Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Never What You Think

It’s a half hour past midnight here.

I went to bed at 10 pm and enjoyed two blissful hours of sleep before being awakened by the phone. There was the initial disorientation – where am I? What time is it? Why is my husband not in bed? Followed by slightly less disorientation (emphasis on ‘slightly’) as my muddled brain tried to understand why the phone rang. It was midnight. Therefore, my brain came up with the most logical answers it could, operating on CPE sleep-deprivation:

a) Something has happened to my parents.
b) Something has happened to my son (off at debate camp).
c) My husband has become another person, one who not only is having an affair, but is having one with someone so ditzy she called his house at midnight.

I grudgingly decided to face reality, whichever horrible one it was, and got up. I could hear the husband’s voice, still talking on the phone, coming from upstairs. Odd. Then I noticed a tennis racket lying on the living room floor.

“Husssband?” I called, fearfully.

He came to the railing. “I’m talking to my sister.”

My brain instantly leapt to worrying that something had happened to his mom, for a very tense second, until I remembered that she was sound asleep on the futon in our gameroom and wouldn’t it be really weird if his sister knew something happened to her before we did?

As I stood there, my brain creakily turning, my eyes landed again on the tennis racket.

The Husband was leaning on the railing again. “There’s a bat in the house.”

NEVER what you think!

As my husband stayed up late working on the computer, he became aware of a black thingy flying around the living room. Not hobbled by 2 hours of blissful sleep, it didn’t take long for him to determine what it was. He called his sister, the wildlife biologist, who then called him back to tell him the best thing to do was kill it with a tennis racket, then carefully place it in a garbage bag and take it to be tested for rabies.

In the meantime, it disappeared.

After checking the girls’ rooms, he stuffed towels under the doors so Mr. Bat couldn’t crawl into their rooms (stuffed them under Mother-In-Love’s door, too). He’s tucked me away in our room. Just get some sleep, he generously told me.

Sure, babe.

So, I’m googling about whether you can get a preventative rabies shot (yes) and wondering if I can get one at my hospital workplace tomorrow.

Never what you think.

2 comments:

Lilylou said...

Good grief! What happened then?

Lizard Eater said...

The rest of the story:
The next evening, as I shuffled through my theological books looking for a perfect "call to worship," the bat zoomed past my head. "I've found the bat," I weakly informed The Husband. Because none of us had been bitten, and because Mr. Bat was flying normally (not banging against walls, a sign of illness), The Husband managed to catch him with a fishing net and deposited him outside.

No bats were harmed during this blogpost. The writer was, however, slightly traumatized. 48 hours later, I still haven't gone back upstairs to find that Call to Worship. I guess it's time.