**Cat Tale #1: **Years ago, before Typo and I got married, we were living in towns about 3 hours apart.
One Friday evening, I drove the 3 hours to spend the weekend at his place. I had my cat in the car. I needed to stop just before I got there - and the cat bolted from the car. I know, I was a dumbass for not having her in a carrier or at least on some kind of leash, but…
45 minutes of looking and calling, with the help of a couple of strangers who saw my distress, and no cat. I drove to Typo’s place, in tears.
2 hours later, we went back to the place I’d stopped, crossed the somewhat major road she’d bolted across, and called - and I heard her meowing. Poor thing was probably frightened and quite relieved to be back with me even if it meant riding in the evil car.
**Cat Tale #2: **Same cat - remember, this was in the days when you just let them run outside. She didn’t appear one night, or the next morning. That afternoon, I went around the apartment complex calling for her and finally heard her. She was on the roof of the building behind mine! The building consisted of garden apartments (flats, vs my own where I had two stories to myself), so I went up one of the stairwells, knocked on someone’s door, and asked if I could go out on her balcony to try to retrieve the cat. The resident let me use a deck chair, and even had some discarded chicken guts for me to use to try to attract the cat. At one point I nabbed the cat but her leg was caught in the gutter so I had to release her or risk breaking her leg. It took a few more minutes for her to be willing to approach me again but she was eventually rescued.
**Missing wallets: **I once lost my wallet. Realized it after I got to the office. Spent an hour or two calling to cancel all the cards etc. Then I went back out to the car for one last look… and it had somehow wound up under the front seat. This was the last work day before Christmas - and luckily my husband had a non-joint credit card, so we had a way to pay our travel expenses.
Missing ID card: A couple of weeks ago, I had to go to our client site (a Federal office building). I’d cleared some things out of my purse before vacation and this was my first day back afterward. I keep my Metro card and the building pass in the same plastic card-holder / lanyard, so I knew I had it with me once I got on the Metro. Only… I had my company ID on the holder, not the client building pass. So I had to go through the full blown security including running my laptop through the x-ray belt, and step through a metal detector, and wait for a co-worker to come escort me in.
But nobody was answering their phones.
45 minutes later, someone responded - but asked me to go around to the other entrance. That meant repeating the whole security thing - got me wanded too, as that machine evidently did not like my bra hooks.
Got home at the end of the day. I knew exactly where my client badge was, right where I’d put everything I offloaded before vacation. And it wasn’t there. Cussing under my breath, I began searching. Then I turned everything out of my bag onto the kitchen table… and the damn badge was there. I’d had it all along.
Hammie goes walkabout: When I was about 10, one of my brothers had a hamster. The hamster lived in a cage in the basement. As hamsters are very good escape artists, he got out a couple of times. One time, he was gone for a day or more. We found him in my bedroom (on the main floor of the house), in the space underneath my desk - it was enclosed, and I had to pull the desk away from the wall to get him out; not sure if he could have gotten out by himself. He’d chewed up a plastic toy that was under there. To this day I have no idea how he got there - that was a massive distance (plus a flight of stairs), there was no food or anything else to attract him in the room or behind the desk. I have to wonder if one of my brothers put him there as a prank, as it’s the only thing that makes sense.
My mother once lost her engagement ring - it fell off her finger into a parking lot at a convenience store near home. She went back an hour or so later, when it had gotten dark - and found it by shining a flashlight until the reflection turned it up. A friend lost her engagement ring; she’d lost a bit of weight and it was loose, and it flew off her finger in another friend’s back yard in Arizona. We all looked for hours but no luck. Several years later, the mutual friend jokingly told her young son “10 dollars if you find it”… and he found it in a half hour. It was stuck in a shrub.
**National Zoo #1: **Not my story of course, but this one is along the lines of the missing bird.
**National Zoo #2: ** Thezoo recovered several stolen Gaboon vipers.
