Midnight explosion in the Servetus household?

Last night I went to bed a bit after midnight. There had been a lot of noise in the neighborhood (snowmobiles, fireworks) after the Superbowl ended, enough that I’d gone outside to see what was going on. I’d been at Obscura’s fundraiser for part of the afternoon, so I was late getting to my daily cup of coffee and wasn’t especially sleepy.

I sleep downstairs, dad sleeps upstairs.

Around 1:30 a.m. dad got up and went to the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. A little after that I heard the furnace run (this is also a “water” noise because dad installed radiant heat about ten years ago). The hot water heater usually runs its daily cycle around that time of night as well. The noises were annoying me.

I turned over a few times and then I heard this huge crashing noise!

I honestly thought dad had somehow not made it back to bed and had fallen, so without thinking I ran upstairs, yelling, “Dad, what’s going on?”

I sleep in the nude with my glasses on.

So does dad, apparently.

He was standing in the living room and said, “What’s going on?”

General embarrassment ensued.

I said, “Let me put a robe on.” So I went back downstairs and got a robe and we started looking around the house.

“You don’t think something’s wrong with the furnace, do you?” dad said.

“No idea.”

“Why don’t you get dressed and walk around the house just in case,” he suggested.

So I went downstairs again, got dressed, and walked the perimeter of the house. Nothing worrying, although I did notice that the neighbors whose windows I could see were also up. A bit odd, I thought. I attributed it to post-football game parties.

After I calmed down I fell asleep but I slept late this morning and dad was gone when I came upstairs. There’s a place where we leave each other notes, and there was a note there that said, in my dad’s characteristic big black letters:

1. It was a meteorite. Toward Milwaukee.
2. Maybe we need to get pajamas.

***

[So, if you’re curious, yes, it was a meteor of some kind. It is supposed to have decombusted over Sheboygan (about an hour east of here as the crow flies, two by car because you have to circumnavigate a lake). Lots of strange things happen in Sheboygan for some reason. It’s like an apocalyptic event magnet, that town. Anyway, there were apparently 200 calls to the police, who saw the flash but didn’t know what happened immediately either.

Here’s how it looked from the Oceanic, Space and Atmospheric Sciences building at the University of Wisconsin at Madison:]

~ by Servetus on February 6, 2017.