As the saying goes...real life is stranger than fiction. Sometime ago - I had just gone to bed and was lying there almost asleep when I heard a weird clicking / whirring sound. I opened my eyes and could see by the light of the moon shining in the window, this thing flying in circles. It passed by my head two or three times before I could blink. I could see my big black cat, Thunder, sitting on the end of the bed and everytime this thing went by him he would swat at it. I could see that it was larger than I initially thought and as my heart beat faster, my head tried to make this be not so bad. I convinced myself it was a large moth. I sat up and quickly turned on the bedside lamp. My eyes adjusted just as it flew by my face and at that moment my brain telegraphed to my eyes that this was a BAT!...Thunder reached up and batted (no pun intended) it to the floor. I screamed for Tony, who was downstairs, to come quick! He ran upstairs not knowing what the emergency was and I pointed to the bat lying on the floor, apparently unconcious. I stayed safely on the bed while Tony, my knight in shining armour, got a broom and dust pan and swept the bat up. (Does this remind you of that old tv show Wild Kingdom where the host, Marlin Perkins would say something like "I'll stand here on the hill at a safe distance while Jim rassles the giant anaconda".) Chickens, that's us - me and Marlin. The bat, knocked silly and lying motionless, in the light did not look nearly as big or horrid as my imagination had made it out to be .... but still made me shiver. I asked Tony what he intended to do with it and he said take it out back and turn it loose. I immediately fastforwarded and imagined (revenge of the bat!)....sounds like a bad horror movie). When my nerves settled I said, "Wait a minute...how did that bat get into the house?" After contemplating the possibilties we decided that Thunder had brought it in as a gift since he was always trying to bring in lizards and garden snakes...never even injuring them. So we accused him and from that time on he had to say ahhhh before he came into the house to insure that he wasn't cheeking something scary! After a while we let down our guard when there were no more incidents. About a year later I was upstairs in bed and realized that Thunder, who always came up stairs when I did at night, was not in bed with me. I called with no response so I went downstairs to check on him. When I got to the bottom of the stairs I saw him sitting just outside the guest bedroom door looking through the crack behind the door. I called to him and got not even an ear twitch so concentrated was he. I thought...there must be a huge roach or rat behind the door. I am repulsed and yes, scared of both, so I took a gigantic step up onto the blanket chest just inside the room and reached waaay out and eased the door open. I was ready for the roach or rat to run out and the scream that was caught in my throat, waiting for release, just vanished as I looked at the little creature sitting there - and he was looking right back at me. Thunder had not moved and sat there as the little furry thing came waddling out and straight toward me. This is NOT a rat my brain signaled. Definitely NOT a rat. It's too adorable. I called Tony to "come see if you know what this is?" It had no tail, was light brown, little rounded ears, frequently washed its face and was in no manner frightened of us. It didn't seem possible but we decided it was a hamster - no doubt. But WHERE did it come from? HOW did it get into our house? We both looked at Thunder. Could it be...he stole someone's hamster and brought it to our house? But how could that be? Did he go into someone's house? Was the hamster loose or did he get it out of the cage? Had the hamster somehow escaped and was outside and Thunder found it? Or if by a slim chance Thunder wasn't a guilty party, how did the hamster get into our house? Did he run away from home and come here on his own free will? Naw...couldn't be...hamsters are not long distance navigators. Had to be Thunder. We picked the little fellow up and found him to be very friendly. Upon examination we found not a scratch on him....yes we determined that it was a he hamster after doing a little research on the internet. "What will we do with him," we said. We ended up getting one of the cat carriers and putting him in some bedding, water, apple, walnuts and placing a paper towel for him to sleep under. He was a very happy camper. After we got him settled in, Tony went all over the neighborhood asking if anyone was missing a hamster. No takers. I knew even as cute as he was, it would not be wise to try and keep him with three cats in the house. The next day, one of my friends agreed to let her young daughter adopt him. To this day it is still a mystery as to how he came to be in our house. We still give Thunder the credit. It was certainly a step up from the bat.
About a month ago, it was de'ja' vu all over again. I was lying in bed reading about 11:00 o'clock one night when I heard a squeaking sound. Thunder was not in the room with me ...(Beginning to see the pattern here... late at night - me in bed... Thunder somehow involved...)At first I thought it must be a mouse that Thunder had cornered. I quickly and quietly slipped out of bed and turned my bedroom light on. At first I thought the sound was coming from out in the hall but just as I stepped toward the door I saw it in the corner behind the bedroom door. A BAT! I swear. I could not believe my eyes! I jumped back on the bed and ...you got it...screamed for Tony. By the time he got upstairs the bat had fluttered out of the bedroom and was somewhere in the hall. "Where is it?", Tony asked. I said I didn't know and he was on his own to find it. He eventually located it and used the old broom and dustpan maeuver and put it outside. Ok ...surely Thunder could not have brought a second bat in ... could he? Is this cat's shenanigins going to kill me yet! I made an executive decision to call a bat exterminator the day. There is no bat exterminator listed as such in the phone book so I called our regular exterminator and asked how he thought the bats were getting in and could he get rid of them. I told him I had looked at every possible way they could have gotten into the house and could find no obvious entry. He said that bats can enter a house through a miniscule opening, but that it wasn't very common, that light attracted them at night and that they got inside by accident and couldn't get out and that they were as frightened of me as I was of them. Easy for him to say. He isn't the one who's too paranoid to walk around inside his own house in the dark! He said there really wasn't a good way to exterminate them and that we should go in the attic at night and look for light sources coming through from the inside. I didn't tell him but there was no way in hell that I was going into a dark attic at any time of the day or night! We, well ok, Tony, looked for light sources and scouted every evening at dusk to see if and where they were going. He never found anything and eventually I had to let it go. It took me a while to get over feeling squeamish about walking around in the house at night. I still don't know if Thunder brought in bat number one and bat number two or one or neither. So far there have been no further incidents of critters invading us but I am not at all confident that it will last. IF Thunder is the culprit, he isn't saying, I have implored him to please stick to the cute cuddly creatures like the hamster, if he feels he must bring me gifts. My nerves can't take much more!
