Goodbye, cat.

Shortly after I moved into the house where I live now, one of my roommates brought home a kitten. At first, he told me her name was Cassie, so I called her that. I work late and keep an odd schedule, so I don't see my roommates very often. When I saw my roommate again, and referred to the cat as Cassie, he laughed and said people just called it whatever they wanted to. I started calling her Lathie, which was short for Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. The name sort of stuck, as I heard people repeat it a few times. Mostly, though, we just called her cat.

Cat disappeared about a week ago. We'd been thinking, or maybe just hoping, that she was out getting laid, and would eventually return. Chomsky, one of the dogs at the house, chased a cat out of one of the barns, and we figured maybe they ran off somewhere else for some privacy.

I just got a text message from one of my roommates. It read as follows:

Rest in peace, cat.
10/06 - 4/23/07

Goodbye, cat.

New gaping hole at the farmhouse.

Hello, kitten, what is it you are looking at?



















Is it all this garbage on the floor?



















All of this garbage?














Don't get wet, sad kitty!















You're sitting under a gaping hole in the ceiling.














It will spill insulation upon you.

My leaking radiator.

Jesse was woken up by a nagging, electronic sound coming from downstairs. In a half-sleeping daze, he followed the sound to it's source: a fire alarm in the music room. The whole room was filled with thick steam as hot water poured out of the radiator that had exploded the day before, soaking the carpet to a squishy consistency. He went into the basement and found the pipes leading to the radiator in the music room and shut off the water.

And then he called me, because the radiator in my room is attached to the same set of pipes.

"Yeah, the radiator in your room was leaking," he told me, "and by leaking, I mean gallons of water were pouring out."

When I went home after work, I checked out the music room first. The floor was covered in blankets which were doing painfully little to soak up the ridiculous amount of water in the carpet. I braced myself, expecting the floor in my room to feel like mud as well.

Once again, I was pleasantly surprised to find a minuscule mess in my room compared to the disaster area downstairs. Water had been coming out of my radiator, but not nearly as much as I had expected. Instead of having a soggy floor throughout my entire room, I just had a puddle directly underneath the radiator.

It's wonderful living in an oldass house.

My exploding radiator.

My house is awesome. It's a bigass old farmhouse that is very conducive to rad parties, and also has the most amazing dedicated music room that I've ever had the chance to enjoy. It's isolated enough that we can make as much noise as we want to and let the dogs and cat run freely outside when they want to, but close enough to civilization that anything we ever need is only minutes away. It has country charm without the small-mindedness associated with it. My roommates are some of the coolest people that I've met in recent history, and I seem to regularly meet more cool people simply as a result of living there.

There are downsides, though. The house is really old, and has poor insulation, which means that when it gets cold outside, it gets cold inside. My room is the coldest in the house, but I get by with the help of a space heater, long sleeve shirts, and a bunch of blankets. I can't complain much, because my room is absurdly huge for the small amount I'm paying. The house also has stinky well water, but I lived in the middle-of-nowhere, Indiana, for ten years, so it didn't take me very long at all to get used to that again. The driveway isn't paved, and I once got my car stuck in the mud after it had been raining.

And then there's the matter of the exploding radiators.

Yesterday, the house was much colder than usual and I could see my breath in my room and in the music room. I assumed it was because it was just generally colder outside than it had been before, but I later found out that it was because the heat wasn't working due to the propane running out. I wasn't home this afternoon, but my roommate, Jesse, called me and told me that the good news was that the heat was working again. The bad news, though, was that three of the radiators in the house had blown up, including the one that was in my room. I listened to the voicemail he left describing the flying metal and black ice spraying around my room, the whole time picturing a disaster area. He said that there was enough force that the far wall across from the radiator had been sprayed with the nasty black sediment that had built up over the years. When he began talking about my upright bass and the metal flying at it, the hesitation in his voice made me fear the worst, and I listened to the words in slow motion, expecting them to end with, "and it looks like maybe the damage might be repairable, but it is a pretty big gaping hole in the body." Instead, I was incredibly relieved when he told me that there was no damage, it just got wet, and was in his room drying off.

I went home on my lunch break to check out the damage. The downstairs hallway had thick black grime all over the floor and wall from that radiator explosion, so I expected a pretty bad mess in my room. I was pleased to find that the mess was pretty much confined to the walls, and the carpet directly under them. I'll have to scrub both at some point, but it didn't look nearly as bad as the hallway downstairs. It looked gross, but the grime wasn't as thick and black, perhaps because only the top corner of the radiator blew off, instead of the whole infernal machine splitting in the middle like the one downstairs. The corner of my bed was wet, but I aimed my space heater at it, and it felt much drier by the time I left. I found a few stray pieces of ice, but it didn't seem to get on any of my stuff. My giant pile of books, science fiction magazines, and comic books laying next to my bed was, as far as I could tell, completely unharmed by the incident.

I went downstairs and another roommate, Bob, had begun mopping up the mess in the hallway. He wasn't home when it had happened, but told me that Jesse first heard a loud explosion in my room, followed by two more downstairs. I asked which other radiator blew up, and he told me it was the one in the music room. We went in there and the whole floor was wet. Fortunately, we had had a party on Friday, so everything was rearranged to allow more people in the room to enjoy some live music. Instead of spraying all of the musical equipment with black ice, the radiator was only able to spray it all over the floor.

It's funny, I really had no idea that those radiators could explode like that until a couple weeks ago when it happened to a friend of mine. She had the misfortune of having it completely soak her bed and hit her cat in the head with a heavy chunk of metal. She ended up calling the animal emergency line, and being told that her cat might have a concussion and she had to keep it awake pretty late into the night to make sure it was alright. I consider myself fortunate for just being stuck with dirty walls and carpet until I get around to cleaning it up.

I still have to say, though, that my house is pretty awesome.

The rats in the walls.

I've been living in my new place for less than two weeks now, and I think I might slowly be adjusting to more of a normal human schedule. Ideally, I'd like to wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night. I've been waking up at two in the afternoon and going to bed at five or six in the morning for a few years now, but now that I'm living with people who are awake during the day and asleep when I get home, I figure it would probably be best if I was able to adjust to a somewhat similar schedule. I've been trying to go to bed much earlier, and when it works I can wake up at around noon, but usually it doesn't work and I just lay there for most of the night. Last night was one of those laying awake nights, but I think I may have gotten to sleep earlier were it not for some animal, possibly living within my walls, making a lot of noise.

I was laying in bed at around 2:30, when I heard a noise coming from the other side of the room. It sounded like it was coming from behind my dresser, or somewhere in that general area.

SCRITCH SCRITCH SRITCH SCRATCH SCRITCH SCRATCH SCRITCH SCRITCH!!!!

I listened to it for a few seconds, wondering if it might be one of my roommates doing something outside of my room. I wasn't entirely awake, so it took me a few moments to realize that it was definitely coming from the other side of the room, and it was probably some kind of animal. I figured there was no way it was something as small as a mouse, because it was fairly loud. I tried to figure out what it could be doing to make that noise, and the only thing I could think of was that it might be trying to chew through the wall, or through my dresser. I turned on the lamp next to my bed and the noise stopped. I walked over to the the dresser and looked behind it, and under it, but couldn't see anything in the dark. I moved around the guitar cases next to the dresser, but couldn't find anything there, either. I turned off the light and tried to sleep again.

SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRATCH SCRITCH SCRITCH!!!!!

The noise started up again a few minutes after I had turned off the light. I turned the light back on and once again the noise stopped. I walked back over to the dresser and moved my guitar cases around. I thought I heard something inside of one, but figured it was probably just the sound of the case rubbing against the wall. In truth, my fear of a bigass rat jumping out at me probably contributed to my unwillingness to open the case. I got back in bed and turned off the light.

SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRITCH SCRATCH SCRITCH!!!!

When I turned on the light the third time, the noise didn't stop. I walked back to the dresser and started moving the guitar cases again, and this time I heard something scurry up the wall. I jumped at the noise heading towards my head, but it was obviously on the other side of the wall. The sound of tiny footsteps disappeared into the ceiling above my head, which is arched to match the top of the house.

I'm really hoping that the mystery creature was actually outside of the house, and not inside of the walls. I'm hopeful that this is the case, because there is already a hole in the wall that the last guy who lived there made so he could run speakers into the next room. If the animal wanted to get into my room, it could just use that hole instead of chewing a new one. As for the sound stopping when I turn on the lights, hopefully it's because the window is only a few feet from where the sound originated, and the light emanating from it frightened the thing into silence.

I guess time may tell what the mystery creature is, and where it is, and what it's doing. I may never hear from the thing again, or I may end up devoured by vermin.