Let me tell you about that time Irene disappeared for 13 hours.
This all started yesterday. Jerbs had to work but I was home all day. It was not a great day for being at home; I tried to do laundry and washed two loads before I realized that the washing machine was leaking pretty badly, so our laundry room got pretty flooded, and I had to clean up the mess, which was very, very unpleasant. Thankfully we are very lazy, so there was a pile of towels waiting to be washed on the laundry room floor, which prevented the flood from hitting the kitchen too. It's mostly aggravating because this happened a couple months ago and maintenance replaced the pump. Hopefully we'll get a whole new washer/dryer this time . . . but we'll see. And that all doesn't have much to do with Irene disappearing except that after the massive clean up, I was tired and grouchy and had a headache and decided to take a nap, and I'm pretty sure that's when Irene slipped out of the house.
At any rate, Jerbs got home and after she'd been here awhile she asked where Irene was, and I just kind of shrugged, because really, Irene's a cat. She hides a lot so when I don't see her for hours at a time I don't worry about it. And neither does Jerbs. So we ate dinner and put up Halloween decorations, and then Jerbs took the dogs for a walk and when she came back, she noticed that the screen on our living room window was completely loose at the bottom. We searched the whole house and Irene definitely wasn't here; Jerbs asked me when I'd last seen her and I think it was when I was cleaning the laundry room. (And I won't tell Jerbs this but I'm not 100% sure on that, it might have been earlier). But my assumption is she went out the window while I was asleep.
So we walked the entire apartment complex, no Irene. We drove to the little shopping complex next door and all the other complexes on the street, no Irene. We came home and I put ads on Craigslist and Facebook. By this time Jerbs was completely freaking out because Irene is her baby, and I felt like the absolute worst human being on the face of the planet for losing her cat. There were definitely some tears. This was at almost midnight, so I had to go to bed, but Jerbs insisted on staying up to see if Rene came back.
At about 2:30 in the morning, Jerbs woke me up to tell me that Irene was home and safe. Jerbs heard her meowing and went outside and saw her at the bottom of our stairs and went down and got her, and that was that. Thank.freaking.goodness. I was so relieved.
It was just odd, because normally when Irene gets out she immediately starts yelling to get back in, which definitely wasn't the case here. So we figure that she got out while I was asleep, and cried to get back in but since I was sleeping I didn't hear her. We think that she eventually gave up and just went to sleep somewhere where she felt safe, and was either too asleep or too scared to come to us when we were calling for her.
That freaking cat, I swear. But as annoying as she is, I'm very glad she came home.
