Things that go "meow" in the night

This past week several very odd things have happened. So much so that I realized it was a sign that I needed to write about said happenings on my blog. And what better time than when I am supposed to be writing a paper?

So last Sunday I ran down from church (we have church in the third floor of our apartment complex...a little stifling, but quite convenient) to get something from my apartment. As I walked back up the stairs I was startled to see a little black something leap out at me from the stairwell.

It was a cat. A very young kitten actually, and it followed me all the way up to Relief Society. She would have followed me in, too, but I closed the door before she got in. Maybe she wanted a visiting teaching assignment, too.

So then. Fast forward several hours, when someone came by my apartment to talk about FHE. He left the door open, and the cat ran in and made a beeline for under the couch. My roommate started freaking out, screaming something about allergies leading to instant death, and the cat kept running each time I moved a couch and bent down to pick her up. After moving all of the couches and chasing this cat as she ran around and around our living room, from under one couch to another, I realized that we had already established a bond of friendship and merely crouched down with my hand out. The kitten walked up to me and I, victorious, set her outside and closed the door. Don't worry, no instant death on the part of my roommate.

So then at ward prayer that night, calls were made to kill the cat (honestly! it was just a kitten) because it had committed the sin of being on the grounds of our apartment complex. I didn't want the cat eradicated because I hadn't taken a picture of it yet for this blog post, but since I do technically live in BYU housing the "RA" made threats about kicking any one out that fed the cat or let it in their apartment (too late for that one!).

And the next day, the cat disappeared. And I never took a picture of it for the blog. Sigh.

So then. The next morning as I was getting ready for work I heard someone banging on the door. It was 6:30 am, and I just figured that it was one of my roommates who had locked herself out and was just going to have to wait until I was fully clothed. Well, the banging didn't stop, so I threw a coat on and ran to the peephole--only to see FIREMEN outside the door--but no longer knocking, so I assumed that it was no longer my responsibility to open the door. I turned to my roommate for an explanation and she said that she had already opened the door and the firemen had said that there was smoke coming out of the apartments next to us and above us.

And why they needed to tell us that, I am still not sure. Maybe if the ceiling in our apartment had suddenly collapsed in on us, burning, we would at least have been warned. Or something like that. But I left for work soon after and we still had a ceiling when I got home that night, so it must have been taken care of.

And one more story. This one might make my sister Kaitlyn feel better about all her bug stories. Early this morning I was grabbing some food to take on a hike. I grabbed some grapes that I had forgotten to put in my cookie salad and that were still sitting in their bag in the fridge. I was just going to grab a bunch and wash them off and put them in a bag, taking them off the stem later, but these grapes (green, fortunately--I am glad red grapes were not put to waste like this) were so tightly squished together I had a feeling that they might just be housing something in the middle. Something alive or that had been alive. And I didn't want to have to deal with it after the grapes were supposedly "washed."

So I started pulling grapes off and washing them before dropping them in a plastic bag. As I got nearer to the center of the bunch I saw something white peeking through--and then, when I pulled off one more grape, I saw a large white bundle which appeared to be an egg sac--and a large white spider.

Seeing this, I did what any dignified adult would do. I stifled a scream (my roommates were still sleeping), threw the whole bunch in a pot filled with water sitting in the sink (so then if they spiders hatched and came out they would drown first) and ran out the door.

When I came back from my hike, I carefully lifted the whole bundle into a plastic bag and threw it away outside.

Sick. We should have kept that cat to eat our spiders...