She's developed the weirdest fixation. She will jump up on my husband's dresser, stand up on her hind legs and paw at the wall with both front paws. She pins her ears back flat and meows at the ceiling with a far-off look in her eyes. She always does this at night. One night she scratched at the wall for a few minutes and turned toward me when I called her name, and when she looked down and noticed my husband's alarm clock (which was always in this same spot) she slapped it and sprang backward like a frightened cat does. This of course made her fall off the dresser.

I find this behavior bizarre and a little worrisome. You know what my Mom said when I told her about this? She said, "She hears something crawling around inside the wall. Maybe termites or something." Do you guys think it might be that, or is Polly just a few fries short of a Happy Meal?

I'd like to hear a few opinions on this before I approach the maintenance people at my apartment complex! I'm going to ask my vet about it too.

Maybe it's one of those frenzy things - Norman gets into frenzies where he jumps as high as possible on the doorframe as he can and sprints away at the first sound of anything.

She doesn't act all frenzied and nutty before or after one of these "episodes". She might be just snoozing inside an open crate in our bedroom or stretched out across a book I'm trying to read and getting petted, then she'll just calmly hop up on the dresser and do her thing. She only does this in the one spot, and only at night.

I did forget to mention one thing that does fit in with my Mom's "termite theory". Our apartment is at the end of the building, and the wall Polly scratches on is the outside wall which is covered with vinyl siding on the second floor, where our bedroom is. If you go outside and look at the siding you can see holes in it, who knows how they got there. It looks like small holes made by something that punched through the siding, maybe thrown rocks? BB's? I dunno. But bugs could get into the wall through these holes very easily.

I know the damn ants around here are a ginormous unpleasant sensation in the gluteus maximus, so it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out my Mom was right and Polly hears ants in the wall. The ants have invaded my apartment before, and were very hard to keep out. They've also messed up my central air unit by fouling a switch in it with their mess and they've even shut off the power to the whole complex before! I watched the electric company guys working on the junction box outside that day. There was almost TWO FEET of dirt inside the thing from the ants living in it!

You know...I'm thinking ants reallyreally suck and I hate them. I think this weekend I am going to nuke the area around my apartment again with a big bag of OrthoMax.

Amazing what cats can hear/smell. One of my female cats kept staring at something behind the tv, I looked several times myself and didn't see anything. I eventually found a ladybug crawling back there. Ladybugs have a distinct smell to them and they often are in walls of a house. Rather have ladybugs than ants or mice ;)