i can cross this off of my life's to-do list

I had quite an adventure this weekend. Manda and I accompanied her mom up to the outskirts of Yosemite where her mom has a small cabin/house/mountain retreat that she's been fixing up for a while.

After the long day Friday, I was looking forward to a lot of sleep and some R & R in the great wide north. Turns out, I got lots of sleep and shoveled gravel. Not that I'm complaining. I really had a nice time. A little hard labor is good for a person. Anyway, that wasn't the adventure, though.

Saturday night, we were going out to celebrate the 71st birthday of Manda's mom's neighbor with a big group of people. Between dinner and dessert, we stopped back at Manda's mom's. That's when I decided to excuse myself upstairs and use the Little Composer's room.

Well, as soon as I closed the door to the bathroom, I noticed some shadows flying around on the far wall. I thought "Oh, a moth must be flying around the lightbulb." and looked quickly at the bulb to see what was going on.

No moth. So, confused, I then looked at the shadows. No shadows. Instead, it was a bat. Now, never having been closed in a small room with a flying rodent before, I'm not ashamed to say that it gave me a pretty serious case of the willies. With a polite "how do you do?" I excused myself from the bathroom and let everyone else know what was going on.

Needless to say, no one was too thrilled. I don't really remember the next sequence of events, but somehow I ended up back in the enclosed bathroom armed with a large dust wand and the screen to the bathroom window as I tried to corral the thing outside.

Actual photo:



We went back and forth all over the place for a while. He hung from the ceiling, the walls, the floor (how do you hang from the floor? he did it), my sweater ... Eventually he ended up hanging from my window screen shield. With him on it, I could finally just reposition the thing back in the window and he flew away.

It was fun. I recommend wrestling with a bat to all my friends.