Thankfully I live in a safe area but having a dozen main floor windows makes me paranoid at times. Doors are alarmed, cameras around the property, but something can happen in seconds. A couple of weeks ago I had a woman banging on our door asking me to unlock the gates to our back yard so she could look for her lost cat. She seemed nice enough so I did. She came back 5 times over the next two weeks and I let her check. The last time she told me that a psychic had told her that her cat was still alive and hiding under someone’s deck. I stopped answering her calls. I’m not a cat person anyway ;-).
Coyote treat. And they eat songbirds. I’m going to P.O. some people, but good riddance. Keep it in your house.
A former neighbor of mine had the following bumper sticker on his truck:
"LOST YOUR CAT?
TRY LOOKING UNDER MY TIRES."
Our tiny little one storey house has 17 windows, not counting the glass in the doors. We rarely have serious crime in our little town. There’s probably a fair amount of pilfering. But even still, I wouldn’t sleep with windows open, unless they’re only open low enough to keep a person from climbing in, and then my husband would make sure he screwed the windows in, so they couldn’t be raised. We have a couple of small dogs, but they sleep in a crate in a back bedroom, so they wouldn’t necessarily hear anything in front of the house. We keep guns on both our nightstands. I never answer the door at night if I’m home alone, (I don’t answer it during the day if I’m alone, unless I know who it is), and my husband doesn’t answer at night, without a gun within a few inches of his hand.
Having said all that, we’ve gone to bed and forgotten the keys in the front door, more often than I’d like to admit. Left our detached garage open plenty of times, too.