plot twist of my life.

I promised part II of this story would be posted one day after the first post. Weeks later... here we are. I am so good at blogging.

Also I regret everything about not posting the second half of this story while it was fresh on my mind... but I will do my best.

So we left off with me surrendering my laundry room to an unknown living thing stuck in my dryer vent.

This is where I made sesame chicken wraps. They were dericious. 

This is the part where I hate myself for waiting so long to tell the second half of the story. The details are foggy, so we will skip to the part where my husband & I put our son to bed and got to work on rescuing Templeton.

I had been telling him all day that there was something stuck in our dryer. When we got home, there was no scuttling. I pulled forward the dryer and bumped the silver snake. You know that thing I'm talking about? It's like the umbilical cord of dryers, only wrapped in some sort of tinfoil and it looks like the springy part of a worm. I just google image searched worms to get a shot of what I mean and now I am going to have nightmares forever. Sorry, folks. No worm photo. Just trust me when I say it's a silver, wormy, umbilical-cord of dryers.

Okay. So I used my mop to bump the silver accordion that hooks my dryer up to the wall. Whenever I bumped it, the rodent would scuttle. I would freak out and look at my husband. And he would say, "what?"

He didn't hear it. Anytime I bumped the silver thing, it made a noise that would drown out the scuttling. Or maybe there was no scuttling and this was all in my head.

No, there was definitely scuttling earlier that day. I knew it.

I started pounding on the worm. No scuttle.

"OH MY GOSH IT'S DEAD!" I looked at my husband, horrified. "There is a dead rat in my dryer and I don't even know where it is. I think we should move. Let's hurry and sell this place before the smell takes over."

"It's not dead. Calm down."

I don't remember how, but something happened and the creature started to scuttle some more. We came up with a plan to trap it.

Knowing this would be noisy, we stuffed towels into the crack underneath Jamey's door, as well as the laundry room door. We closed ourselves in the laundry room and blocked off any chance of escape. Once the demon was released, it would be a fight to the death. I was not about to let some street rat (<< literally) run amuck in my home.

We decided to use two plastic bags (you know, an extra layer just in case this thing had razor sharp claws and vampire fangs) to trap whatever it was. The consensus was that one of us would take one for the team and be the trapper. There wasn't enough room for both of us to go behind the dryer. Husband volunteered, and we set out trying to find exactly where in the worm this thing was located, so we could devise a plan to get it out.

I am going to break for a moment to say that I love my husband. He is a hard working man and does a lot for me. But when it comes to killing spiders, we have to rock-paper-scissors. So I'm sure you can understand how he felt about catching a rat. Also he has a traumatizing history with rats which made this situation all the more terrible for him.

After watching him suffer for a few moments, I decided to Katniss it up and volunteer as tribute. Wanting the animal in a specific place, we turned on the dryer for a few seconds so it would go as far up the worm as it could. The creature was in position, so I got on my stomach on top of the dryer. Husband was holding my legs, and I was trying to yank the worm away from the dryer. Terrible position to try to attempt that.

So I climbed behind the dryer. I got my plastic bags in place, and took a few deep breaths. I put my hands around the worm and yanked. Turns out, I didn't need to pull that hard. The worm came free and my animal now had an open door to escape into my laundry room.

I started shaking from head to toe.

"Hurry!" husband exclaimed. "We don't want it to get out without trapping it!"

I fumbled and put the bags around the top of the worm's opening. I sat there holding the worm, shaking like a chihuahua. Nothing happened. Mr. Scuttle wasn't scuttling. I nudged the end of the worm where I knew the animal was. The scuttling started.

I panicked. I shook. I whimpered. And then Mr. Scuttle ran into the bag.

"AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!" I screamed. I screamed and I screamed. I held the bag so tight, and suddenly something sharp was grasping my thumb.

"OH MY GOSH. IT'S BITING ME. THIS RAT IS GOING CRAZY AND IT'S BITING ME AND I'M GOING TO GET HYPOTHERMIA AND DIE." because that made complete sense.

My shaking turned into seizure-like thrashing, and I was afraid Scabbers would escape. I screamed some more.

"ALLIE! ALLIE!" My husband looked at me. "Allie! It's a bird. It's a bird. Calm down. It's just a bird."

I finally used my eyeballs to look and see that there was no vampire rat digging its fangs into my thumb, just a poor little bird scared out of its mind. He had one of his talons wrapped around my thumb.

My heart slowed. A bird! I took a breath. It's a bird. I took a closer look. Wait a second. I know this bird! 

^^ unedited photo taken from my camera of the bird. 

We successfully transferred the bird to a bucket and went outside to let him free. As I watched him fly away, I thought of all that bird and I had just gone through together and started to cry.

Just kidding. I don't cry over birds.