we’ve had some rough nights since we moved to baltimore

some worse than others. for example, our second night in our newly renovated (once-boarded-up-honest-to-goodness-crackhouse) house, a car, um, blew up a couple hundred feet away. i’m not talking, like, a little car fire or anything. i’m talkin a full-on CSI/90210-oh-my-GOSH-dylan’s-FATHER-was-in-that-car!!!  fireball with a sonic boom that literally made us think our heater blew up in the basement.

i stick my head out one of our two street-facing bedroom windows, suddenly feeling very, oh, let’s just say…trashy (i was rockin my “nighttime” hairdo, i.e. a rat’s nest; all i needed was a cigarette hanging off my lips, hairnet and moomoo) and i’m like, “not out here!” holly runs to the back of our house and suddenly yells “OHMYGOSHCALLTHEFIREDEPARTMENT!” yeah. about 200 feet off our deck is said fireball. more firetrucks than i have ever seen at once come screaming in, as do the cops. there’s so much fire extinguisher liquid chemical stuff being sprayed on this thing that it’s running down the street like a mini stream (straight into the chesapeake bay c/o of our storm drains! nice!). soon, the emergency crews are peering into the charred car with flashlights looking for a body (they didn’t find one. thank GOODNESS). i’m like, what the EFF. is this, like, an everyday occurance?  our neighbors shrugged about it. um yeah. 

i hadn’t even had a chance to shake that off (i tend to need time to “shake things off”) when, a few nights later, we’re in bed and we hear…a drill. we’re like omG someone’s trying to drill off the locks and break into our house! so i whisper to holly, scared outta my gourd, should we press the police button? (we have a really serious security system) and she’s like, yeah, in a whisper. so i jump outta bed in my peejays and hit the button. our siren goes off, brink’s security calls, SENDTHEPOLICE i tell them! soon there are two big police guys downstairs and they’re like nope. nothing. they were really nice about it. to this day, holly and i are sure we heard a drill that night. since we were still in the renovation stage, we had a *lot* of drills around the house. but we still can’t figure out how a drill went off w/out one of us pressing the button or w/out it falling off a counter or something. [if i believed in ghosts i’d be like, it was a ghost of hookers past (apparently a “lady of the night” once lived in our house) or something. but no. i’m not even going to go there.]

then there was The Night of a Thousand Mice. which is a whole nother thing. and oh YEAH, also that night we almost got poisoned by carbon monoxide! [illegal occupants of the vacant house next door didn’t have heat or electricity so they were staying warm, cooking and you know, running a *tv* w/propane tanks, which pumped their house full of carbon monxide, which quickly seeped thru the brick walls into our house and if it weren’t for our carbon monoxide dectector (get one if you don’t have one. srsly.) we’d all be dead. ] 

jump ahead a year+ to last night. last night was a doozie. around 3am we hear what sounds like moaning or crying. maybe a woman? we call the cops. (there’s no telling if they actually showed or not. sometimes we call and they’re no-shows. and i say again: nice!) we hear it again. then some banging on the walls? it stops. shortly thereafter we hear something fall downstairs. we looked at each other like: ohmygosh.

i grab holly’s police stick (hey, she was in the military and we have a police stick next to the bed.) and she’s putting on sneakers and looks at me, “well? are you coming or am i going by myself?” (yes, i was scared and stalling.) we creep downstairs, not knowing what the hell we’re gonna find and….

and…..?

and it was an ikea plastic shopping bag holder. you know, the kind w/all the holes in it that you stick on the wall. yeah. it fell off the wall. geeeeeeeeeeeeez. we breathe out. go back upstairs and watch bbc america’s “you are what you eat” for like two hours (if you’ve ever seen that show, you know it’s really hard to stop watching. like rubbernecking on the highway. exactly.) the comic relief of the night was that when we got back upstairs, holly starts laughing when she sees herself in the mirror. she threw on a polo shirt over her pjs before we went downstairs and apparently, the collar was popped. (accidentally. we have a firm no-collar-popping rule in our household.) hahah. well, if there was someone downstairs and the police stick didn’t scare em away, the popped collar def. would have done it, she said. hahaha.

ahh, baltimore. now i see where my neighbors were coming from back when that car exploded. gotta just shrug it off. gotta laugh or you’ll just cry yr friggin eyes out.  (or just sit in the corner and rock yourself back n forth. that’s always an option, too.)

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