Safety = Brian and his baseball bat, plus a few other things

So twice this month, we've had a middle-of-the-night adrenaline situation. First, a couple of weeks ago, the dogs start barking upstairs, run down to the front door and go absolutely ballistic. So I am flying down the stairs because it sounds like someone is right on the other side of the door or window and is trying to get in. Who would continue such efforts in the face of two large, very upset dogs is beyond me, but I run down. And I turn around to find Brian right there with me, with his baseball bat in hand. Although it was a canine emergency of the most serious kind, it was all a false alarm from a human perspective. That is, some guy was walking on the sidewalk with his two dogs (or was it three? I'll have to check with Brian on this). Not in our yard. Not even on our side of the street. Nope, by the time I made it downstairs, the guy was across the street about a half block down. But the sheer audacity of these dogs to think they could walk down our street, with their human in tow, was simply more than my dogs could handle without at the very least letting them know that they had better not even consider coming on to our territory. Or near our territory. Or within fifty feet of it. Because they were already waaaaaay too close for comfort.

Then last nite, I'm reading some interesting little blurb from a magazine to Brian before we turn out the lites, and we hear voices arguing, toward the rear of the house. They get louder and more aggressive, so I get up to go out on the balcony. When I do, Royale people are running toward the fighters, who are now on the side of my house and I can no longer see. I hear "Let me go! Let me go!", grab the cordless and am dialing 911 as I am flying down the stairs, again. These two people had gotten into a fight and were now grappling with each other on my front lawn. I'm standing on my front porch, there is a wide evergreen bush in front of the porch, and they're right on the other side of the bushes, so maybe 6-8 feet away from me. The 911 lady is asking me questions and honestly I am not able to answer coherently - I just keep repeating my address and saying, "there are people fighting, please come!"

Steve Smith from the Royale totally takes control and he and his employees step between the two fighters and Steve's like "OK, you go that way! and you go the other way!" and then they kept them separated while the one person kept yelling and going at the other. After a certain amount of time -- I am unable to assess the time; it felt like minutes and minutes but maybe it wasn't -- Steve was able to kind of convince the yelling person to walk away, down the street with him (heading east) and the other guy was kept heading west by Steve's employees. These weren't Royale patrons or anything; the Royale people had just heard the noise, too.

While all this is going on, I've been on my front porch talking to the 911 lady and describing what was going on and that they didn't appear to have any weapons and I don't know what all questions she was asking. Brian was right there with me, and then the cops came and asked us what happened and then we took pictures and I wrote everything down, 'cause I know from my work that memory starts to fade within the first half hour, and then the cops had to come again because when we took the pictures, we saw that one of them had dropped their keys on the ground - like the keys were in the imprint their bodies had left in the mud. So a cop came back and picked up the keys, and left.

As one might imagine, Brian and I are stone cold awake at this point, and keep trying to read again and relax, but it doesn't happen for a while. Finally, we fall asleep, but I can't imagine going through that by myself. It definitely felt safer to have Brian there, and the dogs, and Brian's bat and my phone and the locked doors and alarm system. And Brian. And his baseball bat.