Bertie's a climber

It's a quiet week. Bertie the cat has settled into a routine. Callie the dog is acting like she's missing something, or being deprived of something. I think the dog knows that there's a cat living in the garage, and the cat certainly knows that there's a dog living in the house.

That's as far as we've gotten in the area of canine-feline relations. Meanwhile, our work crew took a week off to go do a job in the Paris region, so it's quiet here.

A close-up view of the vineyard road
from an attic window

A couple of evenings ago, I came back from a long walk with the dog. I told Walt I would be out for a while, so he had time to bring the cat up into the house for nice long visit.

When I got home, I left Callie downstairs while I went upstairs to see what the situation was. Walt was snoozing in a chair out on the front terrace. "Where's the cat?" I asked him. "Out here on the deck," he said. I looked around, but there was no sign of Bertie.

We're having warm days but chilly, dewy mornings.

This is about all the moisture that the grapevines
are getting these days.

We proceeded to search all over the house. No cat. Had he jumped off the deck? That's a pretty good drop, but cats are capable of such things, I think. I went back down to the garage to see if Bertie had jumped down and then gone in there through his open window. No sign of him in the garage either.

Callie was waiting patiently as I went back upstairs. Walt was searching high and low in every room in the house. I figured he'd find him in a minute or two, under the bed or in a closet, so I climbed the ladder up to the attic space to see how hot it had gotten up there on a sunny afternoon.

Here's the ladder that the cat climbed up
to get into the attic.

And you know who was up there, right? Bertie the black cat had climbed up the ladder. He was perched in the front window, enjoying a panoramic view of the neighborhood. Neither Walt nor I really believed that a cat would climb a steep ladder like that.

Yesterday, to see if he could do it again, I brought Bertie into the house. Then I climbed the ladder into the attic. Not two minutes later, I saw Bertie climb up too. No problem. Then this morning I brought Bertie into the house after he ate his breakfast and Walt took Callie out for her walk. The cat headed straight up the ladder.

A ladybug on a branch

He likes it up there in the attic. It's the one place where he is perfectly safe from the dog, I guess. That won't be the case when we get the staircase up it.