At least the window is intact this time

When J and I got home last night, it was immediately apparent that something was wrong. The whole house smelled like dank cat pee, which is never the scent you want to be greeted with. A short investigation led us to the basement, where a pool of water was seeping out from underneath the washing machine. The laundry room is also where we keep the cat box and an old bathmat to catch the litter from the cats' paws. The good news was the smell wasn't from a terrible cat pee accident; the bad news was the water had spent the day soaking the bathmat and emitting the musty cat pee smell into the air. We tossed the bathmat outside and called the landlord about the mysterious water.

The landlord came over and quickly determined that the water was leaking in from the massive pile of snow next to the house, which had overwhelmed our drainage system. J and he spent some time outside clearing it all away and some time inside sopping up the water and trying to air out the basement by cracking the little windows down there.

These windows open on a top hinge and just have slide locks on the bottom. We're supposed to open them up when we run the dryer, but I'm afraid the cats will find a way to squeeze out of them, so we usually have a steamy jungle atmosphere in the basement when laundry is going. Anyway, things got cleaned up, I lit a pink grapefruit candle to help with the smell, and we settled in to watch some "Heroes." (Real Girl TOTALLY CALLED who Claire's dad was going to be. She is a genius.)

Before going to bed, I gave the cats some food. Hmmm, no Max. I went down to the basement to turn off the lights, and my stomach dropped: the window had been left open. A quick search around the house confirmed what I guessed: Max took another vacation. At least this one had a quieter exit than the last one. We did a search last night to no avail and I went to sleep with terrible dreams about lost cats and bad things happening to them.

This morning I woke up early to a peach sunrise and went out to do another search. In some ways, I'm more nervous than I was when he was lost in Brooklyn, because the places he could go were limited; he couldn't get into backyards from the front of brownstones. Even though our new neighborhood is quieter, there are infinitely more places he can hide. There is a whole alley of backyards, cars, garages. We back up to a parking lot that releases into a very busy street. It's easy to get to the front of the house, where there is access to all the fronts and backs of houses in all of Denver. Chances are, he's doing what he did last time, which is balling up in a dark place and waiting. But what if we don't find him before he gets unscared and starts exploring? What if he has no sense of what our house smells like from the outside?