martinimade

So Friday night, round about 12:30 a.m., long after the Spouse and I fell into our usual exhausted sleep, I was awakened by the strangest noise. It was a rattling, sorta, then the sound of fingernails on glass, then a bunch of soft thumpings. 

I ignored it. The night was windy, I reasoned. It's probably just that.

But it kept going. Then, because that wasn't enough, there was a weird growly noise, too.

I flung the covers back and tracked it down. The source was one of the windows in our bedroom. Barney was on his hind legs, staring at the closed blind intently. 

I went back to my side of the bed for my glasses. I was certain that this would require glasses.

I pulled up the blind and was staring into the beady eyes of a little brown bat, who had gotten himself trapped between the screen and the window. 

I will admit that I shrieked, just a little bit. Because, dude, bat near my face. Even if it was on the other side of a pane of glass.

Scott was up by then and trying to figure out what the heck I was doing. We both realized that we had no idea how to free the bat back into the outdoors without a) having to get a ladder and scale the outside of the house at 1 a.m. on a rainy, windy night or b) releasing said bat into our bedroom.

I did what any sane person would do, which is get my camera.

 There was hemming. There was hawing. Barney just wanted us to open the damn window already.

Eventually, Scott, who secretly lives for these sorts of problems, came up with a plan that involved two cookie sheets and a bath towel. I closed the bedroom door so that if the bat did wind up in the house, it would be confined. I made sure Barney was on our side of the door. He can be remarkably useful.

I didn't tell Scott that part B of my plan involved diving under the covers and not coming out until the bat was dead.  

We moved quickly, cracking the window open enough to get the cookie sheets into the gap, then moving both cookie sheets and window in tandem so that the bat couldn't fly out the bottom of the gap and directly into our faces. When Scott could get his hands on it, he lifted the screen. We shoved the window back down and waited for the bat to release that freedom was just a fall away. 

This took longer than expected. Clearly, only the less-than-clever bats wind up in such situations.

Eventually, tho, he flapped away. Barney spent the rest of the night staring at the window. Scott and I went back to bed. 

So how was your Friday night?