One Weird Saturday, Part 1

Now that school has started, Saturdays have become precious. Time to work in the yard or house, one-day trips, visiting with friends and family. It's time to cram in as much fun and wonderful in one day as possible since my summer days of doing that are now on hiatus until June 2013.

What Saturdays are not for? Crazy. Gather 'round my friends. It's time to tell you a story. A true story. No story have I told has ever been truer. Followers of my random musings may know that part of my charm (if you will) is my abundance of hyperbole. Things may not happen like that in real life, but that's how it happens in my head. Well, today, I will be omitting that.

I will write without hyperbole. I will not exaggerate. There is no need. So, sit tight and gather up your blanket on this 62 degree evening and listen as I tell you the story of the Weirdest Saturday Ever.

After two and a half months of waking up between 9 and 10 a.m., waking up at 6 a.m. has been rough this past week as school reclaimed my schedule. I looked forward to waking up at 9:30 or 10. Alas, my alarm went off at 9:30. I dismissed it and rolled back over knowing that Steph's alarm would go off at 10. I would wake up then.

Then Nigra started hacking. Something was in her throat and it was causing her esophageal lurches, and while it bothered her (and us), she laid by Steph's side. As her coughing abided, we laid back down to snooze for a bit longer when Steph got a text. It was our friend. She's married to someone that works in dispatch. There were gunshots by our house. She said, if we were home, to stay inside. There's a church a block away from us, and apparently there was some kind of mad man that had shot a dog and was on the run. We knew nothing more.

Nigra, the most creaturest of habits, could not handle the fact that we couldn't let her go out and potty. We were able to feed her, but I made coffee and we waited for more information from our friends. As I started dishes, we got word that it was OK to go outside because the suspect had been pinned down. We gathered the Girls and let them out. I basked in the gorgeous weather. The pups walked around, and then we heard another shot. This was not cool. We tried to get the girls' attention, but they didn't seem to care. Steph grabbed Nigra, and I ran and picked up Raible, running inside.

I tried calling the police, but the local police were already committing their time to the suspect in the field by the church. I wasn't sure if I should call 911.

We live right across the street from a neighborhood. We looked out our windows and EMAs were outside, on parole.

To complicate things, we were scheduled for a chimney inspection. I called the chimney people to reschedule, because traffic was becoming a mess on our road (one teenager parked in our driveway and waited for his dad to bring him a bag), and we didn't know whether it was safe or not -- we hadn't heard word if the SWAT team had caught the suspect or not -- when you hear a gun shot outside when the suspect is supposedly pinned down, who knows what to think!

I sat on the couch and when the woman answered the phone, looking out the window at the EMA cars, I wasn't sure how to put it:

"Hi, we were hoping to reschedule our appointment. We've got a really weird situation going on down the street from us. There were gunshots. A dog was shot. There are police outside our house. We don't know if it's safe."

She was happy to work with us, and as she was looking for a new date, the bell rang.

Nigra went nuts. She started barking, and Steph went to open the door, so I grabbed Nigra while I was still on the phone with the chimney people. In that mass confusion, the chimney inspector arrived on time (when does that happen?) and Steph had just gotten word that the suspect was apprehended. With the barking Nigra, I took her to the bathroom and tried to calmly tell the woman that it was safe and we were going to go a head and keep our appointment.

We got our chimney swept and inspected. Nigra continued to bark. I continued to look on our local paper's website but there was no word. Luckily, I found some information in the Indianapolis Star and WTHR, our local paper and TV news. We found out that our PNC bank had been robbed (the one we go to) and the robber escaped on a bike.

And that was just the beginning of our day.