The Noise that Wasn’t There

As I write this it is the morning after the event. It made me think about my own personal preparedness, complacency and norms.

Last night I was in bed reading. It was about 11, my wife was asleep and my kids had been asleep since 8:30. The house was quiet, and then I heard a sound I had heard before – a door opening and closing. I had heard this before as I have two kids and it normally results in one of them barging into our room and declaring, “I’m sick”, “I’m scared,” “The dog is bothering me,” etc. I braced myself for one of my kids walking into the room, only they didn’t. After about 20 seconds I got up and went looking for the kid thinking they might be vomiting or getting water from the kitchen.

Gunsite Day 1 Night Shoot 020

 

What I found was both kids sound asleep, as were the dogs that sleep with them each night.

At that point a terror shot through me, there might be someone in my house and I was ill-equipped with only boxer shorts and fist at my disposal.

With trepidation I started turning on lights and checking the house. Ultimately I found nothing. Not. A. Single. Thing. In the past my wife has heard doors open and close and believes our house to be haunted (tongue in check). I on the other hand, am pretty sure it is something less sinister than a poltergeist. Nevertheless it was an eye opener. I was so sure it was my one of my kids I had never stopped to consider the worst. I am grateful it was nothing, but what if I wasn’t lucky? What if my family and I were now just a statistic? A simple headline in a newspaper. A prime example of what not to do.

With this fresh in my mind I am reviewing my own procedures. I have long entertained creating something similar to the Intruder Defense Bag as shown by Sootch00 on YouTube. I even have the bag, but I got side tracked and never finished. My goal now is to finish the bag and have something usable. As I work through this I will update and track it here. It may be a one simple post or more, I honestly don’t know yet.

Ray Wylie Hubbard has a song called Conversation with the Devil. In it has says

Some get spiritual, ’cause they see the light
And some, ’cause they feel the heat

A little extrapolation and that applies to my situation completely!

What or how have you prepared for the Bump in the night. Have you ever entertained the possibility you might mistake an intruder for a sick kid?

Edited: December 11, 2015 to correct typos.

4 Comments

  1. I would love to see this website flourish, as the boss of the place is trying to do. But how can it when the grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and spelling are all atrocious?

    Polish up the writing and I would bet you get more donations to achieve the goal of raising that 100k.

  2. You’ve got a point and I wrote the article. I never claimed to be an English major, just a guy that loves guns and mechanical things, but even I noticed several errors last night after it posted.

    Thanks for the comment.

  3. Maybe a better investment would be a well thought out home security system so that you would actually know if someone was in your house. Guns and intruder bags don’t solve anything if you don’t get to them in time because it was “just a noise”.

    1. Yep, I have an alarm with sensors and every window big enough for a human to climb through. Ultimately the peace of mind is easily worth it. Technically the system can be beaten, but not by any type of their / assailant I’m concerned about.

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