[685cmj]

So I get up very early in the morning, as is my habit, and step quietly out of my bedroom into the upstairs hallway, shutting the bedroom door silently behind me so as not to wake up my wife. Instantly I can hear that there is an intruder in the lower part of the house...and he is not all that interested in being quiet--I can hear him thumping and banging around downstairs. As I stand there in a semi-shocked state for the longest 2 seconds of my life, edging closer to the hallway railing trying to get a fix on the noise downstairs, the downstairs motion detector alarm goes off.

So what do I do, standing there in the upstairs hallway, with the gun sitting next to my bed in the room behind me, and an intruder somewhere in my house below in the middle of the night and the downstairs intruder alarm going off? Right! I do what every highly trained, ex-military, heat-packing, home-defending, permit carrying commando would do, of course:

I run directly downstairs in my underwear without so much as a toothbrush in my hand to confront the intruder. Doh!

But hell! I certainly wasn't going to take the chance of waking up my wife by going back in to get the gun! I'd far rather face an intruder unarmed than wake her up at that hour! (As it turns out, as I ran downstairs setting off the upstairs motion detector, she sat straight up in bed, awakened by the alarms, figured I would take care of whatever the problem was and laid down and went right back to sleep. After all, why should she be worried...she's got the gun! Thanks for having my back, sweety !)

So after 30 seconds of sheer chaos, with all alarms going off, and checking all the downstairs windows and doors to find them secure, and shutting off the alarms, here is what I discover. Somehow (still have no idea how this happened--we have lived here 16 years and never had it happen before), a bird got trapped inside an interior wall in the middle of the house downstairs and was flapping and crashing against the wall trying to work its way back out. That was the noise. And the downstairs motion detector alarm had been just slightly turned off its axis enough to have seen my feet in the upstairs hallway as I edged up next to the hallway railing trying to see and hear what was going on downstairs. So of course it went off at that same exact instant.

Too funny, at least once my heart stopped pounding. Good thing I work out regularly. But there may be a lesson or two in this situation for me.
1) Don't worry about waking her up going back in to get the gun in case of such an emergency--after all, if I get to it before she awakens, I will have the gun at that point, not her, so what can she do to me?
2) Thinking carefully through every possible situation in emergencies before they happen pays huge dividends in being prepared beforehand. You may want to be sure, in bad situations, that you have your tactical wear on. Sure glad I was prepared for just such a thing and was at least wearing underwear!
3) Depending on what time of the night it is, the cavalry may have gone back to sleep and may not be coming to help. You are best off by assuming that you are going to have to handle this alone. Mano e errr, bird.
4) It is never good to bring a toothbrush to a gun fight, but better a toothbrush than nothing at all.
5) If you shoot first and ask questions later, you better be sure that the right hunting season is in progress.
6) The very best way to be sure you don't shoot first is to leave the gun behind.
7) When the alarms are screaming and the lights flashing, and you haven't had your first cup of coffee yet, you don't always do what you thought you would.