early morning adventures on Friday

My darling bride and son have been slightly unwell this past week with what seems to be summer colds. Lots of blowing of noses and similar trumpeting. My bride was having trouble sleeping this past Thursday night (ok, it was Friday morning by this time) due to all of the coughing and nose blowing on her part, so she went down stairs. She claims this was to let me get my sleep butI think she has gotten hooked on late night tv. Once she got down stairs she found she was not the only one up. Ok, not so much that someone else was up but better said that we had a visitor. A visitor that was startled almost as much as my bride. There was much flapping about as my bride tried to convince the visitor that 5 o'clock in the morning was not a good time for a social call. After that did not work she begrudgingly decided to wake me in the hopes I would have better success in convincing the visitor to view the wild egress. Bleary eyed, groggy and not sure I had heard my wife correctly I came down stairs to confront this persistent visitor. Not believing my eyes I thought I should record the moment. It helped that I was standing next to the camera when I had this thought. Here is our visitor:

It had decided to take a break on the curtains in the sun room. The unfortunate thing is that this room has no windows that open and is the farthest any room can be from either door to the outside. So I, armed with a broom and a drowsy determination to get back to sleep, went forth that convince it to remove itself. I figured the ceiling fans were not going to do its echo location thing much good, so they got turned off. Then I nudged it with the broom to get it started flying again. After that it was a matter of getting the front and back doors open and trying to convince it that certain doors were in fact walls. What I learned was that even though this bat could fit in the palm of my hand when curled up, it had a wingspan of at least a foot. I also learned that up close it does not fly like a bird does and can be very disconcerting when it is flying very fast at you. The swooping and circling does not help much either. Despite these challenges, I stood my ground and slowly, with several restarts, managed to get it outside. The we realized that one of the cats had decided to take advantage of the open doors and went exploring. Our cats are indoor cats so this was a bit of a tense moment as it was coaxed back inside. I left this to the expert and took my chance to go back to bed.

I can only hope your Friday morning was less interesting.

*smiles*