Remember me?

Hey guys! I know, I know... it's been FOREVER since I posted. I took a nice, long, blogger break -- you know, took up skydiving, learned to speak Russian, mastered the art of origami (okay, it's possible that none of those things are true).

But I have rather missed blathering on about nothing in particular, so I thought perhaps a blog resurrection was in order. And to kick off my brand-new-yet-super-old blog, I'll begin with the story of the Thing That Went Bump in the Night:

Actually, "bump" is not the correct word. Rick and I were sound asleep at around 2 in the morning last night, when we were both jolted awake by something extremely loud. In my sound-asleep-two-seconds-earlier-and-now-startlingly-alert state, I was convinced that someone had thrown a rock at one of our windows. I half-expected cold air to come rushing into the bedroom at any moment, even though logically, it would take someone with a REALLY good arm to launch a rock at one of our third-story (which is really more like fourth-story, with the high ceilings in our building) windows and manage to break one. Still, I couldn't imagine what else it could be...

Rick, however, was convinced that a large picture had fallen off the wall in the living room and crashed to the floor. Since there didn't seem to be any freezing air blowing into the condo, I decided this was the more likely (and much less frightening) scenario. We both finally gained enough composure to tentatively venture out into the living room, flipping on light switches and double-checking window panes in the process.

And when we turned the corner from the bedroom to the living room, we found... nothing. Absolutely NOTHING amiss or out of place. The pictures that had been hanging on the walls when we'd gone to bed were still on the walls... the appliances on the kitchen counter were present and accounted for... the knickknacks on our shelves were in their usual places collecting their usual dust... and every window was intact. From the looks of things, there was absolutely NO explanation for the sudden loud noise that had shocked us from slumber (and caused both the cats to search the condo with alarmed-looking wide eyes).

Needless to say, it took me about two hours to fall back to sleep... and in the morning, Rick and I described dreams that we'd both had about discovering the source of the noise (mine, inexplicably, included Worf from Star Trek...). In the light of day, I walked around to all the windows again, still convinced that the sound had come from one of the windows near the bedroom. I raised the blinds by Piva's favorite cat tree as I do every morning, and there on the windowsill was a small piece of broken plastic. I was certain it hadn't been there the day before -- could this be a clue to what had happened? Or did Piva just find a random piece of plastic on the floor and haul it up to the windowsill?

I usually only raise the blinds about halfway, but now I pulled the cord to reveal the entire window. And there in the track on the side of the window frame were two coiled springs, obviously in a place they weren't meant to be. In fact, none of the other windows in the condo have springs in that track. I called Rick over to the window, and, using our amazing, Sherlock-Holmes-like powers of deduction, we pieced together what had happened. In the middle of the night (of COURSE it had to be in the middle of the night -- it couldn't have happened at 2 in the afternoon? Or when we were out of the house??) the springs that aid in opening and closing the window, and are usually housed in the lower frame, suddenly broke and popped (or, rather, I'm guessing, violently sprung) through that little plastic piece that ended up on the windowsill. Which resulted in a sound like a rock hitting the window, or a picture frame falling off the wall.

And while I'm assuming we won't be able to open that window anytime soon (although this is January in Chicago -- why would we want to? :)), at least we finally figured out where the sound came from.

Otherwise, our best guess was going to be a poltergeist...