The Creature in the Ceiling

I wanted to check back in and let you all know how things are going since I posted my new plan on Saturday. So far so good, even with the universe conspiring to keep me out of my kitchen. That's right, the universe wants me to prove my dedication.

Sunday started out normally enough. I made plans to meet a girlfriend for breakfast at a local cafe. It was my farewell to eating out for the next month. I needed some groceries for the afternoon of cooking I had planned, but finished breakfast before the local grocery store opened. So I headed home and did a preemptive clean of my kitchen. There's nothing better than getting to work in a newly cleaned kitchen.

Despite the chilly, rainy weather, I set out feeling uplifted. I was happy to be back on track, and excited to try some new recipes. I planned to make jambalaya in the slow cooker, a pot of pumpkin soup, and put together an eggplant parmesan to be popped into the oven for easy cooking one night during the week.

By around 1:30 I was all set and ready to start cooking. Instead of buying chicken breast (as the recipe called for) I'd defrosted some chicken thighs we already had in the freezer for the jambalaya. I deboned and defatted them myself, a process which I am usually loath to take on. But it's time to stop being a girl and start being a cook... and a cook is perfectly capable of deboning her own chicken... no matter how grossed out she is by raw meat. It's time to get over it. I took the casings off the Italian sausage, fried that and the chicken up, and had the whole thing stewing in the slow cooker within about half an hour.

That's when I heard the noise... scurrying overhead. Ok, breathe, there's a mouse in the ceiling. So what? You can deal with deboning a chicken; you can deal with a mouse living over head.

Now, before I go on to tell the rest of the story, I have to describe my kitchen ceiling. It's the one part of my lovely character apartment that I really hate. It's a drop ceiling; about 6 inches lower than anywhere else in the apartment. It's made from the kind of ceiling tiles that are found in office buildings, for easy access to wiring, etc. The kind that you can push up on and have access to what's above. I suspect it was added in the last 20 years, out of convenience, rather than properly fixing some other issue with the original kitchen ceiling.

Ok... so back to the "mouse" in the ceiling. It sounds too heavy to be a mouse, and just as that's occurring to me, one of the corners of one of the tiles starts to lift! Holy shit, I've got some sort of super rodent with opposable thumbs, lifting tiles to come down at me from above! That or something with a girth so great that sitting on the opposite side of the tile is lifting the other corner... either way I do not want to meet this creature! I grab the broom and start hitting a solid part of the ceiling and yelling, trying to frighten it away. But why on earth would it be afraid of me, with my dull finger nails and unsharpened teeth? The tile drops back down and I can hear it moving around up there. I'm frozen with fear, listening for it's every movement. The tile starts to lift again and I'm startled back into action, pounding the ceiling again with my broom. We repeat this dance three times. I'm scared that if I leave the kitchen it will get down without my knowing, and even more afraid to stay there.

I retreat to the living room, where I call the caretaker. I tell him there's an animal in my ceiling and they need to send an exterminator. He calls me back to tell me there's a guy on call and he'll let me know as soon as he hears from him.

I'm sitting on my couch with my feet tucked up under me, listening intently to the sound of the ceiling creature scurrying around. Yes, I can hear it from the living room. That's when it occurs to me that I haven't seen my very small, very mischievous, cat in quite some time. I search the apartment top to bottom, checking all her usual hiding places, and any other spot I think a small cat might get into. No luck. I'm starting to think I need to get up the nerve to stick my head up into the ceiling and see what's going on. I'm relieve to find that I am not tall enough to do so even standing on a kitchen chair... even if I worked up the guts to come face to face with creature (or cat).

I haven't mentioned yet, that hubby is out of town, which is why I didn't make the 6'3" man I live with stick his head up there. I frantically call my dad, who lives on the other end of the city. He's at my grandma's for dinner, and can't come for at least a few hours. I'm starting to worry that the exterminator will show up without calling, and I won't know whether or not the creature in the ceiling should be exterminated. I also don't have the money to pay for him, should he find my cat up there.

So I call my best friend. Can she and her partner come to my rescue? He might be tall enough. He's out, but being the excellent best friend she is, she came straight over with her roommate/cousin and two step ladders. We still can't get up high enough to see what's going on. We poke the tiles with the broom, at this point fairly certain that the creature is the cat... or at least telling ourselves that. The whole situation is seeming less frightening with other people there. Unfortunately the creature seems to be long gone. Eventually my friends go, as there is nothing more they can do for me and they have things they need to do.

I call back my caretaker and hesitantly tell him I suspect my cat has gotten up there and to please hold off on the exterminator. He is reasonably surprised to hear my cat may have gotten into the ceiling, but is pretty understanding about the whole thing.

Hours later the cat did reappear, looking annoyingly nonchalant. Only I didn’t see where she came from. My parents had just arrived, and I was feeling rather embarrassed about making them come all the way over. I found myself telling them I saw her come out of the ceiling, which I did not (if you’re reading this, sorry guys!).

So in the end all I got made Sunday afternoon was the jambalaya… but I did spend last night making the soup, and the sauce for the eggplant parmesan.

Incidentally… the cat was again no where to be found when I got home from work yesterday. She eventually reappeared and I’ve heard no more noises from above. So the mystery of the creature overhead remains unsolved.