Remember when y'all suggested that I should hire a film crew to document all of the ridiculousness I get myself into on a near-daily basis? Well, I'm seriously considering it now.

I woke up at 6:00 AM Florida time to get to the airport on time. While everyone else got ready, I had to bale-toss nine bags into the back of the pickup truck all by myself in the darkness. I've gotten used to being the pack mule by now, so I did it pretty much automatically. 

For the most part, my trip home was uneventful. I found my way through the Tampa airport without getting lost, bought myself a giant green smoothie for breakfast, and then boarded the plane shortly after. It was a full flight, but the people sitting next to me were just as small as I, so I had plenty of room to move around. My soda almost exploded all over me when I was opening it shortly after takeoff, but I managed to avert a major crisis at 30,000 feet. The flight home was smooth, and the landing was surprisingly smooth, and everyone got off the airplane fairly quickly.

I took an Uber with my grandma while my mom and little brother waited for my medical equipment to arrive, only after I had the joy of heaving everyone else's luggage off the carousel and onto a cart without help. I almost took out a little kid with a 50 pound suitcase in the middle of everything, but all was good. No kids were harmed. 

We got to grandma's house, and my little dog, Hunter, who I was really starting to miss, lost it. He was so excited to see me that he peed himself. At least he peed on the hardwood floors in the kitchen rather than on the carpet. Even though that was irritating, I couldn't be mad. Hunter missed me a lot while I was gone, and wanted nothing more than to be loved by me after not seeing me for almost three weeks. 

About a half-hour later, my mom and little brother arrived in another Uber, and we had lunch at grandma's. My grandpa Shawn stayed around while we were gone to watch the dog, so the fridge was stocked full of food. That green smoothie I had at the airport and as I was boarding the plane, as well as the bag of beef jerky I had on the plane, didn't even slightly satisfy my needs. I was starving, and ate about 6 turkey sandwiches and several bananas for lunch. 

Nothing worth writing about happened between then and later this evening. Basically, after lunch, mom took us home, I unloaded all of our stuff, went to my room, and took a 5 hour nap while my dog slept on my back.

But, later tonight, while I was getting my pajamas on, I heard something fall somewhere behind me. It almost sounded like something fell down the wall, but that was impossible. Behind the sheetrock is just a solid concrete wall, and there's no space between the sheetrock and the concrete for something to fall through. All of the pipes and wires are run through the inner walls of the basement, not the outside walls. I shrugged it off and figured I was just hearing a pipe rattle or something, when I started hearing something squeaking in one of my windowsills. 

I stood still and listened closely. For a few moments, all was silent, but then I once again heard the squeaking. I checked the time, and it was 10:30 at night, and I was exhausted. I didn't want to deal with it, so I just pretended I wasn't hearing anything. Five minutes later, my mom comes into my room to check on me while I was unpacking my luggage, and the squeaking started up again louder than ever. 

"What is that?" my mom asked. 

"I don't know. I don't really care either." I answered. 

My mom cautiously approached the windowsill above my bed where it sounded like the noises were coming from. She pulled back the Colorado state flag I use as a curtain, but due to the reflection of my bedroom lights on the window, she couldn't see anything. So, she turned off my bedroom lights and used her phone flashlight to peer into the window. She immediately jumped back and gasped, which startled me too. 

"What? What? What?" I stuttered. 

"There is a baby bunny in your windowsill!" my mom practically shrieked. 

"What? That's impossible! That window has a plastic covering nailed to a mesh grate. There's no way in hell a baby bunny got in there!" I shouted in disbelief. 

I squeezed past my mom to look through the window and, sure as shit, I locked eyes with the tiniest bunny I've ever seen. If this happened at any other time in my life, my heart would've melted from the cuteness that was in my windowsill. But at 10:45 PM after a long day of traveling, this baby bunny was much more of a major nuisance than a source of infinite cuteness, especially since it somehow fell into the one windowsill I have no easy access to from the outside. 

I had to dig out my bowie knife from my hunting bag (which I'd put away in the storage room for the season), while my mom dug around to find a bucket, a screwdriver, a flashlight, and a pair of thick gloves. My mom followed me out to the side of the house where this windowsill is, and I hacked away at the rose bushes surrounding the windowsill with my knife so my mom could get to it and rescue the baby bunny. I wasn't about to stick my hand down into a windowsill that hadn't been cleaned in 50 years for sanitary reasons, but my mom was more than willing to rescue a baby bunny. That was like a dream come true for her. 

Unfortunately, when my mom finally got to the windowsill, she discovered that the nails securing the metal grate to the windowsill were too rusty to remove. She tried just straight up ripping the grate out of the ground, but it didn't even budge. Meanwhile, the baby bunny was panicking. It actually sounded like it was dying in there, which further convinced my mom that the baby bunny absolutely had to be rescued no matter what. I tried to tell her that it would be safe in the windowsill for the night. Wild animals, big and small, are resilient, and the metal grate above the window would keep even a starving grizzly bear from getting to the bunny. The thing could've easily made it to sunrise no problem, but my mom insisted that it was in dire need of rescue.

She went back down to my bedroom and asked me to help her move my bed away from the window. She planned on opening the window, cutting the screen, then coaxing the bunny into the bucket. My mom was convinced everything would turn out ok, but all I could see in my mind's eye was a baby bunny getting lose in our house. The very, very last thing we needed was a tiny frightened wild animal, capable of running up to 40 miles per hour, loose in our 4,000 square foot house at 11:00 at night. Rescuing it from the inside just had bad news written all over it, but my mom refused to listen to me. 

I stood behind by bed chewing my nails while my mom carefully opened my window and started cutting the screen. Meanwhile, the baby bunny ran around its tiny enclosure, screaming its head off. My mom slipped a small bucket with a lid into the windowsill, and gently pushed the bunny into it. She closed the lid, took the bucket out of the window, and released the bunny back into the wild from the front door. Surprisingly, it was a beautiful success! 

However, I was still paranoid about the possibility that my mom stirred up dust with some sort of super disease on it during the whole episode, so I went crazy with antibacterial spray once my mom sealed up my window. Then, I immediately rubbed my arms and hands with a decent amount of hydrogen peroxide for good measure, and did an extra Pulmozyme treatment to make sure I'd live through the night.

As of now, I'm staying the guest room while I let that antibacterial stuff work its magic. I'm pretty pissed off that I couldn't spend the night in the comfort of my own bed, but it will be ready to be slept in tomorrow, and the baby bunny would've just kept me up all night anyway if we left it there until morning. 

At least it was just a harmless baby bunny and not a raccoon or a coyote. I had raccoons at my previous house, and they often got into our trashcans if we left them outside for any length of time. Guess who regularly had to go outside with a rake to get the little turds out of our trash? Fun times, fun times...