On Personal Safety

As you may know, I have crazy vivid dreams. Last night, I had another one, involved a tiny Kroger, looking for some grocery item and being in a weird, long house with lots of apartments, TVs with static and a flipped breakers. Anyways, I was trying to turn the power on and I flipped some breakers (in the dream) and it made a loud noise. I contacted the landlord but then I woke up. Once I woke up, I wasn't sure if the loud noise was only in my dream or had actually happened. So I tried to lay as still as humanly possible and listen, in case someone had broken in to my house. I kept hearing noises (which were probably normal, every night noises but seemed way scarier) so I finally convinced myself to very quietly reach for my glasses (so I could identify the intruder), put them on, pick up my phone (to contact the police, obvii) and my pepper spray (yes, I sleep with it by the bed). Side note: It's extremely difficult to fling open a door in a manner meant to startle intruder when one is carrying things in both hands.

So armed, I did a thorough inspection of my whole house but was still pretty frightened, even though my dog hadn't moved during this whole escapade and so far as I could tell, nothing was amiss. I tried to convince myself that no one would break into a house that was clearly occupied and advertised a security system when there are a lot of empty, for sale or for rent houses around me (it's summer in a college town, after all). No go. I then decided to leave several lights on, both inside and outside, to further discourage intruders and locked myself in the bedroom. While trying to fall back asleep, I decided it was time to look into something a little more threatening that pepper spray.

I do have a birthday coming up and it's legal for me to shoot someone in my own home if they're not supposed to be there. I don't even have to warn them. But I really think I'd be more likely to pull the trigger on a stun gun and proceed with duct taping an intruder to a chair (Wikipedia was not clear on the legalities of this so I'd probably check with the 9-1-1 operator before proceeding) than putting a bullet in a living person. Plus, that's quite a lot of mess the clean up and makes an awful racket. Although the pink Taser is super cute, I think that red sends more of a Stop or I'll Shoot! message.