Dead Cat Part Two

As you will all remember, a couple of months ago I had a memorable moment one night on my front porch when my neighbor and I thought we had discovered a dead cat in the ceiling of our front porch. It of course turned out to be merely the fur hood of a winter coat stuffed in the crawl space above, but nontheless it has had me on guard unknowingly ever since. (See Another Unexpected Experience)

We have a crazy number of alley cats living in the alley next to our home. They grow exponentially and seem to survive thanks to a little old lady who drives down the alley a few mornings every week and dumps cat food to feed them. The whole in the side of our home (where I found the tray of baked beans last month) has become the welcome door for these cats to live under our home apparently. For the last few weeks, we have been suffering through nights of cats fighting beneath us and making all kinds of other unappreciated noises. They particularly liked to congregate underneath the floor of my bedroom and "yowl" all through the night. In an attempt to reestablish peaceful slumber my dad and I bought a board to cover the whole. Our friends Eddie and Vinnie came over to partake in the scaring of the cats out of our basement only to discover what appeared to be a suspicious orange furry thing draped over an air duct in our basement. Many of the air ducts had been pulled out and ripped up from the cats living under there and so I just assumed it was insulation from within the duct, but the more closely we looked the more we were unsure. Before my family left town, I finally caved and had my dad look in the basement to make sure once again that there were no dead cats anywhere in our home.

You may have guessed it already, but this time it was indeed a dead cat! Not only was the cat dead, but it was mummified, which means it has probably been dead under our house for at least the duration of our stay. I couldn't believe it! By the end of it all though we successfully removed the dead cat (okay so that was my dad), sealed up all entrances to the basement, and by last night enjoyed our first night of peaceful slumber in quite some time.