Fumblebum

I caught Ernie sleeping on the guest bed a couple times this weekend -- once with Bunny, and once with Blakey! It's hard to get a picture because he's so friendly, when he sees you he jumps down off the bed to come visit. He must have been really tired when I snapped this picture.



And FYI: as best as we can deduce, the reason Ernie got in so many fights is because he is completely stupid. Don't get me wrong, he's completely lovable, wholly adorable. But he's an idiot.

Some examples:

I was sitting on the couch in the living room and Ernie came up to me, purring and talking, and then he decided he wanted to sit on the windowsill. Ernie is by far the most athletic of our kittie-kids, but he totally misjudged the height of the windowsill, and splatted into the wall like a bug on a windshield. It was the funniest thing I'd seen all day. When he fell back to the floor I heard the boiiing sound when a cartoon gets hit in the head by a frying pan or runs into the wall. Then he shook his head, and I swear I could hear marbles rolling around, although I guess it was his cheeks flapping together.

He either can't, or perhaps doesn't realize that he should, jump over the baby gates that we use to keep the dogs contained in one half of the house. Blake is either not motivated enough, or not interested enough, because he never comes over, but both Bunny and Ernie like to see what's on the "other side of the fence." When we're in the kitchen Bunny frequently hops over the gates like a . . . well, like a rabbit. The canines and felines more or less get along, plus we can't stop them, so we never yell at them for coming over. Ernie is apparently not a "watch and learn" type of cat; he doesn't have Bunny's knack for hopping. Instead, he comes up to the gate and starts scrabbling and clawing his way up like he's crawling up the rock wall in an Army obstacle course. And not just any rock wall, but the last obstacle of a really long, exhausting course. He eventually hikes himself to the top--sometimes by his elbow!--and perches there resting for a second before jumping down the whole 24 inches of sheer terror he had to scale.

My favorite is really hard to describe because I've never seen a cat do this before in my life. Danny and I were watching TV and we heard Ernie doing his "hunter meow" in the other room (Blake does the same thing, and in truth their voices sound pretty similar, so I can't always tell who it is). Blake will walk around the house with his ferret hanging out of his mouth, and doing this yowl-type sound that apparently means, "I am a fierce hunter! Look at me and tremble!" Well, Ernie was making the same sound, and then all of a sudden he popped around the corner playing with . . . not sure what. A fuzz or piece of lint. A scrap of paper. A piece of plastic. Whatever it was, it was small and hard, and it skidded across the linoleum floor. He went wild! Back flips, somersaults, spiked tail . . . the works. Danny and I stared at each other with wide eyes: "Did you see that?" Then Ernie kept going! He spun in circles (like a dog chasing his tail, but he wasn't chasing anything because in his enthusiasm he lost whatever he was playing with) until he was so dizzy he collapsed. Now, as I'm typing I realize this is kind of starting to sound like a medical problem, a seizure or something, but I want to be clear: he was very obviously playing. He was so excited about the "toy" that he found, his skin was just a restriction for his glee. And when he wore himself out (it didn't take very long; his adrenaline was so revved up he just pooped out after a few minutes) he just stretched out on the cool linoleum, looked at me and Danny, and clearly said, "And I'm spent."