Unwelcome Guest

I was working late in our home office the other night when I heard a noise on the patio.  The office is in the basement, but there is a lower level patio cut out about 12 feet under ground level -- it's great because it gives the basement lots of natural light.  Anyway, I called up to Sweetie to see if he had thrown something down into the patio or something like that.  He hadn't.  He instructed me to close the shutters and we'd see what was out there.  So, I closed the shutters and turned on the patio lights.  He looked down from the upstairs and said, "It's a cat."  

A cat.  A small, very mangy, nasty-looking cat.  It had apparently jumped, or fallen, into the basement patio and now couldn't get back out.  We watched as it got up on the patio table and did a spread-eagled leap into the air toward the wall of the patio, falling to the ground like a ton of bricks.  Yeah.  He hadn't quite mastered the whole jumping thing.  

It is cases like this where my 7th and 8th-grade gifted students class ("Project Challenge," which my classsmates and I affectionately called "Project Reject") proves its worth.  I start brainstorming 101 ways to get a yucky cat out of a basement patio WITHOUT bringing it into the house and tracking fleas all over the place.

My first idea was to put our tall ladder on one of the patio chairs so that the cat could climb out and make the short leap to ground level.  So, Sweetie did that.  For the longest time, the cat wasn't getting it and kept leaping off the table fruitlessly.  

So, I put Plan B into action.  I put a bunch of canned tuna into an empty tea bag and tied a roll of string around it.  Then, I lowered the string down into the patio from outside, resting it near that chair with the ladder on it.  However, the cat didn't appear.  In fact, I couldn't see the cat anywhere on the patio.  Sweetie came to investigate and noticed that the ladder had moved.  The cat was gone.  Hooray.   And it was waaaay past our bedtime.