We are back (OK, out of timeout)

First of all: We're sorry.
Second: We are making a public apology to Ernie. We didn't really mean to knock over the cat food tower (right), and we're pretty sure we weren't the ones who put cat food all over the den and dining room. If we didn't, it was truly an accident because we truly believe in immediately picking up any food we drop. (Sometimes we even fight to see who gets to snarf it up!)
Here's what happened: Staffer Mom filled up the self-feeding cat food tower, and we got a little excited and at some point it went flying across the kitchen and food went everywhere.
We admit mouthing off a bit about Ernie even needing a self-feeder and if she didn't want us to taste it it shouldn't be on the floor...yadda, yadda.
Basically, she told us we couldn't blog again until she quit finding food in the rugs and floorboards across three different rooms and until we figured out how to share our toys and when we quit digging up her new bed of pansies.
And then she wouldn't let us try to help by sniffing out the strewn food -- one of our more refined skills, she had to pull out the sucking vacuum cleaner thing and it never works right....anyway...more than you wanted to know.

But we're back.
Staffer Mom says that the first day of Tar Heel basketball season is special one and all household shenanigans are forgiven for another year. We are really glad every year when that day comes.
Go Heels!

Endless food; gas for the road

From Maggie: Ernie, our cat friend, has a food dish the staff calls a "self-feeder."
When he wants to eat, he can walk up to it and it always has food. A small chute in the back provides an endless supply, it seems. We've always been jealous of that, but we never could get close to it because the staff won't let us eat cat food. Patience does pay, however, and yesterday was payday.

By the time the staff arrived home from work, we'd discovered that the supply is not endless. In fact, once it's empty, it's gone. When we got access to the bowl early in the day, we decided to learn its secret. We decided the way to do this was for Bandit to just keep eating until it was clear how it worked. We still don't know how it works, but we do know the staff wouldn't give us any dinner and they weren't the least impressed with our research.

What else we didn't know was that we were supposed to leave on a road trip last night -- they tend to not tell us this stuff because Staffer Mom says I get "overly excited." Whatever.
They piled us into the limo and took us on a 8-hour trip to one of our fave places -- the beach.
We felt like sleeping on the trip, because our tummies were full. Bandit was complaining of some tummy upset. He even turned down the opportunity to rummage through Staffer Mom's purse when she left it sitting open.

We didn't get much sleep though. Let's just say that while we were very full and calm, our tummies weren't.
Staffer Mom kept opening the back windows and yelling at us. At one point she called us some kind of "blossom" and cursed at us.

It's all the staff's fault. If we hadn't had access to the cat food, we wouldn't have had upset tummies and we wouldn't have tried to figure out how much food was in the bowl. What were we supposed to do? Just look at it?

Gotta run. Bandit needs to go outside again, and I want to watch.