The Dog Who Cried Break-In...

As promised, this post is the tale, not of a boy who cried wolf, but of a dog who cried break-in. I was at the farm the other day, minding my own business, dragging ill-sorted ponies through several inches of mud (YAY it finally rained!!!) when my cell phone rang. Considering I was in an area known as a vortex of inter-dimensional airways, and there was half a hurricane hovering overhead, it was a miracle that my phone even bothered to accept the call. Seeing that it was an unknown number, I was momentarily inebriated with the thought that this might be 'The Call'... you know 'That Call'... the one we all wait for and then usually go mute for the duration of? Yeah, no. Instead, someone identified themselves as an ADT service person calling to notify me that the alarm at my house was going off.

I asked him to repeat himself. He did. I ran into a wall, face-planted into a muddy horse butt, and stepped in... stuff that wasn't mud... The gentleman restated the reason for his call one more time. I immediately suggested that it was my ma, Snowbear, coming in from school, because I knew for a fact that she had gotten off early. Tote bag, groceries, you know, sometimes you hit the wrong buttons on the alarm pad. The gentleman informed me that the alarm was registering in the living room, specifically from broken glass. My first thought was the window, obviously. But my next thought was 'I've climbed in that window before, and your a$$ hangs out for everyone on the road to see'. The only other window has an air conditioner shoved into it. The ADT folks hadn't been able to reach my dad. I asked the gentleman on the phone - while scraping 'stuff' off of my boots - if he thought that I should leave work and go to the house to meet the authorities. He said it wasn't his place to offer suggestions. Men. Either they want to be in charge of everything or nothing. He asked how long it would take me to get home so he could inform the authorities. I looked out the front of the barn and saw grey sky... looked out the back and found solid white sheets of rain. I told him I didn't know, I was in monsoon season and said that I was going to try and get in touch with my dad.

I reached him, discovered that he had gotten the message from ADT and was heading home. He promised to call me as soon as he knew anything. So I went back to work, actually got a few things done, and waited. And tried to call my ma, who's notorious for never turning on her cell phone. After cursing about yet another unanswered call, my sister Fenris helpfully admitted that she was worried because what if ma had interrupted a burglar? Seriously? Thank you dear sister.

Well, anyway, it turns out that my ancient dog had knocked over a kitchen chair in her Alzheimer-like trundling, thusly setting off the 'breaking glass' alarm. And even if she'd been able to push another chair over and climb up to reach the alarm pad, since she doesn't have opposable thumbs hitting the code might have been difficult. On top of that, in her old age, she doesn't enunciate like she used to, so talking to the ADT rep who undoubtedly called 'Hello?' through the automatic connection would have been almost impossible. So the end result was that my MIA mother, Snowbear, got to chew the fat with our local sheriff and the rest of us got to suck on oxygen tanks because for a few insane minutes, we feared that someone wanted to steal our 'stuff', in the immortal words of George Carlin...