Holy Winged Intruder Batman!

So, last night I climbed into bed relatively early--about ten o'clock and figured that I'd get a good eight hours sleep anyway...Then, about 10:30, over the hum of the heater which kind of acts as white noise, blocking out most distracting sounds, I start hearing these weird noises like something bumping around on the roof. I thought that maybe some kind of animal was up there--you know, like a squirrel or something. But, then I thought maybe it was nothing but the heater making weird noises. I quickly put that out of my mind when I started determining that a lot of the noises were coming from directly over my head--I have a sky light right over top of where I sleep. So, I waited somewhat nervously for the heater to stop running to see if I could get a better grasp of what it was that I was dealing with once there was silence.

I didn't need the audio help. After kind of staring up toward the ceiling for about 30 seconds I got my answer. I saw a movement--not outside on the skylight, mind you, but rather inside my apartment. It was a swooping movement coming from the general location of my front door and moving toward me. I knew right away what it was. A bat. Yes, I had a bat flying around in my apartment. And, of course, I don't have a huge apartment. It's actually a loft and it's not much bigger than the size of a college dorm. Stacey, you can think "Owl's Nest" and you will have it pretty close in terms of size.

Anyway, so I sprang up out of bed and darted over to turn on the lights. Then, I through open my front door and propped open the storm door and proceeded to try to shew the thing out. Of course, anytime it got close to the opening, it didn't want to go out. It's cold outside. The whole reason that it was in my apartment to begin with was because it wanted to be in a warm place. So, after doing this little dance with it for about an hour--I had also opened the one window in my place that opens--I decided that I needed to change my tactic. Now, if you've never tried to get a bat out of your house, it's hard to appreciate how difficult it is to get near enough to them to actually influence their pattern of flight or to get them to do anything in particular that you would want. They sense your motion and fly away from you. Like, they'll fly in your direction until you move the slightest bit, then will veer away.

I had to re-strategize. By this time, the thing must have been getting tired from flying around so much. So, it started landing. I decided my best bet was to start throwing things at it. Because, you know, it was landing on the ceiling, on the curtains way up high, anywhere that I couldn't get to it. So, I balled up some socks and some shirts and started chucking them at it, hoping that I could aggitate it enough to just fly out. No, it was just more of the same. It would take off, then not go out the door or window. Of course, I still had both open, thinking that eventually, it would be the same temperature in my apartment as it was outside, and, not knowing the difference between in and out at that point, it might just randomly go out.

Eventually, through a long process of trial and error, I discovered that if you peg it hard enough with a balled up sock, it will be stunned, fly to the ground and sit there for a couple of minutes. So, I balled up a tee-shirt for a little extra umph, chucked it at the curtain on which it was resting, and bullseye! It circled to the ground and was just laying there by my kitchen sink. So, I grabbed a sheet and threw it over the little guy. Then, I balled him up in it and ran it to the door, hucked it over the railing and watched it sail down to the yard. For any animal advocate out there, I can say with certainty that the bat did not get hurt in the confrontation. I witnessed it take off and fly away after the sheet hit the ground.

So, the long and the short of it: I missed out on a couple hours of sleep last night because I was doing battle with a bat in my apartment......

After a Conversation About Mythology

This is a picture that I took after a long conversation with Stacey Leigh about ancient literature and some of the books that made a large contribution to humanity. This is what I do. We start talking about these books and I immediately go and dig them up, then walk around with them for a while thumbing through, then throw them on a pile on my bed. There probably ought to be a Bible in that pile as well. I'm surprised there's not, although if you look really, really closely at the top right corner of the picture, you will see the spine of a few significant volumes including, "The Other Bible" which is a collection of Christian and Jewish apocrypha, Islamic scripture and other ancient texts, the DSM IV-TR, and "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" by Galileo Galilei. I'm thinking that since I'm finished with all my required reading for the semester and have a few weeks before residency, I should maybe crack into the Aenid. That's the one volume of greek/roman mythology that's not going to be directly in my path to read any time soon...