Usin' sawmill slabs for bats...

Okay, about 2:00 am last Sunday morning...

I was sleeping, Freddie sleeping beside me on his side. I rolled over and my elbow hit him on his side. Without fully waking up I said I was sorry and our exchange went like this:

Polt: Sorry.
Freddie: (mumbled something I couldn't hear).
Polt: What?
Freddie: There's a bat in here.
Polt: (not being awake enough to comprehend yet) What?
Freddie: There's a bat in here.
Polt: (thinking, since I wasn't awake yet, that since I hit Freddie, he was going to hit me back and claim he was using a baseball bat, so I put my hands over my face and said) Okay, go ahead, hit me.
Freddie: (pause) There is a BAT in here.
It finally dawned on me what he was saying, and I said, "There is not a bat-"

Now, just picture this for me: Polt laying on his back, Freddie on his left side to Polt's right. Both of us naked. Several pillows laying aruond us (I have like 7 pillows on my bed). And just as I was saying that above, a bat flew above us, maybe two feet or a yard above us. And when it did, Freddie and I both, in unison, gasped and grabbed pillows and pulled them on top of us.


I blurted out "Oh man, there's a BAT in-" but was stopped by another fly over by the bat, eliciting identically timed gasps by Freddie and myself. And honest to God, the thought in the forefront of my mind was "this pillow's not long enough to cover my face AND my special no-no place!"

I started to say, "Freddie this IS a bat-" but then it circled overhead again, making us gasp in time again. Then it landed somewhere, cause it wasn't flying overhead right then.

Freddie asked me to turn on the light, which I adamantly refused, cause it would require me to roll over and extend my arm to it's fullest extent, and i wasn't gonna give that long of a target to the bat to run into. Then Freddie asked me to give him his glasses. that I could do. I rolled over and got them off the stand and handed them to him. Then I figured, since I hadn't seen the bat for several seconds, I'd try to turn on the light, and did so without any bat attacks.

We located the bat hanging from the top of a doorway in the room. Freddie started to climb over me, and at that point, that bat took to the air again. I grabbed a pillow and threw it over my head, curling into a ball on my side. Freddie launched himself over me across the bed and landing on the floor with a great thump. (A thump so loud, incidently, that it brought Ag and Andrew, in Ag's bedroom, both right up in bed. Andrew wondered what had happened, Ag told him I was probably too...vigorious with Freddie and pushed him off the bed. Or he fell off. She didn't know.) The bat circled a few times, and then landed on and clung to the doorway to my closet. Freddie threw on some shorts and a t-shirt, while sitting on the floor. I inched my way across the bed and then ran into the bathroom, shutting the door.

At about that moment, the bat took to the air again, but Freddie was on the floor and I was safely behind the shut bathroom door. The bat chose to land on some curtains I have up in the bedroom's dormer, and then crawl behind them.

Peeking out the door, Freddie asked me what we were going to do. I told him that since he was Zoo Science major, and all about animals and stuff, he'd know what to do. I explained to him quickly about my prior experience with a bat in the apartment (involving several dives behind the bedroom door, a clothes basket, a tennis racket, my mother and a collander on my head) and advised him I probably wouldn't be too good in this circumstance.

Since the bat wasn't moving, I came out of the bathroom and put on some shorts and a t-shirt. Freddie said he'd need a pair of gloves, so I got him the second set of orange, orange-scented cleaning gloves (like those I used a few weeks ago to clean my bathroom). As he put them on, I went to close the door to the living room. This would keep the bat trapped in the bedroom, and the hallway between the bedroom and living room, which, also conviently, had the doorway out onto the balcony. I explained that all he had to do was get the bat out the balcony door and our worries were over.

He asked if I had something to throw at the bat, something not to hurt it just to dislodge it. I went back to the bathroom and got him two of the sponges that I bought at the same time i got the gloves. Then when he was ready, I did made myself as useful as possible: I went into the living room, shut the door, and started to download porn. Hey, had I been in the room I would have been in the way and caused mor probelms than I would have solved.

It wasn't long, though, until Freddie knocked at the living room door and asked if I had something else, like a broom. And indeed I did, so i got it and took it into the bedroom for him. He said the sponges didn't work and pointed. Apparently, when he threw the one sponge, since it was so light, the breeze took it right into the way, where, it was still stuck.

So with the broom in hand, and Freddie well in control of the situation, I retreated back to the living room and my porn. After a short bit, he came into the living room, looking dejected. he said the prodding with the broom hadn't been as successful as he hoped. And when grabbed onto the windowblind and pulled for it to go up, the lower portion instead ripped off in his hands while the upper part flew up and flopped around the roller at the top...causing the bat to fly out a bit and Freddie to be startled. He wasn't sure where in fact the bat had ended up.

So i went into the bedroom with him. the only thing to do was to move all the STUFF that I had...well, stuffed into the dormer. Not something I wanted to do at 2:30 in the morning, but what could we do. So we carefully did that, each armed with a t-shirt in case we should disturb the bat and cause him to fly around again.

After clearing it out, he asked me for a box. We (meaning HE) could trap it in the box and let it go out the balcony door. I got him a shoe box and while he worked on that, i went back to my porn downloading. After a short while, he came out and told me he turned the light off, maybe to make the bat less stressed, and wanted to know if I had a flashlight. I told him I did. He then asked me to come back into the bedroom and hold the flashlight for him. I didn't want to BUT he needed to hold the broom and the box and couldn't hold the flashlight as well.

So in we went. I held the flashlight up to where the bat was. Freddie had found him back under the curtain, right behind the curve in the curtain rod. So he prodded it with the broom. this made the bat crawl out about half it's body length and released a horrid little screeching noise that bothered Freddie more than anything else. Then, it crawled back. So Freddie jostled the curtain again, and again the bat crawled out, only this time, Freddie shoved the box up against it, pinning it where it was. More of that screeching. unfortunately, Freddie had pinned it with the side of the box again the wall and NOT against the open side of the box. So he was like that, me shining the flashlight on it, for a few seconds, when we both realized this wasn't going to work.

So Freddie pulled the box away. At which point, the bat, disorientated, flew forward, but slammed into Freddie, landing on his shorts and clinging on. Freddie jumped up and down, dislodging the bat, which promptly landed squarely on his one, unsocked and unshoed foot. this cause Freddie to stamp his feet up and down vigoriously. The bat was flung off onto the floor where Freddie wisely threw the box, open end down, over it.

And Freddie and i started breathing again.

After this is was just a small matter of moving some rugs out of the way, propping the balcony door open, sliding the box along the floor to the door. The living room door was shut, I shut the bedroom door (while I was on the bedroom side), and Freddie, kneeling, lifted the box, and the bat flew right out the door, probably scared out of its' wits, but not injured. Neither were either one of us.

We laughed about it later, and went back to bed, although Freddie said he didn't go back to sleep until the sun came up. And the rest of the time he was here, he got pretty anxious (not in a good way) when we were in bed, listening for and looking for bats.

It was only the next day, that we discovered how he got in: I had left the screen up on one of my windows (I put it up to take an unobstructed photo of the cut guy cutting the lawn), so the bat probably just flew in one night when I left the windows open because it was cool.

the worst part about all this is, for a few days before this, it had been very hot, and I had the place all shut up, with the a/c on. So who knows how long the bat was in the apartment.....flying around at night while i was sleeping...pooping and bat-peeing all over the place. EW!

Below are some pics of the adventure:

First, the bat himself. It's just the black blob above the curtain top.


Second, we have Freddie, all gloved up and armed for combat!


Thirdly, we have the sponge, stuck on the wall and not doing ANY good against the bat.


And finally, we have Freddie, hand over the box, ready to released the wayward rodent.


Freddie, my hero. My defender, fighter of flying rodents, vanquisher of unwanted bats!

POLT

You're going to hell for what you've done to this girl, Talia, if I have to escort you there myself. - Black Canary, Birds Of Prey #97