Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!

Interesting factoid of the day: if you’re having trouble waking up in the wee hours of the morning, you don’t need coffee, a cold shower or a quickie with your significant other (or a combination of the three, though I recommend you avoid bringing coffee into the shower with you). Nope, another excellent way to suddenly be wide awake is to have someone try to break into your house… while you’re home.

I’ve been here by myself while Mom and Dad have been out of town since last week: she’s been at our family cabin with Grandma and he’s been at Scout camp. Thus, when I woke up at 4:30 to use the bathroom, there was no one else around to answer the phone while I was… you know… making poo. The caller didn’t leave a message, so at least I knew it wasn’t a family emergency. When I checked the caller ID (after I was done… making poo), it registered as a local call from a pay phone (or so I assume since it reads “STERLING PAYPHO”). I shrugged it off as a drunk dialer and went back to bed.

I was having trouble falling asleep again, which may or may not have been related to the phone call. My mind was spinning all over the place, but I was intent on trying to sleep instead of lying in bed and reading a book for ten or fifteen minutes to help me relax. That inability to sleep is probably the reason why I was awake as soon as there was a noise outside my door.

Here’s the deal: I live in the lower level of my parents’ house and there’s a sliding glass door in the room with a sliding screen door outside of it. These doors face the backyard, so I don’t have to deal with people driving past the house with their headlights on at 5:00 in the morning. I do, however, have to deal with funny noises coming from the screen door at that hour.

It was kind of a “zwip zwip zwip” noise, which I figured was a raccoon or something scraping its nails against the screen. The best way to scare off a raccoon? Turn on the lights and listen to it scurry away. When I turned on my bedside lamp, I heard something scurry, all right, but it hit something during its hasty retreat and the impact sounded a lot louder than one a raccoon would make.

That’s when I got up, walked to the door and realized that “zwip zwip zwip” is also the noise of something cutting through the screen. Given that the slit is up next to the door handle, it was either a very tall raccoon or a person with an agenda.

Mind you, it would have taken some extra effort to get the glass door open. You can reach your hand in through a slit and unlatch the screen door, then pull it open. If you bust a hole in the glass, unlatch the door and try to pull it open, there’s a very solid 2×2 that fits between the door and the wall, so it moves… maybe an inch unless you remove it. Would the person (or tall raccoon) have shattered the entire door to get inside the house? It’s facing the backyard, so he/she/it would have had plenty of time. Or would have if I hadn’t turned on my light and sent the potential intruder scurrying.

Now it’s 6:30 in the morning, it’s getting light out and, yes, I’m still very much awake. I’ll probably crawl back into bed soon for a few hours or take a nap this afternoon, but for the time being, I’m content to sit upstairs and play with my laptop. I’m not too concerned that whoever was outside my door at 5:00 might try again (though, like I said, I’m content to sit upstairs). If he/she/it came back and gave it another shot, I’m pretty sure I’d be able to hear the glass door breaking. If that happens, we have plenty of very large and solid objects in the house that make for good raccoon deterrents.