The night the kitty-saurus had an adventure.

It was a warm and lovely day. I got to talk to a few friends who stopped in at work (I must admit, I missed that part of working in retail. Until someone I don't like comes in, in which case I'll wish I was working in a factory again.), and got to spend time with The Hubby. We even went for a walk at a  park, and walked about a mile. Of course, then we rewarded ourselves with ice cream.

When we got home and settled it was starting to get late, so we started getting ready for bed. I kept hearing a cat who sounded an awful lot like our Juggabutt, but there are also a lot of other strays that run around. They seem to be drawn to the porch area, especially since my cats like to hang out in the window that faces the porch. So I tried to ignore it for a minute, but it quickly started to bother me. It sounded exactly like Jugga, and The Pants was meowing, too. She's helpful like that. Anytime they are low on food or water, or if one of them hacks up a hairball, or if Jugga's in some sort of shenanigans, The Pants will follow you around and meow like the world is coming to an end until we figure out the problem. This is the only time she does this.  I looked out on the porch and in front of the porch, but couldn't see anything, and once I was out there I couldn't hear anything, either. Shit. I had The Hubby go check our bedroom to see if both kitties were safe, because it wasn't looking good for us.  The Pants was in there freaking out, meowing desperately to let us know that her frenemy was in trouble, and indeed, the Jugga was nowhere to be found.

The next 30 minutes went something like this:

"I think she's in the wall."
"No, she can't be in the wall, there's no way for her to get in there!"
"Maybe she's in the attic. It sounds like she's in the attic."
"No, she can't be in the attic, there's no way for her to get up there!"
"Could she have gotten outside and under the house somehow?"
"She could have gotten outside, but when? And there's no way for her to get under the house. She's gotta be in the closet. Did you check your closet?"
"Yes, and she's not in our closet, and the sound is coming from this side of the hallway. She's gotta be in the wall or the attic around the bathroom closet."
"She can't be! I don't see how she could've gotten in there."
"Are there any holes anywhere that she could have gotten into to get up into the attic?"
"No, there aren't any holes anywhere, we sealed all that stuff up. Are you sure she's not in the closet?"

And repeat. Sigh.

Closets were ransacked *repeatedly*--no kitty. This whole line of conversation was punctuated by me calling for her and her responding. And almost every time we'd call Jugga to try and get a better idea of where the hell she was, The Pants meowed, too. I think maybe she was trying to help us call her, but her yowling was interfering with our ability to hear our stuck kitty.We could even hear Jugga scratching occasionally, trying to get through. My heart was pounding, but I was going to get my dinosaur-kitty out of wherever she was. The in-laws were using the generic "Here kittykittykitty," which never works for our cats (they respond to their names), so for a while when we were looking outside they weren't getting any response from her. So when I got back in and heard that, I started to panic when I wasn't getting any response either. But I think she was just like "WTF?" since after a few times of me calling her name she started responding again. There was no doubt about it, she was in the wall. We just had to figure out how to get her out.

Like they said, they'd sealed everything up (...Except for the two spots that they eventually mentioned, one of which she had used to get up into the attic. Stab.) so there wasn't an easy way to get to her without putting a hole somewhere. So they dragged a chair into the bathroom closet and ripped out some of the paneling in the wall at the top of the closet, giving us just enough open space to look and shine a flashlight. And pull out a kitty. We could hear her meowing, and she could see the flashlight beam, but it didn't seem like she was moving closer. So I  got up in the chair and called for her, and finally I could hear her scrambling. Obviously she had dropped down some from the attic floor into the wall space, and had to climb back up to be able to get out. I was about to cry at the thought of Jugga getting stuck in the wall with no way to climb out (she is declawed, after all), but I stuck my hand up into the hole in the closet anyway so she could hopefully see where to go.

There are no words for how happy I was to see whiskers and a nose finally peek over the edge of the hole... She climbed down so she was at the same level as the hole, but that still left a foot of a drop onto the tops of the clothes hanging up in the bathroom closet. She wasn't jumping it and she wasn't letting me pull her out all carefully and stuff, so I petted her and got her purring and happy while The Hubby grabbed her legs and I got her around the neck and shoulders and pulled. And out comes a filthy, scraped up, musty-smelling kitty-saurus, meowing and purring and rubbing against my ears, neck, hair, and face. 

And all was well with the world again.