Rar!

It's 6 in the morning, and I'm afraid to go back to bed for the hour or so that I could sleep before my alarm goes off.

Well, not "afraid" in the monster-under-the-bed or even rapist-at-the-door sense.

I'm afraid that if I try to sleep, that damn car alarm will ruin everything again.

It woke me up at 4:15 or so with its honk-honk honk-honk-honk-honking. At first my thoughts were along the lines of "bleah, car'larm, go 'way, sleepy ..." but it kept going. Just about the time when I became lucid enough to realize that that alarm had been going off for kind of a while if it had been going long enough for me to not only wake up, but start to be coherent ... it stopped.

Hurrah! I began to snuggle deeper into the blankets for my journey back into Slumberland - and then it went off again. But instead of 7,496 honks, the alarm just honked about 9 times, then stopped again.

Pause. Six honks.

Pause. Three honks.

OK, what is the deal? Is this a spectacularly incompetent car thief, or just some sort of code? I throw off the blankets (good-bye, warmth!) and head to the window. All seems quiet and peaceful on my street; there's a light dusting of snow on the cars that doesn't seem to have been disturbed.

I return to bed and spend a fitful half-hour imagining an elaborate hypothetical in which the car alarm is the distinctive screech of my Hyundai. In it, I clock the would-be perp with my largest frying pan, chase him down the street and pin him to the ground until the police arrive, whiling away the interval with "What would your mother think of you"s and periodic punches to the neck. I fall asleep.

Fast forward to 5:30, when the stupid alarm goes off again. Twice.

This time, I actually call District 2, hoping if they have a car in the area they can at least take a turn down the street. I find out that unless the alarm is actually going off at the time, they can't do much. In retrospect, I probably should have pointed out that the way things are going, if they drive down the street at any given time there's about a 50-50 shot that the alarm will, in fact, be blaring.

So now it's 6 a.m. and it doesn't seem worth it to go back to bed. I think I'll put on the kettle for tea - and possibly fashion some toilet-paper earplugs.