The Great Escape

* Cue the Mission Impossible music * (It's here if you can't remember it.)

This is Ripley. Isn't he handsome? Look at those bedroom eyes... or, I guess he was just sort of sleepy since I woke him up for this photo.

Ripley likes to chew on inanimate objects. He's not like Crow, who used to loudly chew on things right before mealtimes because she knew it drove me crazy and I would feed her earlier. No, Ripley will hop down from eating his breakfast and go to town on something like this box.

He's a big fan of plastic, cardboard, and fleece. I consider it a sign of my amazing abilities as a pet owner that Ripley has made it through fifteen years without needing surgery to remove something from his intestines.

Here is another one of his projects.

For many years that was a very small tear in the screen, but then Ripley decided to chew on the edges and now it's not so small. Ripley will be right by the door every time I come home, but it's not so he can rush outside -- he wants to greet me and the dogs. So Ripley made this hole in the screen, but did nothing with it...

This is Guido-You-Bastard. Six months of steroids to treat his lymphoma have made him a bit... portly. I may change his name from Guido to Gordo if this keeps up. He has a history of successful escape attempts, but his increased bulk plus my latest attempt at putting a cover over the cat patio have stymied him since last summer.

Guido waited until Ripley had made the hole big enough and then took advantage of it.

This is Mackie. She's a conure. She has a scream that can be heard three houses away even with all my windows closed. (The only saving grace is that my birds are quiet when it's dark.)

Mackie has strong views about whether cats are supposed to be in the back yard, so she started screaming and didn't stop even when I called back to her.

The problem with using Mackie as an alarm is that she screams quite a lot. It's kind of what conures do. Cats in the yard. People in the yard. Birds in the yard. Clouds in the sky. You get the picture -- she screams and I mostly ignore it because otherwise it would drive me crazy. So I wasn't really paying attention until she'd been screaming for a minute or so.

What really got me going to look, though, was Ripley coming to find me with his worried "hall monitor kitty" meow. That's what he does when he sees something that he's pretty sure I would want to know about. Ripley's the double-agent in this story. He enabled the escape and then immediately blabbed.

Anyhow, the great escape was foiled before Guido got more than two feet away from the house, and he let me pick him up and bring him inside without any fuss. I think he really just wanted to go outside and meet the neighborhood cats who hang out in my yard when the dogs aren't patrolling.

Sorry about getting the Mission Impossible theme stuck in your head.