community Network and arranged for someone to come and install our router for me. When I went to look for the router, I couldn't find it. Jeri reminded me of our problems trying to install it before and suggested that it was so old, maybe I should get a new one. So I did on the way home from Sacramento yesterday. It took Craig all of 15-20 minutes before he got the router up and running and I was downloading a book onto my iTouch.

When Walt gets home he will finally be able to use his new lap top with the speed it can give him, which should give him lots of free time to install a new chain lock on the front door.