...sleep in heavenly peace!

An Early Morning Intruder

Sunday, 19 December, 2010, 2:21 AM:

I woke to a rustling that was obviously coming from outside. Late at night, when these sounds occur, I have to say my heart gets to racing a little. My wife trusts me to protect the house, and I do keep a fire bat under the bed - not just for breaking windows during fires. So I know, when there's a sound, it's up to me to confront whatever is lurking in the darkness.

But before I confront anything, I try to listen closely to determine what I'm up against. In the past, I've never been up against much: a child wandering around the house; neighbors up making a lot of noise outside, or even upstairs. The scariest moments I've had to confront up until last night is Liz crying about some nightmare she's had. Typically, I'm pretty asleep, and I hear her scream out for me. In my fog, I try to understand why she's crying - only to learn that it was a nightmare from which she needs a parent's comfort to calm her.

She would wake from a nightmare on this night, too, but that isn't the sound I was hearing at 2:21 AM.

Instead, the sound I was straining to hear was something I hadn't heard before. Foreign sounds are definitely the worst. At first, I couldn't locate the sound spatially. We live in a bottom-level condo that is partially underground. All of our windows are on the south side of the building. Each bedroom has its own window; ours has a sliding glass door leading to our back porch. As I strained to hear, I knew the sound certainly came from outside, but at times it sounded far away, as though someone were trying to open the blinds in one of the kids' rooms; at other times, it sounded quite close, like someone were on the back patio - right outside our glass door.

But, after a bit of straining, I was sure that whatever was making the noise was on our back porch.

I now knew where the noise was coming from. I lay for a few moments trying to determine what was making the noise. I'll admit, I was a little scared to get out of bed and look out the blinds.

Sometimes, it's harder to be brave when my wife doesn't hear the noises. I suppose that's because if all else fails, I want her to hear me falling to floor and writhing in agony when whatever the disturbance is beats me up or shoots me. Even if there's nothing she could do at that point, it would be nice to know she knows I'm risking my life for her.

It was quite a relief when, through the fog of being just awoken, mixed with the emotion of having something just outside our door, to hear my wife speak up:

"I think there's an animal on our patio."

I could be brave now, because when she said that, I was finally able to place the sounds that were being made: a rustling of leaves (we have something of a collection on our porch from all the storms lately) and the scratching on the glass of the door, that could not have come from anything larger than a ... cat? No, too small. Mouse? No, too large. Rat? Outside of our door?

Sort of.

Turns out it was a muskrat (we have a creek that runs through our property). I'm glad I didn't have to use the fire bat. But I did have to get the thing off our porch. Since the porch is underground, the walls are cement; a cat could get in or out; a muskrat would be stuck there all night, scratching at our window.

Anyway, long story short: went to the dumpster and dragged a large tree limb over to see if I could get it to climb out on its own; that explains all the sticks in the picture; he used it as a good hiding place. So I removed the limb and used a shovel to...

...scare it into a bucket, which I promptly threw over the side of the porch (hey, I thought it could be rabid or something). I think it was just as relieved to be out of there as I was to get back into bed.

Home Security

1 Fire-bat

1 Shovel

1 Bucket

A whole lotta courage!

A pinch of wimpering in bed

P.S. In the middle of the ordeal, Liz woke from her nightmare - which I think turned out to be a half frightened/half irritated man walking through her house trying to decide how to get a muskrat off the porch.

Forgive My Self-indulgence (just this once)

One of the reasons you don't see me post so much is because I'm not really sure what to blog about. A lot of blogs are online journals and I suppose I don't care to leave a more detailed record of my life online. I guess I'm afraid the world will find out how self-centered I am, then more than just my closest friends and family would know. So I just keep to myself and let my wife do much of the blogging. But for some reason, I couldn't resist this one clichéd blog.

Apparently, the BBC says that of the list of books below, an average person will read six. I have bolded those I have read and italicized those I have read some of (not just opened). I've also added some parenthetical commentary after some of the books, in case that's interesting to anyone. Because I'm bragging, I should add that my PhD is in psychology, not the humanities, and most of these books I've read in the last 10 years while getting my degrees. Oh, and in a couple of months, I will have finished the first ten in their entirety. Thank you very much.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (just 120 pages to go, actually)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (only slightly a disappointment)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (probably the best book on this list)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (this was a good one)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (not that I'm proud of it...)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (this shouldn't be on this list)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (I read the abridged version, one of the most shameful things I've ever done - I didn't know it was abridged till about 3/4 way through)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (28 freakin' chapters! guh!)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo