bed time at casa de crazy cat lady

Living alone has its perks. For instance, I know that the only hair I have to fish out of the bathtub drain is mine. Also, that mess in the kitchen, all mine! I can clean it or I can leave it. Surprisingly, I end up cleaning it more often than not. However, the downside of being alone is that when I am awakened by strange noises at 2 in the morning, there’s no one to consult. I can look to the cats in puzzlement, but they only look back at me like, “Oh, you’re up! How’s about some cat chow? No? Maybe a scratch under the chin?”
The strange noise was a steady chirping emanating from the basement. Very curious, my half asleep self thought. If you know me at all, you know that I am a really sound sleeper, so if this chirping got into my head and woke me up, it was loud, and persistent.
I got up to pee, which I suspect was what really woke me up, and to investigate. Was it an organic noise, was it an electronic noise? My basement is stinky and creepy in the best of circumstances but at 2 in the morning when I am alone in the house, the basement is a horror house I’d rather not visit. I went back to bed and turned the fan up. I lay there thinking, did an injured bird get into the basement? It sounded like a bird. Suddenly the thought of what else would be trapped in the basement popped into my head, was it a rat? Or a bat? Oh my god, it was a nasty rabid bat! That constant chirping was some creepy sonar thing!
I flew out of bed and ran to the basement to retrieve a litter box. I brought it back upstairs and locked the basement door so the cats could not get down there. If there was some crazy rabid bat, it was not going to attack the kitties. My sleep dulled mind was certain that I could live with painful rabies shots, but I could never live with out my cats.
Once again, I went back to bed. I fell asleep thinking of who I would need to summon in the morning to rid my basement of the bat with a possible case of rabies. I mean why else would he not be able to get out of the basement, he obviously got in, some how….
Fade to morning…I arose fresh and remembered little of the creepy bat sonar chirping noise, until the litter box smell hit my nose. The noise had gone away but the evidence of my bat conclusion was in the kitchen. I went down to the basement, which was considerably less scary at 8 in the morning. I didn’t see or hear any thing. I looked at the smoke alarm by the stairway. Aha! Low batteries in the smoke alarm. Batteries changed, mystery solved. The cat’s bathroom was quickly moved back to the basement. Little Nancy Drew went to work feeling very satisfied.
Cut to 11 pm, bed time at casa de crazy cat lady….the chirping noise came back. What the fuck? The light of day had convinced me of the impossibility of a rabid bat, so I listened carefully at the basement door. It was so loud…it sounded like a cricket chirp but if it was a cricket, it was the Incredible Hulk of crickets, Godzilla Cricket, Jurassic Park cricket, I mean a really freaking ginormous cricket. Clearly mutated from it’s cute little cricket friends. So, I went to sleep. I figured I could leave a giant mutated cricket to the paws of death.