Okay, we had a truly bizarre night. I stayed up late playing on the computer and came into bed around 2:30 AM. I did my nightly ablutions (sp?) and laid down to read a little. Around 3:00 AM I heard a pounding from downstairs. It was somebody pounding on our door. I hopped up with a "What the heck is that?!?!?!" and threw on some pants and headed downstairs.
The pounding kept getting more and more insistent as I approached the door. I flipped on the porch light and tried to look through the peephole. All I could see was the top of someone's head. I was pretty certain it was a woman, though. I guessed that it must be a friend of our's from around the corner coming because she needed help. I threw open the door and some girl I had never seen before came stumbling in. I assumed it was a drunk girl wandering into the wrong house by mistake and told her that she had the wrong house and I didn't know who she was. She started going into some drunk explanation about how she came from next door and was related to our neighbor. A woman followed almost immediately behind saying that she was our neighbor and that this was her sister who had had too much to drink. Now, I've never met our neighbors. Their daughter has come over to borrow things a couple of times but I have never met the parents. I keep trying to do the friendly-wave thing but it never seems to work out. So when this woman said that she was our neighbor I just had to accept that that was the truth and move on. She said that her sister was really drunk and acting crazy and violent. She said that her parents were on their way to pick the sister up and was it alright if she just stayed here for the moment. We agreed and she said that they were going to be standing out front if we needed something. Karen and I hung out with the drunk girl for a few minutes but she started saying that somebody next door had beat her up. That made me take a step back. If somebody was beating her up then I wasn't going to just let it slide. I immediately moved into I-think-we-should-call-the-police mode. Karen and I did a quiet debate about it with me thinking we should and Karen not certain. I decided that I would step outside and talk to the rest of the family to see if I could get a better handle on what was going on. So I threw on some shoes and a jacket and headed outside. The neighbor lady and her brother (in-law?) and another woman were in front talking. I started talking to them and brought up that the violence claims. They kind of shook their heads and said that nobody had been hitting her. They said that she probably did get banged up as they were trying to restrain her and forcibly remove her from the house, though. They said that the girl had gone bonkers and was yelling and hitting everybody and that they had been trying to calm her down and, when that failed, get her out of there so that they could take her home. That's when she broke free and came running over to our place. I expressed my concerns and we talked it out. In the end I decided (and I hope I was right) that the three calm, lucid people outside were telling me a more reasonable story and that the raving, drunk girl inside was out of her head. They said that she was just really drunk but I think that she was on something else, too. I can't say that I've ever seen a drunk person talking quite that crazy. Whatever the real deal was I don't know. I waited out front with them until the parents arrived. The dad came in to get her but she still wouldn't come. The dad went to get the mom and she came in to talk sense to the girl. They got her to move a little but she had an iron-hold on Karen's shirt and had her head buried in it. As the parents were trying to forcibly drag her away she pulling Karen along with. I got in the middle and got Karen's shirt out of her hands so that at least Karen was free of the mess. In the end they got the girl calmed down enough to get her to walk out under her own power relatively calmly. We closed the door and shared a oh-my-dear-heavens moment as we went back up to bed. We talked for a little bit and everything seemed to be calmed down. So I curled up and started to go to sleep.
I had been asleep for about 30-45 minutes when I heard this terrible banging coming from outside my window. I hopped up with another "what the heck?!?!?!" and immediately thought that the girl was back and had taken to banging on our bedroom window. I was obviously very incoherent and disoriented for a moment because I soon realized that was quite impossible because our bedroom is on the second floor. Unless the chick learned how to fly she wasn't banging on my window. Then I realized that the sound had been more a metal clanging rather than the sound of someone banging on a window. In the end I decided that it must have been somebody letting off firecrackers in a metal pan. That would definitely account for the type of sound I heard. The fact that it was 4:30 in the morning was a bit much, though.
The whole thing had me pretty freaked out, though. I was truly scared to go back to sleep for fear of what might happen to wake me up the next time. I fell asleep pretty quickly, though, and nothing else happened for the rest of the night. It was a very nerve-wracking night, however. I hope this doesn't set the tone for the rest of the year. I don't know that I can handle more of this nonsense.
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I went to Krav last night after another two week absence. I swear it seems like I've had a hard time getting to my classes recently. I'm really glad I went last night, though. I was going to go to the yellow belt test a couple of weeks ago, but I came down sick and had to miss it. That's the main reason why I didn't go the last two weeks. I was feeling pretty crummy.
