No one likes to be woken up at 3 in the morning. When you're NOT a morning person, though, and no one is dead or dying, it almost qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment.

But that's what happened to me today. I was woken to my brave and loving husband yelling my name.

Let me digress. You see, we have only a crawl space under our house. Somehow a stray cat managed to find its way down there about two days ago. Now, we do have three cats and two dogs of our own, so another cat meowing below the house isn't really something we need or want. Not to mention that the temperature last night was -24 (yes, that's negative twenty-four degrees!) -- BRRRRRR!!!!

OK, so for two days we've tried to catch this mystery cat. My brave husband even put a "Have-A-Heart" trap down in the crawl space to capture it. At 3 a.m. today it finally worked.

As he yelled for me to see the cat (which I've named "Harry" for Harry Houdini) did what is supposed to be impossible. He escaped.

My husband dropped the cage and grabbed the cat. Harry didn't appreciate that, as you might imagine. Harry tried to escape again. This time using claws and teeth, he succeeded for a second time in less then 2 minutes.

That's when all heck broke loose. Our three cats scattered in every direction and Harry took off like... well, you get the idea. Thankfully, the two dogs were outside already, doing their own thing.

As a side note, 6-foot tall men with heavy Texas accents should never scream like young girls. Not at 3 a.m. and not if they don't want their very tired wives to laugh.


Harry darted away and ended up in the bathroom. It took every ounce of focus I had at that time of the morning to close the bathroom door and trap Harry. Meanwhile, my husband, still sounding a bit like a pre-pubescent girl, grabbed a sheet to use on Harry.

The brave man went into the bathroom and said "Calm down, boy." It didn't work.

Crash! Bang! Crash!

"Open the door!" Hubby then ran out of the bathroom carrying a wad of bed clothing that wiggles more than when the kids were little and thought we might not notice the lump in the bed. I opened the door as he tossed the pile into the front lawn. By the time the sheet hit the ground, the cat was gone.

I was back in bed by 3:15, although it took much longer to actually fall back asleep!