Listening to the Subtle Clues

03 Aug Listening to the Subtle Clues

The previous blog entry concerned our cat, her health and her particular skill set.  I don’t want to spoil the plot if you haven’t read it, but you can probably throw an accurate guess at it by considering what a cat does well.   If you’d like a further clue, it has something to do with the unsettling sound of a scraping of tiny claws within a wall cavity.  You have heard that sound, right?

Well, that sound plagued me last night. I had spent the day working alongside the crew, taking turns running the jackhammer, lifting up the broken concrete chunks- that was the morning.  In the afternoon we installed a bluestone patio.  Aidan and Jack worked together to place the largest stones, the ones over a hundred pounds, and I worked the gaps, braking rocks to fit irregular spaces.  Basically I was spent.  It was a friday too.  I sat in my a-little-too-small recliner chair and watched a few episodes of the newly released 5th season of Breaking Bad on my iPad.  But from the kitchen, throughout the evening during the breaks between episodes and during the quiet moments between dialog I heard that unsettling sound emanating from the kitchen.

After I woke up, after the iPad hit the floor, after I had slept through three quarters of an episode in my chair, it was at last time to drag myself to bed.  I took my dinner plate to the kitchen where I heard the sound more clearly.  The house was quiet.  It was all of 10:15, Nancy had gone to bed, the teenagers were wherever teenagers are at that hour and I was alone in the kitchen.  Or was I?  I stood near the refrigerator and listened, then the stove, then the sink.  The sound had a rhythm.  Maybe the mouse was rehearsing for a drummer gig in a rodent band?  Or maybe it wasn’t coming from inside the walls at all.  Maybe it was the broken iPod Porter had plugged-in on the counter that had defaulted to an endless loop of a disjointed startup chime, complete with a scratchy-feedback chorus finishing with a chopped-off chirp.

Electronic pest.  I’m going to need a hacker-exterminator.