Today I went downtown with a twinkle in my eye and a wee bit of a spring to my step and I FINISHED ALL OF MY CHRISTMAS SHOPPING. I bought and bought and bought until I didn't need to buy any more. That makes me awesome, right? Everything is DONE. It's December 3rd and I am done with my holiday shopping - I've set a new record for myself.
Of course, I still need to get everything wrapped and I need to write out my Christmas cards...but that's nothing. Well, it's nothing but you can be sure that once I am done I will crow about it and expect everyone to lavish me with praise and congratulations.
Note: I should advise you that once I am done the wrapping and writing of cards, I will likely be a self-righteous bitch about the whole thing. Just so you know.
Oh, and of course not ALL of my holiday chores are complete. The apartment still needs to be cleaned and decorated to a disgusting degree for the Christmas party that's going down on Saturday. But at least now with the shopping done, that and getting my hair done are the only two pressing things I need to accomplish this week.
Well, the cleaning, the decorating and the hair AND I'll have to work really, really hard at not being squicked the fuck out.
You see, when I got back from my downtown killer shopping session I found something creepy in the apartment.
Now, let me preface this by saying that I am, for the most part, not a girlie girl. I can plunge a toilet, spiders don't freak me out, I can use an awful lot of power tools, I can snake a drain etc. etc.
But tonight's madness made me squeal like a little girl.
When I opened the door to the apartment I managed to catch sight of something out of the corner of my eye. At first, being a country girl, I thought what I was seeing was a bat. But a bat? In the city? In an apartment? In the winter? To consider such a thing would be pure folly!
So okay, it was a bird and a rather big bird at that.
With my eyeballs peeled so that they were almost rolling right out of my head I quickly saw that there was indeed something flying around the apartment. Okay, something flying around. Flying around the apartment. Eek! A BIRD in the apartment! What the fuck do you do with a BIRD in the APARTMENT and what, I wondered, were the chances of said bird hitting me in the head if I ventured further into the apartment?
I figured there was a pretty good chance I'd get hit in the head so I slammed the door and stood in the hallway, nothing short of totally stunned.
When I came to my senses I called Mr L on his cell and started freaking out, demanding that he help me figure this shit out. While he was working late in a most important meeting.
Mr L, being of clear and sound mind having not almost been hit in the face with a bird said that he would call Papa L and hopefully he could come by and help me out.
I then went downstairs to wait for Papa L cause there wasn't any way I was going far enough into the apartment to grab the phone and buzz him in when he arrived.
I tell you, when I saw Papa L heading up the pathway I almost cried with relief. Little did I know things were going to get worse before they got better(ish.)
We let ourselves into the apartment and there wasn't a bird in sight. Nothing flying around, nothing strutting around on the floor...just...nothing. Well, just the cat freaking out.
After we tried to determine how the thing got in (screens on the windows kinda shot down the idea of it getting in that way) we finally decided it was more important to find the thing than to figure out how the hell it got in in the first place.
A mostly-through search of the apartment turned up nothing. Nada. Zilch. Naturally at that point Papa L decided I was fucking loopy and there hadn't been a bird in the first place.
I was all, "it was THIS big! I saw it! I did!" but he really wasn't having any of it.
But thank heavens he kept looking because after a few minutes he said, "take the cat into the bathroom and close the door." I was all, "thank god, he doesn't think I'm crazy - he's FOUND IT!"
When I came back from securing the cat in the loo Papa L said, "so you thought you saw a bat?" I said I did. He said he knew I did BECAUSE THERE WAS A FUCKING
BAT HANGING OFF THE BACK OF THE SOFA.
WTF? How does that even HAPPEN? Is it some super bat that crawled up one of the drains? Did it come in on one of our coats? I mean, anything is possible when we have NO CLUE how a bat came to live between the sofa and the wall.
At that point, we started to scramble for a bowl and cardboard to get the fucking thing out of here. An appropriate bowl and board was found and dearest Papa L scooped the fucker up and dumped it off the balcony.
I'm not even going to tell you about the noises it was making as it was being ferried out the door. No, I'm just not going to get into it.
Now I'm squicked out and drinking what will likely be the first of many beers tonight.
PS When Papa L was dropping the creepy creature off the balcony I was going, "da na na na na da na na na na BATMAN!" He didn't think that was very funny. I thought it was, but I wasn't handling the bat so...maybe he was right to not see the humour in it.
[edited to add for the poor bat-having-souls who end up here through google:
how to get rid of bats]
