Be careful, Kitty!
Well, you all know why I keep a gun (in a locked box) next to my bed.
There had been a couple of dozen robberies in town, and I knew most of the victims -- our kids were of similar ages, and we were of similar socio-economic levels. D was in Tokyo, and BJ and I were home alone. Normally we would have been at Mom's in Atlanta on Friday night because I was scared. But I was too tired to drive to ATL after a hard week at work and decided to go to bed early and drive to ATL the next day. I suppose because the lights were off early and D's car was gone, the burglars assumed no one was home. They cut the phone lines, broke down the back door, and entered the house. The burglar alarm going off woke me up. I figured that it was a malfunction and went to the control panel in the bedroom to reset it. It wouldn't reset. So I went to the phone and called 911. The phone line was dead. The burglars had cut the phone line to keep it from calling the monitoring station. I woke up BJ, and down the stairs we ran. I mean, there were burglars in our house, but we couldn't jump off the second floor gallery to escape them. So we just ran like crazy to the garage to get to the car and escape (on foot would be too slow -- we have acreage). BJ noticed that the double-doors to the living room had been broken down. I thought, I'm not letting my poodles escape, so I went back inside, grabbed the poodles, and put them in the car with BJ, and drove away. Thankfully our neighbors across the road were throwing a 16th birthday party for their daughter, so seeing the activity over there, I drove over there screaming for help. Our neighbor and a friend called the police and secured our house until the police arrived (at least 15 minutes and we only live 2 miles from the police department headquarters). The police searched the house for the burglars, and we determined that despite some items being in disarray, nothing was stolen. The scary part is that on several of their break-ins, one of the males raped the female occupant, and he will be in jail for a while. The female burglar spent a couple of years in jail and is out now, which really scares me.
Anyhow, like I've said before, I keep the alarm on even in the daytime, I sleep with a cell phone and a gun in a lock box by my bed because by the time the police get there, you'd be dead if someone broke in and had no qualms about harming you.