Bert & Ernie! (well, if you reverse Bert’s ‘e’ and ‘r’ and add an ’n,’ you’ve got quite the pair! Brent & Ernie...and they are quite the team. This is a photo when Ernie, as a new pup made his 1st appearance in Los Gatos, and now he’s a regular town celebrity (thanks to a few escapes from our tight security here at 25 Alpine).
While Webb took leave to visit New York City for the pre-holidays (lucky boy!) somehow he (foolishly?) trusted us with dog sitting responsibilities. At this point in the story, we’ve reunited with Webb in San Francisco for our annual holiday-overnight-in-the-city outing and we relinquished Ernie duties to the Bryan boys for Thursday/Friday.
The classic tale while Ernie was under our watch was our Wednesday morning dying dog scare. At 5 am (as always) Brent started his day but when I got up at 5:30 am (my usual), Brent was concerned about Ernie. “He won’t eat and he’ll hardly move,” Brent gave me his worried rundown. “He’s kind of twitching funny and he’s completely lethargic; something must be wrong, this is not like Ernie.” Brent can work himself into a dramatic frenzy fairly quickly so he was kind of worked up about Ernie’s condition.
Not as akin to the nuances of dog mannerisms or canine health conditions, I was more passive (I can’t pretend to be the hero or goat of this story) but it did alarm me. But my worries were probably more like “man, if Ernie is sick, this is not good timing! What are we going to do with him? I don’t have time today to take him to the vet.” I know, I come across at my worst when it comes to pet empathy (I’m seriously lacking in the dog loving gene and I’ve got absolutely no trace of the cat loving gene in my body).
Anyway, for the next three hours Brent stewed over Ernie’s ailments while I worried about how much trouble we’d be in if anything happened to Ernie. Suddenly around 8 am, Ernie perked up, enjoyed his breakfast and almost instantly transformed into the happy beagle Webb left us to babysit.
Finally, it dawned on Brent that Ernie had just been tired and not accustomed to a 5 am wake up call. Brent had been dumbfounded that Ernie hadn’t bounded from his quilt pile frisky and ready to play.
I guess it was our first lesson that there are morning people and morning dogs and mixing a morning person with a dog that is clearly used to sleeping in is not a good combination!
