An Escape Artist And A Tattle-Tail

First-Brutus is making me NUTS today! He has been in and out of every single door at least thirty times. I have had "discussions" with him that involved words like "knock" and "it" and "off", but to no avail. He is possessed, and probably bored. Dad went home last night, and since Brutus has gotten very comfortable in the neighborhood, I just can't leave him off leash all the time unless I can have an eye on him.

Second-we have two Calico cats. One is Sophie, who is my loud, friendly, in your face frat cat. The second is Bernice, who is very delicate, and I only see her a couple times a day when SHE decides that it is time for me to love her up. She is still very afraid of Brutus, and stays away from him at all costs.

So, after getting tired of letting Brutus in and out of every door in the house a bazillion times today, I decided to ignore him for a while. I got busy doing some laundry, and unloading the dishwasher. When I was in the kitchen, my little Bernice came in and made her arrival pretty well known. She actually meowed, which was kind of funny. I picked her up and gave her her usual snuggle and back rub and then put her down. She jumped up on a chair and meowed at me again. I kept talking to her, and she jumped off the chair and over to the ledge by the table and sat there and meowed. Great, not only was Brutus making me nuts, but Bernice was being bazaar too.Wait a minute......Brutus, where was that boy? He hadn't bugged me in a good fifteen minutes, and if Bernice was upstairs in the kitchen, Brutus couldn't be anywhere on the main floor of the house. Oh crap.

The first thing that came to my mind was that the door to the screened in porch on the lower level of the house wasn't latched, and he had snuck out the main door of the house, which we leave cracked open a little so the cats can hang out in the screened in porch, and pushed the screen door open. Doggone it! No wonder Bernice was in the kitchen yelling at me. The little punkin was trying to tell me that her big stupid brother snuck out of the house.

First, I went down and latched the two hooks on the screen door. Then I started calling for Brutus. In about five minutes here he came, tooling through the woods across the road. Grrrrr.

This proves two things to me. One, he's a stinker, which I already knew, and kind of love about him, although it isn't funny every day, and Two, he actually does have a brain to think things through. He had to think about the fact that I wasn't going to let him out of the upstairs door, so maybe the door downstairs would be unlatched. It took me back to a moment during dog classes when his teacher Libby was talking about her own dog not being the sharpest tool in the shed, and she used to say to him "is the elevator ever going to go up in that brain of yours?". We always have to be one step ahead of that boy. I bet Bernice laughed all the way back to her hiding spot.