Wild Things

I woke to a live bird in my bedroom yesterday. In case any little children are reading my mortgage blog, I cannot say what came out of my mouth before pulling the covers over my head. I panted under the sheets and listened to the loud squawking noises coming from above my head. And then…silence… I crawled out of bed, ran straight to my garage and secured my bicycle helmet on my head. Grabbing a broom, I reentered the house.

One of the joys of homeownership is that you get to have pets. No landlord tells you what kind of pets you can have or how many or whether or not you can cut a hole in your back door and insert a plastic flap so that your cats can come and go at leisure like I did. I don’t have to clean litter boxes, and my cats get to enjoy nature whenever they like.  It’s really great. Until it’s not.

The pesky thing about pet doors is that my cats can bring “friends” into the house. “Look Ma! A bird! I didn’t even kill him yet so you could watch him fly and see me catch him again!”

When I came back to the bedroom I found the bird still alive and wedged between my wall and a clothes hamper. I knew what I had to do. I braced myself and, using the broom, gingerly pushed the hamper away from the wall.

Thus ensued a four minute battle in my bedroom consisting of me in my nightgown and helmet screaming like a dying woman and waving a broom at a petrified bird that my cats were trying to re-catch while my dog ran around the room wagging his tail at the excitement.

In the end, my cat Thomas caught the bird. The bird is now in bird heaven, and the whole ordeal took a good 17 months off my life expectancy. Below, my other cat, Harold, trying to leave the bedroom unnoticed after the ordeal…

Yes, that’s a feather on his head. There were quite a few feathers.

Proud Homeowner. . .

If you’d like to discuss the joys of home/pet ownership, please call me. You may or may not receive a free cat out of the deal.