A Batty Bedtime

Ready to sleep, Malcolm and I were cozy in bed. In fact, Malcolm was already snoozing by the time I called down to the cat.

    "Moo? What are you doing?"
    "What's he doing?"
    "I don't know, but he's thumping around a lot."

Being that our cat was prone to odd behaviours at random, we let him be. He'd already quieted down anyway. Malcolm went back to snoozing, and I continued to look up crappy movie lines on the web. I was distracted a second later by what I thought was a shadow in the hallway. I looked up, but of course there was nothing there.

I continued my web perusing, but a second later, I swore I saw something again. My heart was pounding--too many episodes of Ghost Hunters had over prepared me for this moment. Before I let my imagination get out of hand, I woke Malcolm again.

    "Honey? Honey, wake up--I think there's something in the hallway."
    "What is it?"
    "I don't know...a shadow? It's darting around out of the corner of my eye."

Thankfully Malcolm didn't give me the "too much Ghost Hunters" lecture, but instead groggily put his glasses on to join me in my intent staring out the bedroom door. We didn't have to stare long.

    "There it is! It's...it's...I think it's a bat?!"

Having confidently identified what was catching my attention, we relaxed. I was glad it wasn't a ghostly intruder, and Malcolm was relieved it was just a bat...so he went back to bed.

    "Shouldn't we do something about it?"
    "It's just a bat. We can get him tomorrow."

His answer was the kind of answer for a guy. His answer was NOT the kind of answer for a girl. I was already out of bed and putting on my war clothes.

    "But what if it gets in our BEDroom?!"

Reaching the door to our room, I carefully peeped my head out into the hallway. Nothing. Keeping my head low, I looked into our upstairs office. Nothing. In the next room, the empty guest bedroom, I saw our cat sitting in the middle of the floor.

    "Moo, what are you...argh!"

I instinctively ducked as our winged intruder flew close to the doorway as he frantically circled the room. Ripping the chin-up bar off the door frame, I quickly stepped inside and closed the door. With the light on, I could clearly see the bat; it was flying silent circles around the room in an attempt to find a way out.

I tried to open the window in the room to let it fly out, but found that the window screen was not the type to come out. My next idea was to catch it.

    "Honey? Malcolm, can you get me a box?"

As I slipped out of the room to find a box, Malcolm opened the door and took a video.

    "This is actually kind of cool!"
    "Shut the door! Don't let it out of this room!"

The video completed (and probably already on its way to Facebook), I set to trying to catch the poor guy in the cardboard box I'd acquired. The bat being as fast, panicked and evasive as he was, this was not going to be an easy job. I was making myself dizzy just trying to follow his circular route around the room. Malcolm left me to it. So did Moo.

10 more minutes alone with the bat and I managed to catch him in the box. I was triumphant, but felt sorry for the little guy. He probably went from panicky to down right terrified now that he was closed into a paper box. I wanted to free him as soon as possible.

    "Honey, I caught him!"
    "Already? I wanted to take another video!"

Needless to say, we filmed his release back into the wild from the end of our front door stairs.

The point to this late-night adventure?

I just caught a m*ther-f*ckin' bat!

Fuck yeah.