For the past two nights I have been sleeping alone, well... not exactly. I've been sleeping alone in that Snickers has been out of town on business and so it's just me with our 3 four-legged furry friends. Tonight marked the third night this week I've slept alone, slept minus Snickers.
A little while ago we heard a noise late in the night, long after we had gone to bed. Balboa with his bat-like supreme hearing capabilities was the first to hear it and he went a bit bonkers when he did. He wiggled his way out from under the covers and then started barking, causing the other two pups to join in the commotion. We assumed it was a mouse and so the next day Snickers set up two mouse traps, one behind the juice bar sink and one in the laundry room/storage area.
Side note here, Snickers is absolutely terrified of mice, to the point where he shivered at the sight of the bagged up mouse cage I found today. So you know if this mouse is caught, it's going to be me to catch and release it. I tried the other week and did actually come across a mouse. It was no bigger than maybe 4 inches long, super small, but being that it suddenly scurried out from under the freezer, just inches where I had knelt down and lowered my face so I could look under, I jumped up and screamed. That was the end of my mouse hunting that day. I've yet to see that mouse again and the two traps have remained baited and untouched.
I'm not afraid of mice and I've become used to the ghosts that linger in our club from time to time. My tolerance for ghost stories and random things is quite high now. I'm used to many things that not so long ago I wasn't. The ghosts used to scare me. Our dogs randomly barking in reaction to something at the back end of the club that I couldn't see but yet they could, waking up to the medicine balls so suspiciously falling off the shelves one by one, and the occasional moving shadow the corner of my eye catches no have the same effect me. I tolerate them and I ignore them but I am no longer scared by them and by "them" I mean both the mouse and the ghosts. As far as I am concerned, they can keep each other company and entertained because they do nothing for me.
Every night I sleep with Pacquiao beside me and "beside me" I really mean 50% across my chest and 50% beside me. He's an overly happy puppy when it comes to people he knows but he's a vicious, butt-biting mean dog when he feels the need to protect me. Consequently, there is definitely a strong sense of security that comes with being alone in the club with him and so the club is no longer this massive place of secret hiding spots, dark corners and strange sounds. Pacquiao protects me.
Both last night and the night before, I've been waken up around 4am to Balboa's super sonic hearing catching some random sound in the club and thus him barking his head off. I assumed it was the mouse again so I calmed the doggies down and went back to bed but when they continually woke up and barked I got annoyed. Then an idea hit me, if I created some kind of noise myself to distract them from whatever noise was being made in the main part of the club then they wouldn't hear whatever else was going on and won't bark. Hello phone applications!!! Downloaded a simple phone application that simulates rain. You can chose from things like a light rain shower to rain on a tin roof and an all-out thunderstorm. I picked a rainy meadow with birds chirping, put the timer on for an hour and then laid down to go to sleep. The phone application worked like a charm -- the dogs stayed asleep for the rest of the night.
Being that it's now actually Friday that I'm posting this entry for Wednesday, I'm actually going to add some extra stuff here that evolved from this situation.
Snickers returned from his business trip on Thursday but on both Wednesday and Thursday I was once again woken up around 4am to something triggering Balboa to bark like a crazy dog and the others joining him in the comotion. So once again I tapped into my phone application and blasted sounds of a rainy meadow and once again the dogs went back to sleep and stayed asleep. However, and this is where the story takes a totally unexpected turn, Snickers noticed something strange today.
Snickers headed up the stairs to put some extra chairs on the third floor our building but as soon as he stepped out of the doggie's corridor and into the stairwell he noticed something was off. "Did you move the ladder?" he asked me. I hadn't, nor had I moved any of the other things he noted had been moved. Snickers had been away for several days now and it's only been me who has had access to the stairwell and the rest of the abandoned building... or has it?! And thus this got my brain thinking.
Perhaps those 4am sounds, which I note here are strangely almost always at the exact time each day, weren't that of a mouse or even a random animal for that matter but maybe were that of someone breaking into our building. Great, just great. I've been drowning out the sound of someone possibly breaking into our building four days in a row now and preventing my pups from doing what it is they're suppose to be doing -- protecting me and our club -- with a rain simulator phone application.
My plan is to pose a stakeout, seriously. I'm going to convince either Snickers or some of my friends to hide out with me on the third floor one night this upcoming week and see what, if anything, happens at the mysterious hour of 4am.
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