I just finished talking to a couple of sherrif's deputies. I've been home by myself all evening. My mom's dog, Jake (who is half lab, half chow and looks much more menacing than he actually is, which is to say, he's not) was outside barking his head off at something. I figured, wild animal. I got him to come inside, and he immediately ran to my mom's room to look out the window on the same side of the house where he'd been barking earlier. I went to look, still thinking wild animal, possibly a big wildcat of some sort, and he was whining and shivering, scared out of his mind. So I went out to the garage and turned on the light to the side yard, in the hopes that the light would scare whatever it was away. I go back to the window where he's barking, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever was out there, and I see a freaking man's shadow go across the little porch that comes off of our garage.

So now I'm thinking about a story a friend told me about her dog freaking out and waking her up in the middle of the night to find that her psycho neighbor had broken into her apartment for nefarious reasons, and I run to the laundry room, and hear the automatic garage door open outside, but no vehicles driving in, so it's definitely not my mom getting home. Then somebody tries the doorknob. It's locked, of course, because I am a paranoid scaredy-cat and I lock every single lock there is to lock when I'm home by myself. I scream at the top of my lungs, "Who's there?!" Nobody answers. I scream it again, and still nobody answers, though I can clearly hear somebody moving around in the garage. So I run and grab the phone, and take it back to the laundry room, and as I'm dialing I scream out, "I'm calling 911!"

No sooner do I hit the last one than my brother calls back, "Jeanie, it's me!" So I immediately hang up the phone, thinking the call didn't go through, unlock the door, scream at him for scaring the shit out of me, explain *why* he scared the shit out of me (he said he heard me yell the first couple of times, but he didn't understand what I said -- I seriously think his hearing's starting to go -- and thought I was yelling at the dog to quit barking, so he didn't say anything. So the phone rings, and it's the 911 dispatcher tracing the call. I explain to her what happened, and I'm embarrassed as hell, and she says no problem, I hang up, and my brother and I have a good laugh. Then the phone rings again, and the 911 dispatcher says it's mandatory for them to come check it out whenever somebody calls 911 and hangs up. Which is actually pretty comforting.

Good thing it wasn't a real emergency, though, because it took them about 45 minutes to show up, and before they did the dispatcher called back again to get directions to our house, even though since they made us change out our addresses from rural route to street addresses a couple of years ago they're supposed to have all that stuff on record already. Turns out they still had us on record as living at our old house, hence the trouble finding us. So thank God nobody was actually trying to break in to my house, because they would have arrived much too late to help me, if in fact they arrived at the right location at all.