calimac

Every hour or so, but unpredictably, a car alarm in the apartment building next door is going off for about 20 seconds. This is long enough that, after several attempts, I was able to get out of our front door fast enough to figure out generally where it's coming from* but not long enough to identify the specific car. And the intervals are too long and irregular for it to make sense for me to stand over in the apartment building's parking lot in the middle of the night, especially looking as if I was planning to blow something up as I undoubtably would look.

*I have to be sure before casting blame, as a car alarm in my own car once went off without any proximate cause, a truly weird event considering that my car doesn't have a car alarm.

Left unanswered in any of this is why it isn't keeping anybody in the apartment building awake enough to send them out into the parking lot, a question the likes of which first occurred to me one night many years ago in grad school in Seattle, when the continuous howling of a dog was keeping me awake. Eventually I got up, dressed for the cold, and after some searching found the dog, its leash tied to a post in an apartment building parking lot two blocks away.

When the dog saw me staring at it, it stopped howling. I looked at it pointedly and walked away. It started howling again. I stopped and looked at it again. The dog stopped howling. I walked away and ... Two or three iterations of this and it didn't start up again. I walked home and went back to bed.

Yes, I know, but petting dogs is not in my repertoire, and doing something substantive for it (what? taking it home and adopting it? reading the tag, if any, and confronting the owner in the middle of the night?) even less so, and that leaves open the question, if the noise was enough to get me up two blocks away, why didn't it rouse some actual dog-lover in the neighborhood?