Oh, Natasha! Outside is Not as Awesome as You Think

Our black cat Natasha thinks she loves to go outside. She tries to get out the front door nearly every time it opens, and she's succeeded a couple of times this week for real short amounts of time. Last night, our friend's 3-year old opened our front door because he was ready to leave, and Natasha apparently went "don't mind if I do" and walked out. Yes, our black cat with no collar escaped into the night. Ugh.

This led to a 30-40 minute search, in the dark, around the house and a couple of our neighbors houses. Judy thought she had her, but Natasha hissed and ran away and she couldn't find her again, so I went out to search. Just before I gave up, I decided to check our back yard and managed to find her. Natasha, however, had found out that she doesn't like going outside nearly as much as she thinks she does. Turns out that outside in December is cold and dark and pretty scary. So scary, in fact, that she hissed at me repeatedly and ran away around the back of the garage when I tried to get her. Then she wriggled under our side gate and into the neighbors' bushes. She stayed there for a minute, though, and when she tentatively poked her head out, I grabbed her and held on tight despite getting a pretty good scratch. Then I deposited her back in the house where she continued to be freaked out for the next hour. All of this happened, of course, right during Evelyn's bath time, which is why we had to split up the search in the first place.

On top of that, her brother Victor, who has never really been apart from her, started freaking out and meowing like crazy when he realized that we were trying to find her. When you have little kids over as company, odd things can happen, I guess. I'm just glad we were able to find her and that she didn't spend the whole night outside.