Houdini, our oldest dog, twitches in his sleep. He does it fairly regularly, no more than a few minutes apart, and he does it all night long. His favorite place to sleep is against our bedroom door. It makes sleeping difficult on my part (and sometimes my wife’s part too) hearing his sharp little nails clawing at the door.
To combat this problem we have a little tri-fold gate that we set up so he can’t sleep directly against the door. He gets to sleep somewhere else, we get to sleep in our room. Everybody’s happy.
Last night we prepared to get to bed. I set up the tri-fold gateway, turned out all the lights, told the dogs to go to sleep, and went into our room. My wife asked me to go back out into the kitchen and get her a bottle of water in case she needed something overnight. Not a problem.
I went out the bedroom door from the lit bedroom into the dark house. As I’ve aged my eyes take a little longer to adjust to differences in light levels like that. I know the layout of the house like the back of my hand, so no issues in navigating.
I go to step over the little trifold gate, and my toes on my right foot catch on the top edge of it. I have to balance, which is also getting more difficult as I age, and work to get my toes dislodged from the top rail. Takes a moment but I finally manage to get free and finish stepping over the gate.
I take another step and fall forward, sprawling all over the floor. What I hadn’t been aware of was Houdini had settled down for the night already, just on the other side of the gate. I couldn’t see him as my eyes were still adjusting to the dark. I hit hard, even though I managed to break my fall with my hands. No major boken bones or anything but a little bruising on the arms and legs. When I manage to get the lights turned on, Houdini is just lying on the floor, slowly wagging his tail, apparently fine.
‘Would you stay out from under my feet!’ I say to him. He just wags his tail in response.
After retrieving the bottle of water for my wife, I turned off all the lights again, stepped over the dog, and the gate, and got back into our room with no further mishaps. Some day I’m going to seriously injury myself in a similar situation.
If you liked this look into the way my mind works, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum