apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Earthquake?
Living in Tokyo and SF, I've lived through them - fortunately no damage, but definately a wake-up.

My mother would dump a bowl of ice cold water on our heads if we wouldnt get up for school. To this day, when the alarm goes off I jump up immediately. I guess Im still afraid of the water treatment.

A loud rumble in the skies in Manhattan around 3 a.m. the night after 9/11 - I was petrified that something else was happening until I realized it was an ordinary thunderstorm.

Spending the summer with my uncle in Texas. He had a rooster. Enough said.

A friend of mine was spending the night on the floor of a mutual friend's college dorm after a late-night rock band party at their house. She was awakened in the middle of the night by one of the members of the band, who, in a drunken stupor, had mistaken their bedroom for the bathroom and peed on her where she lay.

He then tried to exit the room by walking into a closet.

We recently had a car (probably a drunk driver) somehow manage to flip itself completely over on the street outside our window. EVERYTHING shook and it was so loud, I really believed it had ran into our house.

I also get treated to a cooing pigeon that lives in our chimney each morning at 7am.

Last night I was rudely awoken by a claw in my eyelid. A claw. In my eyelid.

One of our cats likes to sleep on the pillow above my head (sometimes he drapes himself around my head like a wig). Last night he did an innocent little stretch in the middle of the night and extended his claws like he is apt to do, except when he extended his claw, he did so right into the outside of my right eyelid.

So we either need to clip their nails more often or kick the cats out when we sleep. After a soap-and-water treatment of my punctured eyelid last night, we did the latter.

I've actually been awakened twice in my life by smoke from kitchen fires. One that was a very minor fire started by my roommate that I was able to put out quickly (while my roommate slept through it), one a pretty big one when I was a teenager that involved fire engines, etc.

I also had a drunk driver drive up my front lawn, needling his way through 2 old maple trees by some stroke of luck. He narrowly missed my living room, but proceeded to hit and hurl my SUV into my neighbor's living room. He then proceeded to crash into my front porch. The whole house shook, and the experience was terrifying for myself and my neighbor. Luckily, my car acted as a buffer between my neighbor in his house and the drunk driver going 55 mph through my yard. A year later, and the sound of cars speeding by still makes me flinch sometimes, and it's even more difficult sleeping with the windows open. Sounds are magnified.

One night I awoke in my bedroom to the sound of dribbling water oiverhead. "Probably rain," I mused and drifted to sleep...before jolting out of bed as I remembered that I lived in a basement!!!

I ran upstairs and pieced together this story: the cat jumped onto the kitchen window ledge. She knocked over a flower pot, which crashed into the sink and bumped the faucet on. And of course a shard of pottery just had to block the drain, so that the sink had overflowed and I was now standing in a inch of water in my kitchen. grrr grrr grrr VERY bad kitty.

When I was a gradeschooler a lady (who turned out to be drunk) hit the neighbor's parked car across the street. She was going about 60mph. I had no idea what had happened and thought maybe I had dreamt it. Then I heard her crying. I ran in my parents room and woke up my father. He ran outside and soon after all the chaos began - neighbors milling about, police, ambulance.

Ive always been a light sleeper and Im always the one to wake up to middle of the night drama.

Two summers ago I woke to the most violent and spectacular thunderstorm I think I've ever seen. The lighting was striking so rapidly the sky was a permanent electric blue and when the thunder wasnt barking and booming it was a constant background growl. I watched for more than an hour from my glassed in back porch. Neither of my two roommates even knew the storm had passed over us the next day.

On a less act-of-god note, my little sister used to wake me up by pounding her hand down the wall of the hallway - the wall my bed was pushed against. My older sister would open the bedroom door and gently shake my feet - over and over and OVER. To this day I can't decide which was more annoying!

Gosh, nothing that serious, but I generally wake up to the loud drunks outside yelling "TAXI!!! TAAAAAAAAXIIII!!!!" for five minutes straight. Our windows face the alley (lovely view), so their yelling is amplified by the buildings. There's a bar just downstairs and another around the corner that has the highest concentration of unsavory Cubs fans on the face of the earth. Oh how I hate bar time.

The other was when I had a huge tree outside my window and it was struck by lightning in the middle of the night. It shook my bed, it was so loud.

At summer camp when I was a kid, a tree right next to my tent got hit by lightning....and exploded (because of the high sap content, I guess). I remember waking up to seeing my pillow and sleeping bag about five inches *underneath* me because the explosion flung me into the air.

Less dramatic, now. When I lived in a dorm, one particular girl who lived down the hall ran into my door every single time she came home drunk. Every time, it was the same 1) thunk, 2) "Wahoo!!!! I'm s--- faced!!! It drove me insane.

Easter Sunday....next door neighbor....loud sex....4:30am.

Earthquake.

I once attended a boarding school, and my room overlooked the front courtyard, my bed right by the window. One night a man in the neighborhood was sleepwalking and woke up in the courtyard - right under my window! The poor man temporarily (I hope) lost his mind and starting screaming. I was so terrified when I awoke that I couldn't even open my eyes to see what was going on. Even though that seems like a hundred years ago, the thought of that scream still gives me goosebumps today...

Back in college, my boyfriend and I had a roommate whom we'll refer to as Jones in this story. One Saturday night we all attended a party, but my boyfriend & I returned home early. I guess when Jones got back he forgot to lock the front door, because - at about 4am - we were awakened by the sound of a strange man in our apartment yelling, "Jones! Jones! Where are you, Jones?!" This strange man swung open the door to our bedroom, saw that he had the wrong room, politely said, "Excuse me," then shut the door and proceeded yelling, "Jones!" until our roommate finally came out of his own room to address the situation. Later on I officially met that strange guy and he became one of my favorite friends at college. He never remembered why he needed to speak to Jones to much that night. ;)

A couple of years ago I had just moved into an apartment - it really smelled bad on move-in and I decided to open all of the windows to air it out. No curtains were up, boxes everywhere, and it was also late February so it was pretty cold outside. I dumped the blankets on my bed and decided to crash out. I woke up in the middle of the night to my cat rebounding off my head. My whole apartment was full of black smoke. In a panic, I jumped out of bed (nude, of course) and ran to the kitchen to look outside. Lucky for me, the building that usually would have protected my nudity from the street was ON FIRE and the firemen fighting the blaze were RIGHT OUTSTIDE my window. I bought curtains the next day.

(I also cried for my neighbors, six apartments in a poor neighborhood burned to the ground. Thankfully nobody was hurt)

Pigeons.

When I studied abroad in India, I had an apartment with bars on the windows, but no screens. Every so often, early in the morning, a pigeon would get confused, hop through the window sill onto my head, take off, then panic and flap around the room, until it could get out and fly away.

These were bad mornings, and often involved post-pigeon cleanup.

My neighbors shed caught on fire in the middle of the night a few years ago and I woke up to a bright light from the fire and approaching sirens. My husband and I went outside to watch the show and were treated to the extra site of my neighbor running around in just his tighty-whiteys. Keep in mind he looks like the orchid thief from Adaptation so the show wasn't all good.

Years ago when my brother was back from college and sleeping off his hangover my dad woke him up with an air horn. In a similar vein an old boss told me his dad would wake him up from his college summer hangovers by waving a very greasy frying pan under his nose.

Grew up in FL and was visiting my parents a few months ago. Around 1am (or so), there was a loud boom and the entire house shook, furniture rattled and our dogs barked. Walked around the house but didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Turned out to be the space shuttle's sonic boom from Cape Canaveral (2h. away)--a super early morning launch. We always hear the boom of a launch or re-entry and every time it's jarring until you remember what it is.

My mother would wake me and my brother up for school in the mornings and she wasn't particularly forgiving of slow risers. We usually had a 60-second window after the initial "time to get up!" call. If there was still no movement after the grace period, she would come into our rooms, rip the sheets/cover entirely off of the bed (and us) with one hand and use the other hand to cover our entire faces with a washcloth that had been dunked in cold water.

There was nothing more jarring. Needless to say, we quickly learned to hop out of bed when we heard her footsteps coming.

Augh, some of these stories are terrifying.

My cat, Sheffield, now recognizes the sound of my alarm clock, and takes it as his cue to start meowing and walking on our faces until we get up and feed him. I wouldn't dream of preventing him from doing this, actually -- I'd probably never get out of bed otherwise.

I was once awakened by a squirrel who had fallen down my skylight into my bathroom, and was freaking out, running around and knocking everything over. This was in NYC. It took hours for him to calm down enough for me to shoo him out my window onto the fire escape. My boss said it was the best excuse she had ever heard for someone coming in late to work.

I awoke one night to a tremendous shaking thump and clatter ... the bathroom ceiling caving in and scattering paint chips, wall parts, cracked and rotted wood pieces, and bits of rubble and concrete into the bathtub and all around. The torrent of debris knocked most stuff off the walls and when i gingerly opened the door fully the dust was still settling and small pieces continued to make their way down. I'd been after the landlord for weeks; there was a leak upstairs...

This was absolute horror to my house-living family and friends on the west coast - but almost everyone i know that rents or even owns in new york has a similar story. Funny (funny-sad? funny-pathetic?) what becomes the 'norm'.

If my mom couldn't hear my feet on the floor within a minute of my alarm clock going off, she'd send my stepdad in. He'd flick the lights on and off, at which point I'd pull the covers over my head, then he'd yank them off and tickle me until I fell out of bed into the floor, kicking and screaming until he stopped. He did the cold water thing once. It worked. My cat would also paw at my face until I woke up if he wanted attention before the alarm buzzed. This happened often.

Back in DC, I lived in a gentrifying neighborhood, where my block had $500k one bedroom aparments on the same street as a still operational crackhouse. The building i lived in was a flop house/drug den before a developer renovated it. I was constantly woken up by people looking to purchase crack and "companionship" from me by screaming into my bedroom window, which faced the street. One time while on my way to the restroom in the middle of the night, i was greeted by a toothless man holding a lighter and grinning at me through the window over my toilet. That woke my drowsey arse up.

When I was 11, we were visiting my grandparents in Indiana. All the kids were camped out on the living room floor and at 4:15am, my dad woke us up to tell us that my grandpa (the other one that we weren't visiting) had died. To this day I remember how confused and awful it was to wake up in a totally strange place to awful news.

For this reason I always turn the ringer off my phone when I go to bed, because it always seems like bad news comes in the middle of the night. I'd rather wait until morning for it.

On the lighter side ... the christmas lights around an old boyfriend's bedroom once fell right on us in the middle of the night. Weirdly, I wasn't awakened by that, but by him grabbing on to me all of a sudden in a panic.

Ha! I don't know how I could've missed this one, but just two months ago, I was in a dead sleep, when the ceiling above me crashed down with gallons and gallons of rainwater that had been accumulating over the course of a bad storm. I didn't get hurt, but it was a totally rude awakening!

Posters falling off a wall, very bad. Incredible thunder and lightning. One time, in like '88, I thought the Russians had nuked us.

I also have a schoolbus that honks every morning for 5 minutes straight at 6:30. I HATE the people that live there who can't get their child ready in time for that damn bus. And we recently had a new neighbor move in across the street and his car alarm does this quick "beep beep beep beep" thing every single hour. Not sure why ... perhaps to tell him "yes, I'm still out here!"

Geez ... now that I think about it, no wonder I have trouble sleeping. I never get a full night's sleep!

Oh, I thought of another one... When I was first married, my father-in-law was worried that neither of us would ever wake up in the morning. So he rigged up what we used to call the fire alarm to an alarm clock. It was one of those metal bells against which an arm bangs. The worst sound in the morning ever! It would literally cause us to leap out of bed in shock. Needless to say, that didn't last long - I guess we just learned to get up on our own... like grown-ups.

One time I woke to the sound of my now ex-husband urinating in MY closet all over MY shoes. We had a house full of company and I started screaming at the top of my lungs. The drunk sleepwalking husband went right back to bed. I got a nice new shoe wordrobe the next day.

Oh yes, I also woke up to a firetruck's ladder outside my bedroom window. I saw orange coming through the window of my dining room - it wasn't our building, but the next building over. Thankfully we had an alley between us or else ours would have caught fire as well. Sadly, that building was ruined - many people kicked out of their homes because someone was a hoarder with a faulty air conditioning unit.

They remodeled and now it's full of trendy, very pricey condos. yay Chicago...

When I was in college an assigned roommate had guests. I was awakened to the sound of um, urination, in the room. I stayed in bed while they got out and cleaned it again - to their credit, they cleaned it up.

I had a good one in the middle of the night one time in highschool... There had been a marijuana grow-op bust at a house kitty corner from ours earlier in the week. Then, in the middle of the night a few days after the bust, I woke up to what seemed to be strobe lights flashing all around my room. There were firetrucks right outside my window with rapidly flashing lights-- light came in the window, and reflected off the large mirror on the opposite wall. All our neighbours poured out onto the sidewalks to survey the commotion of the former grow house burning to the ground and the God-knows-how-many fire trucks lining the street. The smell of pot in the air was really *really* pungent...

My third year at Kent State I lived in a house with 5 other guys on a party street. We were woken up abruptly at around 4 am when somebody threw a frozen chicken through the picture window into our living room. We hung a sign in the window that read "We only eat red meat and fish. NO POULTRY." until the landlord replaced the window about a month and a half later.

what an amazing thread.
i like the pigeon & squirrel stories.

i once woke up to a dude getting head from a hooker out my back door. i heard "oh YEAH choke it down" at 4am.

my old roommate got a good one, too. my drunk now-ex-boyfriend climbing into bed naked with her because he screwed the rooms up after coming back from the bathroom.

good times.

There was a girl in college who was notorious around the sorority house for not only climbing in the wrong bed when she was drunk, but also peeing in it (right alongside the rightful occupant). Never happened to me, but then again that's why you opt for the top bunk.

wow, kewl stories...when the alarm goes off at home, Oscar, the dog I'm minding at the moment, licks my face until he achives his disired result (yes, its spelt wrong).

i used to have a cat who would have seizures sometimes when she was in a deep sleep. this kitty also liked sleeping under the covers w/ me. i have scars from the many times i would wake up w/ her biting (& not letting go) of my tri-ceps, thigh, etc. oh well, i'm glad i gave her snuggles anyway.