Sir Edmund

Do/did you watch The Simpsons? I did not, I’m probably one of a dozen people in the US who didn’t care for the show—I watched a show or two when it first came out and thought Bart was the most obnoxious child ever. I couldn’t believe people would spend time watching a bratty child. God knows there are plenty of those around in real life. But Kent loved the show. He’s told me that while the show initially started out to be about Bart, it shifted over time to focus on Homer, the clueless dad.

In much the same way, when I first started this blog, I mostly wrote about Wally and about daily events here in Boston. I’d toss in the occasional story about the other two cats but Wally was and is a funny cat who does crazy things and he’s pretty entertaining in his own right. Apparently others think so too; a friend talked me into creating a Facebook fan page for Wally and he’s now got 185 fans. I know 29 of them.

But Eddie’s sort of crept in more and more. He’s not nearly as complex as Wally which can be a relief. He’s also very affectionate, has a big vocabulary, is quite strong, can flush the toilet, and loves to be a monorail cat on the backs of our office chairs.

He prefers that I sit cross-legged in my chair so he has a proper nest to sit in and will holler at me until I sit in the correct manner, he wakes Kent up in the mornings when he believes Kent’s had enough sleep, and he tends to wander around the apartment with one of his cat toys in his mouth, meowing away to let us know he “caught” it.

He also discovered one of his toys had a pull-out tail. WE hadn’t figured it out but Eddie did; he carried the hedgehog (it's the second one from the left) in his mouth by the tail and used his big paws to pull the body down to make the vibrating noise as it retracted.

When I’ve had a rough day or feel lonely when Kent’s gone, it’s pretty easy to convince ol Fattie to curl up in my lap. Weighing in around 17 pounds, that’s a lot of purring comfort and usually he’ll end up making one of my legs go to sleep. He also prefers to sleep under the covers between us and will holler at us until we accommodate him. This addition to the bed is quite nice in the winter since cats run hotter than humans (100.5 to 102.5 F compared to our 98.6F +/- a degree or so). As you might expect, this is not so great in the summer. But you try saying no to Eddie.

My mother-in-law very kindly gives the cats presents at Christmas and she picks good ones—she may be a dog person by inclination but she has a gift for picking toys the cats love. She’s the one who got the hedgehog and this year she got them a hanging toy. It’s got a ball that makes a slight rattling noise hanging almost at the end and there used to be a feather there too (feathers don’t last more than a couple of hours in our house). I did have it hanging from the armoire but the cats sort of ignored it after destroying the feather. This week I moved it to the back door and that changed everything. Most mornings I find it on the ground because big ol Eddie has pulled on it hard enough to separate the Velcro bits on the straps.