So I am one of those people that listens to a lot of true crime podcasts and generally I'm not deeply affected by it, at least consciously. Um, but the one time that it does tend to rear its head is if I'm home alone at night, specifically. So, if my partner is gone overnight or just, you know, gone late I tend to be a little bit more vigilant. So there was a night, a couple months ago. My partner was gone overnight and you know, I was really late to bed. Just my kind of schedule was a little bit out of whack and I finally fell asleep. And I was awoken in the middle of the night to a man's voice. And it wasn't, you know, Siri - we have like, a Google Home or whatever. It was not that voice that that, you know, it's a female voice, and then Siri is a female voice. So I knew it wasn't that and it was like - kept, you know, it was just talking and I - it sounded like it was coming from across the hall. So I'm frozen. I'm like, "What is going on?" I'm trying to figure out like, "Is my cell phone, did - is my cell phone in the other room?" Like, "What could possibly be making that noise?" And the room across the hall doesn't have any "smart" anything. So if it wasn't my cell phone like there's nothing else that it would be. So I'm doing this - like, these calculations and I realized I just have to go see what it is. So I crossed the hall and it turns out my - I have a Siamese cat that's borderline morbidly obese, and he has taken up residence on my work computer. And apparently, if you just hold down all the keys for an indefinite amount of time, the computer just starts to yell at you or like, tell you that it is - can't do this anymore. It can't - you know, I think he was like smashing all the buttons into the password area and honestly, the computer might've also been saying it was overheating. I was just so relieved that there was not an intruder that I didn't really wait to hear what was going on. I just picked my cat up and tried to backspace…

"Has there ever been a time when something unexpected woke you up very early? What happened?" I lived in Detroit with my family. And my mother-in-law had moved in, so we gave her her - our upstairs bedroom, along with the kids and we moved into the basement. And one time, this - I heard this scritch, scritch, scritch. And I woke up, kinda like in a jolt 'cuz, you know, it was a unexpected noise. And I looked up and we had a drop ceiling. And one of the tiles were moving. And I, I kept watching it and out of that hole poked the biggest spider you ever saw. And it was right above my bed, and I screeched and jumped out of bed. Tried to kill the spider before it fell on me. Didn't get the spider, went to bed the next night wondering what in the heck, you know, this - where the spider was, 'cuz it was as big as my hand. It was one of those hairy wolf spiders and it scared me pretty bad. I never did get that spider.

I remember getting woke up in the middle of the night by a huge crash - this was a few years back. And I remember thinking "What the heck?" And I thought "Oh, it's just gotta be one of the cats." And I kinda let it go, and I started falling back to sleep, and then I thought "It sounded like a splash, too!" And I got up and thank goodness I did, because the cat pushed over the goldfish bowl onto the floor. She was literally sitting there, smacking the goldfish around, watching it flop around. Luckily I was able to get him back into a thing of water and save him. Ugh! But that was crazy. I was like, "Really?"

I'm grateful for my girlfriend and... She's also become my go-to Scrabble partner. Around the year 2005 or so when I was a broke college student, I just went into a Toys R Us one day, just for funsies, when Toys R Us still existed, and I saw they were having a deal for board games. It was like, two for $20 or something and $20 was a lot for me back then. It's still not a drop in the bucket today, but the deal seemed so great that I felt like I had to cash that in. So, I bought a Trivial Pursuit, like a modern one, and I bought the Deluxe Scrabble that comes with the turntable and the nice wooden pieces and, you know, the actual Scrabble board has kind of like - it's grooved. So the letters stay exactly where they need to stay. And so that's been my most prized college-aged purchases in my life, but it's been sitting in the closet for 10 years. Probably more, maybe 15. But because I'm sitting here on crutches and broadly immobile in many ways, we decided to dive back into Scrabble and it's been so much fun. I feel like I'm 80 years old because we have a routine now, which is basically dinner and then Scrabble on the back deck which - whatever. I love it. And in turn, what we've done is we've kind of dived into Scrabble Theory. You know, before when I bought it, it was just kind of whatever. We'll play on the fly and we'll decide what works as we go. But she and I have been diving into eligible plays in Scrabble such as - like a big, a big strategy to help you get over the top in Scrabble is to be very familiar with all of the playable two-letter words. And it turns out, there's tons of two-letter words in Scrabble that you just wouldn't imagine actually flying, ones that would probably get called out by your friends. But anyway, yeah that's been a pretty fun way to pass the time honestly, this week.

Once in college, I was studying at Reeds Lake and uh, I was laying on my stomach like, with my books in front of me and I was eating pretzels and I, uh... had my arms crossed in front of me. I was leaning on my arms, you know, and so I had a pretzel in my hand, but my arm was tucked underneath me. And all of sudden, I felt someone yank the pretzel out of my hand and I turned around really fast thinking it would be, like, a guy messing with me or something and it was a duck! Who, who was being very sneaky and snuck up behind me 'cuz he saw this pretzel in my fingers and just snatched it right out of my hand, and other people had seen it approaching and were laughing and thought it was really funny, but that was very mischievous.