Well, we got back from Wal-Mart last night around... 8:30? We carried our groceries upstairs, but when we got to the top of the stairs, I heard a noise. I shooshed Chad and he finally stopped rustling his grocery bags. We both heard a noise. It was coming from the ceiling. We listened for a few seconds, to hear what what sounded like something scurrying around in the ceiling. Grrreeeeeeat.
We went into our apartment and put down all of the groceries, deciding that if it hadn't been in our apartment yet, it probably wouldn't be, whatever it was. I walked back to the hallway to listen, only to have my attention drawn up to the fluorescent light in the ceiling. There are fluorescent lights in the hallway ceiling which we leave on all of the time. They are set up in a cubby in the ceiling, that's supposed to have some kind of surface covering to make the ceiling all one plane. Those coverings got taken down who knows when, and so it sits, open straight up to the bulbs. There's a little hole in the ceiling in the corner of the light cubby, in which I saw something yellow move. Not like, yellow as in a yellow animal, but yellow as in an animal pulling a piece of food into the hole. Something like that.
I told Chad what I saw and asked if there was possibly someone working in the ceiling. Yeah, no. But I figured I'd be optimistic. It really sounded like someone had a wire that they were trying to push through the ceiling. Something was up there.
We locked our door and went to bed, thinking of all of the open holes in the walls in the apartment we're living in now. There's one behind the cabinet in the kitchen, but if something fell down through the hole, we don't think it would be able to climb back up. I guess that's not much of a consolation. There's another hole behind the stove/fridge so you can get to the water pipes to the shower. Even if something came in there, it wouldn't be able to get to the food. So, feeling pretty confident that this animal(s) wouldn't be able to break into our fortress, we watched a movie and went to bed. This morning Chad got up to put a new doorknob on our door. The old one worked just fine, but nobody had the key to it, so we couldn't lock it when we left. The door that leads up to these apartments from the street has a large deadbolt-ish lock on it that's supposed to be kept locked all the time, so we weren't really worrying. But, especially with some kind of animal roaming around, we decided we better have a working lock just in case. So I was still laying in bed when I hear the drill start going. A few minutes later Chad comes into the bedroom.
"Yup, there's definitely something out there. I could hear it as soon as I started up the drill. But now it sounds like it's in one of the other apartments, not the ceiling."
Knowing that the doors to all the other apartments were securely closed, I didn't think he had too much to worry about, except the creepiness factor. He went back to the doorknob and I went back to my snoozing. He comes back in just a few minutes later and says
"Okay, that was creepy. I just heard a noise like a door opening. Like the weather-stripping brushing across the floor. Why don't you get up and get dressed and keep me company? (Or something along those lines)"
So, with visions of giant mutant rats running around in one of the apartments, big yellow eyes a-glow with ferocious greed, I put in my contacts first. I was not going to be attacked by something only to have my glasses knocked off and be rendered completely defenseless. Think Piggy in Lord of the Flies. Not happening.
So I got up, got dressed, and put in my contacts. Armed with my multi-purpose weapon of choice, I joined Chad in the hallway. I poked by broom handle into the ceiling a couple of times, and didn't hear anything. I walked down to the hallway that leads out to the roof (where Chad said he thought it was coming from) and looked through the grates on the door. There, at the far end, was the culprit. Yes, my dear friends, a bird. I watched it fly around in the hall for a few seconds. There was a box and some kind of packing paper material in there that it kept flying into, and that was the noise Chad kept hearing. His comment to me was: "I'm glad you had the guts to look, cuz I wasn't going to. I didn't want to look in and see a giant rat." I was feeling pretty self-assured. We didn't know how to get it out without getting attacked by it though. It looked pretty irritated. When I first saw it, it was flying head on into the window in the door that leads outside to the roof. Over and over again. Before I could protect my head, open the door into the hallway and shoo it out the opposite door to the roof, it flew into a hole in the ceiling, and we haven't heard from it since. We're hoping it found the exit. It explains the movement near the light last night though, if it got stuck up in the ceiling and was looking for the way out, it would have been confused by the light. But the light was probably hot and so it could see the light but not get out that way.
Anyways, I, the conquerer, feel much better to know that I don't have to worry about rats invading our kitchen. And I, the conquerer, am realizing what a wuss I married. ;o)
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