Not the frog I was expecting, but the frog I was looking for.

Last night, as I was trying to get to sleep, I heard a chirp-chirp-chirp sound. It sounded like a spring peeper frog. Or possibly a particularly loud cricket, or possibly a fan bearing going bad, but mostly it sounded like a frog. It would chirp a dozen or so times, pause a bit, chirp another dozen or so times, and stop for a bit. Sometimes for 20 seconds, sometimes for several minutes.

I carefully listened to see if the sound still happened when the furnace was off. It did. I turned off the fan. That didn't help either.

I got up to try to figure out where the sound was coming from. Frog sounds are very hard to locate, but it seemed to be coming from inside the house. I opened the sliding door on the bedroom to see if maybe it was outside and loud. The sound didn't recur at all. I closed the door and went back to sleep.

A few minutes later, when the sound came back, I was able to confirm that when I was in the hallway the sound was coming from the guest bedroom door. I quietly walked in the door, to find the cats -- one on the bed, one on the floor -- in a classic "we weren't doing anything" pose. I stood still in the room for two minutes, listening. No sounds came forth.

I went back to bed, ignored the sound that of course started again in ten minutes or so, and eventually got to sleep.

Today, all was quiet on the frog front.

Except for two sets of chirps, in the short period of time right after it got dark and before the still-up Christmas lights came on and shone in the guest-bedroom window. Just enough to say, "yup, still here."

Then it was quiet again, for an hour or two. When Suzanne got home, I commented to her that I was fairly sure we had a frog. No idea how it got in, or what (or whether) it was eating, or where it was hiding, but that was the best explanation I had.

A bit after that, we were sitting on the bed, and the chirping started again. Again I quietly got up and tracked it. This time, when I was in front of the guest bedroom, it was clearly coming from the other side of the living room -- and, when I was in the living room, it sounded like it was coming from Suzanne's sewing room.

Again, the cat was in the sewing room, sitting there attempting to create a "nothing happening here" impression. She did not seem to have located the frog either, and was facing the door rather than any plausible froggy hiding place, but it seemed noteworthy that she was in there.

Then I looked closer, and saw a small scrap of green felt under her front paw.

Upon investigation, I discovered that the scrap of felt was in fact the leg of a small green felt cricket-shaped cat toy.

It chirped, loudly, a dozen or so times, when I picked it up.

I looked at Suzanne, who'd followed me to the room, and held it up and said "Well, I found the frog."

(And then we de-chirped it, and gave it back to the cats, who are now ignoring it.)