Things that go "grind" in the night...

And of course I mean "grind" here in the sense of "grinding up old food and chicken bones." Because this is what happened: Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a notoriously light sleeper. This was true even before my Mighty Mom senses kicked in when Clara came home. So last night, I was snoozing away in whatever light sleep cycle I spend most of my time in when suddenly, at 2:30 in the morning, I heard a soft "thud" followed by a distant whirring. At first I thought I was just hearing the fan we keep on in the hallway for white noise, but before long I realized something more sinister was afoot.

In the past, if something like this had occurred I would have immediately woken Jeremy to go investigate, but because of 1)our super-duper deadbold and 2)our squeakier than squeaky floors (seriously), I feel extremely confident that no intruder would dare come into our house to steal our finery. Or at least if they did we would hear them easily. And since no squeaky footsteps preceeded the "thud," I decided to investigate myself.

I followed the sound of the whirring into the kitchen, where the noise became more of a grinding, and this, I quickly discovered, was because the garbage disposal was on. Yes, friends, at 2:30 in the morning, the garbage disposal was running of its own accord. I switched it off, turned on the light, and looked frantically around the front of the apartment. (Could someone have gotten past our intruder-detecting floors?) Assured that no intruders lurked in the shadows, I darted back into our bedroom, stood next to Jeremy and said, my heart pounding, "Uh, Jer, I just turned off the garbage disposal."

I always expect my nocturnal announcements to be met with a bit more shock and awe than they ever are, but all Jeremy said was, "Oh, yeah, I think that might be my fault." And as it turned out, it was. Jeremy had balanced a new loaf of bread on the sugar canister, which sits just beneath the switch to the disposal. From 9:00 p.m. until 2:30 a.m., gravity slowly worked its magic on that loaf of bread, until suddenly its center shifted, knocking it off the sugar canister and switching on the disposal.

This should have satisfied me, but he has made up stories before to get me to go back to sleep, so I had to go examine the evidence for myself. He was in luck: the bread was lying on the counter, half resting against the sugar. And so I knew it was true. And so I went back to sleep. But I will say this: fewer things are more freakishly off-putting than the spontaneous running of the garbage disposal in the middle of a snowy Syracuse night.