Hazel's Misadventure

Despite being engaged to a big Bears fan, I actually didn't watch much of the NFC Championship game yesterday. Why not? We thought we lost Hazel, our 8 month old cat who we've had for two weeks, and spent 2 hours looking for her. I remembered shutting an open door around 2:15pm and then not seeing Hazel until 4:30, when we were well into the Bears game and Becka wanted to play with her. Thinking she was in her usual hiding spot under the bed, we looked under there. No Hazel. That's funny. So we looked in the bathroom, in Meghan's room, in Becka's closet. No Hazel. Becka's completely calm at this point. I'm outwardly calm and inwardly freaking out. I know that's she's gone. She never hides for very long, or at least not where we can't see her.

Keep in mind that "never" means within the last two weeks, since that comprises the entire history of our knowledge of Hazel's tendencies. But it's a fairly robust amount of information, and we know her typical hiding spots. Plus, Becka's apartment is a little over 1000 square feet. How many places could she hide?

But after turning the apartment inside out, we couldn't find her. No squeaky meows (my mom says she has some Siamese in her), no purring, no Hazel. At this point, Becka has started to get upset and it dawns on her that Hazel might have run away.

That's a terrifying feeling if your cat has never run away before, you live a block away from a busy street, and you couldn't find her collar so she has no identification tags.

So we start out looking for her. She had about an hour and a half head start on us, and she could have been anywhere. Luckily, we didn't see her on the road, but we didn't see her anywhere else either. After about 20 minutes of driving around, we realized the odds were stacked against us finding her on our own and retreated to make posters saying "LOST CAT" and post them on grocery stores and nearby trees. But after doing that for a while, we decided maybe we'd better go home in case she gets hungry and cold and tries to come back. We convinced ourselves that our best chance was for her to come back on her own.

And sure enough, not 10 minutes after we'd given up and were sitting on the couch watching my mangled attempt at DVR-ing the Bears game, she comes strolling in - from the bedroom. She was in the @#$% apartment the whole time. Becka scolded her and I freaked out and, of course, she immediately went into hiding again. But at least, this time, we knew she was in the house.

We felt like idiots, but then again, we'd looked everywhere for her. We still have no idea where she was hiding, but I guess it doesn't matter anymore.

Now we need to go take those signs down b/c I just got a phone call from the Norwalk Police Dept telling me that they think someone might've found our cat about one block from Becka's...