What I’m reading: Comics weekend! The Search for Smilin’ Ed
What I’m listening to: High Violet
What I’m watching: Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Commitments
What I’m drinking: D.H. Krahn’s & Q-tonic.
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Skipping Sunday’s greyhound hike in favor of a party hosted by their grey-girlfriends Ruby & Willow. Otis tried to impress everyone by eating vegetation until he puked, while Rufus cooled down by lying in a kiddie pool.
Where I’m going: Louisiana for Amy’s godson’s birthday!
What I’m happy about: Finding a new linen suit, a watch, some slip-ons, and a few other articles of clothing in the last week-plus.
What I’m sad about: That my credit card company thought those purchases were so out of keeping with my regular spending patterns that they froze my card until they could call to confirm that a 39-year-old man was indeed buying Vans.
What I’m worried about: Getting the July/August Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma Companies issue written; the month of June tends to be pretty exhausting for me.
What I’m pondering: How a bat got into our house on Saturday night. We took the dogs out downstairs for their pre-bed bathroom break, but I always close the door right after we get outside, to keep bugs from getting in. After we got ’em upstairs, I noticed a fluttering wing reflected in the window of the kitchen. I thought a bird had gotten in and was bashing into the walls, but once I turned the kitchen light on, I realized that it was a bat. I hurried the dogs down the hall into the bedroom, since they would’ve gone bananas trying to catch it (and maybe rabies). Since the kitchen only has a half-wall to the dining room, and there’s no partition between the dining room and the living room, the bat zoomed around among the three rooms for quite a while, hitting corners and not necessarily dive-bombing me. I started out trying to swat it with an old issue of SI, then graduated to trying to smother it in Amy’s cooking apron so I could get it out. The area’s cluttered, so a tennis racket would’ve led to my demollishing half the space. After 5 to 10 dizzying (literally, in both cases) minutes of chasing it around, ducking when it came at me, and spinning repeatedly to keep an eye on it, I got the idea to hang a bunch of dog-blankets from the ceiling beam of the dining room, where it connects with the living room. This managed to confine the bat to the dining room and the kitchen, giving me a slight advantage. Then I grabbed an old curtain I was getting ready to throw out, and after a dozen more failed attempts, managed to get the bat tangled up in it. It was heading straight at my face when I got the curtain up. I’ll carry its harrowing squeaks to my . . . well, not my grave. I mean, it wasn’t so scary, but I saw where Bruce Wayne was coming from when he got the idea. Anyway, it was a good thing for me that we were directly in front of the Sliding Glass Door To Nowhere (which once led to our deck). I tossed the curtain, bat and all, out the door, and heard it land in the back yard. The bat was caught inside, still squeaking panickedly. I hurried downstairs, shook up the curtain, and freed the poor creature. I like to think its last squeak before it flew off was one of, “Thanks! Sorry about the misunderstanding!”
I think one got in when we were kids
Love the visuals accompanying the story.
‘Otis tried to impress everyone by eating vegetarian until he puked’…That’s hilarious. I keep getting pictures in my mind of Otis eating half a carrot and crushing the rest on his forehead.