Spring forward to a flashback

Lest you forget, turn your clocks ahead one hour at 2 a.m. Sunday morning....

As far as the flashback rodent story, during college I lived in a duplex. One semester, a friend of mine decided to sublet from one of my roommates because he was in France. She brought with her a pet hamster that she would let run around in her room at night. It wasn't a problem because the door was closed and he would always go back to his cage in the morning.

That is, until one morning when she woke up and he wasn't there. We searched and found no sign of him. She left out food, and we hoped that he would eventually find his way back. It should be noted that she lived in one of the upstairs bedrooms, while I lived in the downstairs one. A few nights later, I heard an eerie scratching in my room. I finally realized where it was coming from: inside my closet wall.

The next morning:
Me: "Anne Marie, I think I found your hamster."
AM: "GREAT! Where is he?"
Me: "In the wall of my closet."
AM: (spit take) "WHAAAA??!?!?!"

We finally deduced that the hamster had crawled into Anne Marie's walk-in closet, which connects to the crawl space and he had been stupid enough to fall/crawl into one of the holes in the floor and had fallen down an entire story (which, for a hamster, must be like falling off a 20-story building) and managed to land, alive, in the area of the wall in my closet.

Anne Marie, Reuben and I dropped some food down the hole and tried to think of ways to get him out. We made a little makeshift ladder, but it wasn't long enough. We tried leaving string down, hoping maybe he had turned into a commando hamster of some kind who could shinny his way up it. We would have built a little hamster escalator if we knew how.
But we were stuck.

Finally, with heavy hearts, we decided there was nothing we could do. He was on his own and would probably die down there.

A couple of nights after that, we were having dinner with a couple of friends and relayed the story of the trapped hamster and what we had decided. One of our friends, in his thick Southern drawl, exclaimed loudly:

"LORD ALMIGHTY!! THAT THING'S GONNA REEK WHEN IT DIES!!!!
YOU GOTTA GET IT OUTTA THERE!!"

Anne Marie and I looked at each other.
The smell. We hadn't even thought to consider how bad a smell it might make; it was just a little hamster after all.

But he was right.
We had to get it out.

I immediately left the table and grabbed a hammer and a screwdriver. I knocked on the wall several times trying to figure out where the hamster was so as not to impale the very creature I was trying to save. Like POWs, I rapped, he scratched and we managed to communicate. I used the hammer and screwdriver to create a small, rectangular opening low in the closet wall. After I had done this, we grabbed some thick gloves so the little rodent wouldn't bite anyone. You would think the hamster would be happy to see his saviors and the light of day, but no. It took a lot of coaxing and some food to finally get him where we could grab him and bring him to safety.

Not since Baby Jessica was removed from the well had there been so much rejoicing.

The next day, I bought a flat wall panel and glued it to the wall over the hole. It blended in perfectly. I doubt anyone has ever thought twice about it.

I'm happy to say that the hamster spent the rest of its days with a bit of celebrity, being the wonder hamster who had miraculously cheated death.

Well, until Christmas break when he died of natural causes.
He was buried in a shallow grave behind the duplex and now probably haunts the residents of 1811 Juniper Circle who keep wondering why, late at night, they hear scratching in the walls.