Captain Underpants

We've been living in the subdivision now for just over a year. We're only really familiar with a few of our neighbors, but mostly we just chat with our next door neighbors on either side. To the left of our house live a married couple close to our own age, and to the right of our house is a single mother and her 14 year old daughter.

The daughter recently lost her cat and had spent weeks combing the subdivision for it. She taped "lost cat" signs to every stop sign and put cat food out on our porch, as the last place the cat had been spotted was in my front flower bed. Eventually I had the bright idea of loaning her my father-in-law's live trap, and she caught her cat this past weekend. The trap was returned and profuse thanks offered, and the girl was happily re-united with her lost kitty.

Until this morning, when our doorbell rang about two minutes before my alarm went off. Our bedroom is at the front of the house, with our windows right next to the front porch. I groggily elbowed my husband and said "someone is ringing our doorbell!", to which he offered the response of "muuuugrrhhh...."

The doorbell ringing was followed by hard knocking, and then we heard the sound of someone hysterically crying. This spurred my husband into Instant Action Mode, which pretty much meant that he leapt out of bed and was out the front door in lightning speed, thinking Something Bad Was Happening Outside.

What had actually happened was that the girl's cat had darted outside again this morning when she was getting ready for school, and she was desperate to catch it and wanted to borrow the live trap again.

What also happened was that my husband went charging out the door onto the front lawn clad in nothing but his Marvel comic book hero t-shirt and a pair of baggy blue boxer-briefs. The trap was quickly retrieved and given to the girl, and then he seemed to realize that he was outside. In his underpants. In front of a teenaged girl and her mother. You know that sinking feeling you get when you realize you've done something horribly embarrassing? I'm guessing that was the feeling churning through my husband's gut as he hightailed it back into the house and retrieved his pants before the whole neighborhood got an eyeful.

While he was procuring his jeans, another bright idea crossed his mind. When he bought some special edition of one of the Call of Duty games, it came with a pair of functional if rather comical looking night vision goggles. I'm sure you can all imagine where this is going. Now clad properly in pants and t-shirt, my husband decided to join the cat hunt..with his Call of Duty night vision goggles on.

Because that's not weird, or anything. I suppose I should be grateful that he didn't decide to grab one of his replica lightsabers while he was at it. Just in case, you know, an evil sith lord appeared from the bushes.

Thankfully the cat bolted back inside when the mother raised their garage door, the trap was returned, and my husband came back inside. I'm pretty sure the cat was terrorized by the sight of my husband charging around on the lawn first in his underpants, and then in his night vision goggles, and decided "screw this outdoors shit, I'm going inside for some friskies!"