Things that go "bump" in the night

Last night I woke up from a dream that me and Tim were being held hostage in our house by terrorists (maybe someone has been watching a little too much 24, I don't know) because nature called. While in the bathroom, I hear a fairly loud, high pitched, mechanical whine. I'm an experienced insomniac, so I know that the trick of being able to go back to sleep after getting up is to not fully open your eyes, don't look at the clock, and don't do anything crazy, like start thinking. I decided that maybe it was the sound of street cleaners - which is impossible, they don't clean the streets in the winter, but I was trying my hardest to stay half asleep. Then I heard these crashing sounds, kind of like when the trash collectors come around and dump trash. Clearly people were cleaning snowy streets and emptying the trash at 1 am. It made sense to me.

I went back to bed, glad that our noise machine's "dolphin" background seemed to mute all of these strange sounds, and was about to fall back asleep when another crash came and Tim said, "What was that?"

The next thing we know we hear sirens coming down our street. My first thought: were those gunshots? This is Milwaukee. Tim said no (he's an authority on the sound of gunshots). We open our blinds and watch as a firetruck pulls up a couple of houses down from us. Then Tim says, "Um, they're getting out the hose. I think those sounds are that house burning down." We both get up at this point and go to our back window, where we see flames and smoke rising above the tops of the garages in our alleyway. Tim decided to investigate, while I stayed warm in our bed.

Please note that during this entire scenario, our faithful guard dog, Dirk, slept blissfully unaware in his bed.

Tim came back and reported that the neighbor's car was on fire in the alleyway, and was exploding. Really! And our other neighbor was out there taking pictures! And Tim had watched and then laughed hysterically as one of the firemen got hosed in the face on accident as he was standing by the car.

The lesson learned: If it's nighttime, and your car's blowing up, don't expect me or Dirk to get up or anything.