I couldn’t believe it, even after it seemed as though it had to be the case. Sometime on Tuesday afternoon, between noon and three o’clock, I opened the door. I subsequently closed the door. And upon further investigation, later that afternoon, it hit me.

My cat had ran out when the door was open.

Lucky for me I was only figuring this out when Ashley came back from her classes, so it wasn’t as though she was going to freak out or anything (riiiiight).

For the next 5 hours or so, a lot of things seemed to happen all at once.

1. I didn’t get any work done for the rest of the day, pretty much. I spent most of the rest of the daylight hours (and a little bit of the night time) searching for Indie.
2. Ashley made the most of her time, mostly by sitting by the window, looking out, and being sad. Way to go.
3. Justin made up a few LOST CAT posters for me to slap up around the neighborhood. He even put a couple of them on white stakes for us to punch into the ground. I guess the front of my apartment just wasn’t white trash enough for Mr. Jones.
4. A couple of Indie’s belongings were placed out on the curb in order to help her find her way back. By the time night fell, it was her monkey (something she drags around all over the place) and a scarf of Ashley’s she likes to lay on, tied around the outside of the doorknob.
5. Finally, a call was placed to the local humane society, just to put a bug in their ear. Alas, the line was busy for over an hour, and we gave up on them. Time to adopt some newer technologies, maybe, humane society?

As the night came to a close, we were both finally able to get to sleep, with the mindset of getting up nice and early to go out looking for her again.

Around 3:30am the next morning (probably only a couple of hours before another search would have begun) a loud meowing sound came from the other side of the front door, and there stood Indie, hungry and tired.

Ashely gave her fresh food and water, and stayed up with her for a little while before collapsing again. Indie proceeded to sleep throughout the rest of the day (a little over 24 hours of napping, in total).

Oh, but there was one part of the day that she wasn’t able to sleep through. Her bath. See, something about being at ground level in an apartment complex gives a small animal the distinct smell of gasoline.

So Indie’s gift for for coming back to us after about 12 hours of being away? A nice bath, complete with humiliating pictures of her as a wet cat.

Turns out wet cat is also pretty hard to photograph well.

Turns out Ashley did a way better job getting a shot than me.

After a few hours of licking herself, she was ready to calm down. So we threw a towel in the dryer and wrapped her up in it. She liked that, and didn’t move for another few hours.

Yeah, I think she was pretty glad to be back.

Thanks to Justin, Dad, Hannah, and everyone else for the moral support!