Big Jack, Orlando, and another incident at the Laundromat

The night before last I was awakened by L, sleeping next to me, when she heard the alarm on our digital stopwatch go off. Nobody has been able to figure out how to stop it, aside from pitching it out into the bay, so every 3:00 AM, it beeps twice a second for one solid minute. It doesn't bother the other heavy sleepers in the house; I'm generally the only one who hears it. After I reassured L that it would stop soon and not to be scared, I had almost drifted back to sleep when I heard screams coming from the cage of our hedgehog, Jack. I jumped up, snapped on the light and was horrified to see Jack hanging upside down, apparently impaled on the thick gauge wire that attaches his food dispenser to the side of the cage, as he had tried to move downstairs to his sleeping quarters. He was swinging by a long pinkish appendage. It looked like it caught his leg. When I looked closer, I didn't see a foot. Oh my God, he's chewed his foot off to get free...oh, jeez, it's worse than that...it's his intestines, it must have caught his belly...

He nearly removed my ring finger as I tried to get him free.

When I finally got him down and inspected the poor, terrified little guy, I discovered he had been suspended by his, ahem, sheath (see 2 a.) If there's any men reading this, and probably sitting there with your hands covering yourself in empathetic protective mode, sorry about that. It had to hurt. My little tale does have a happy ending: the swelling has gone down, he's able to urinate properly, and he's been left more endowed than ever.

Then, sometime before sunrise this morning, S came out of her room complaining of being too hot to sleep. Fine, hop on in with me. First, though, she headed to the bathroom. The door wouldn't open. I got up to try it. It wasn't locked, you could twist the handle, but it wouldn't budge past the door frame. Uh oh. Our cat, Orlando, sleeps in there at night because I can't bear the thought of fleas in our beds, so I figured he had something to do with it. By then, I had to use the bathroom pretty badly myself, and S and I were forced to go outside and squat in the dark.

I knew we could get in through the window.

We pulled up the stepstool.

Too short.

Then the fully-extended roofing ladder.

Too tall.

Then the sawhorses.

Just right.

I could now see into the bathroom with the flashlight and observed that the cat had possibly tried to climb up the towel that had been hung over the shower curtain rod, pulling the whole thing down and effectively barricading the door. I pushed in the screen and S climbed through.

I'm hoping tonight I'll get a full night's sleep.

------

G learned a new reason to never leave your laundry unattended, after already having a load of his clothes and a backpack stolen in separate incidents. As he folded up his laundry yesterday, he thought he saw a guy, who looked like Jerry Garcia, taking a birdbath in someone's wash cycle. When the guy pulled out a stick of deodorant and applied it, he was sure of it. He discretely mentioned it to the attendant, who immediately confronted Jerry, sitting outside the laundromat having a smoke, and pointed G out as his accuser. G left very quickly.