The cats successfully woke me up and forced me out of bed at 5:30 am. My plan to get up at 7 am, make coffee, and return to bed was foiled. Once my body was awake at the usual weekday waking up time, it wanted to stay awake, and it wanted some coffee and a bite to eat.
Damn cats!
The cats’ techniques for forcing me from slumber are routine. I’ve learned to ignore them, individually. I have even learned to ignore them while making a combined attack for a limited amount of time. I have no idea what time they started trying to get me out of bed, but at 4:45 am, they joined forces, and there’s no ignoring them. There’s certainly no sleeping through it.
Ronin begins his Human Waking Technique by jumping back and forth between the tall chest of drawers and the bed. Twenty pounds of cat bouncing back and forth over the distance of a few feet is, to say the very least, annoying. I imagine the equivalent would be a small child jumping on the bed repeatedly, except that a small child might make an attempt to not land on the sleeping human. Ronin? Not so much. When the bed-bouncing fails to get a rise out of any nearby sleeping humans, he then moves on to running from one end of the house to the other at full-steam and bounding onto the bed. During this stage, I occasionally find myself dreaming about earthquakes, but I have adapted, and as long as I don’t hear anything being destroyed in the house, I manage to ignore it rather well. It’s his third and final method that forces the human brain to fully engage. He tries to climb the door frame –something he could successfully do on occasion, before he was a huge lard-butt– which leads to the teeth-shattering sound of cat claws scraping on enamel paint.
Myu’s Human Waking Technique is all about the love. First, she lies as close to or on top of the human, who is already hidden mostly under the covers trying to avoid the bouncing Ronin, and purrs loudly. This has the combined effect of overheating said human and making them dream about circling helicopters. All in all, it’s pretty easy to ignore. When this doesn’t bring immediate results, she then begins to softly mew. Well, it’s really more of a sigh, like “Sigh … won’t you get up, please?” This generally elicits a head scratch or two, something I have learned to perform in my sleep. Alas, the head scratch is all the proof she needs that the human is nearing wakefulness, and she proceeds to step three … the face patting. She’s particularly fond of patting noses and eyes, but a mouth will do in a pinch. Repeated, insistent, face patting, which becomes more forceful in five-minute increments, eventually leading to the extension of claw tips. Hide under the covers? More claws. Hide under a pillow? She’ll go digging for that face!
Tora’s implementation of the Human Waking Technique is by far the easiest to ignore, up to a point. She’s young. She hasn’t learned to be overly cruel and obnoxious yet. She begins by moving from point to point in the bedroom and squeaking. Not loudly, but often. When this doesn’t bring any noticed, she lightly hops onto the bed and pads back and forth over the sleeping forms of the nearest human. Since she’s still a kitten and doesn’t weight much, this rarely causes anyone much grief, though it does tend to lead to some sleepy head scratches which she adores. It’s her final method that is the real eye-opener, and, quite frankly, appears to be fast becoming the linchpin of the Three-Way Combined Cat Attack. Sure, it’s possible, if one is really intent on sleeping, to mostly ignore all the other measures being collectively employed by the cats and wrest a few more minutes of sleep from the night, but it is utterly and completely impossible to ignore a cat walking across your head, settling onto a window sill, aiming its posterior at said head a mere few inches away, and releasing a totally silent but utterly deadly cat fart. I challenge you to try ignoring that.
Those are the insidious methods by which the household’s collective of cats successfully rouses me from slumber on any morning, when I do not appear to be waking up on my own at the cat-appointed, cat-expected time. And what happens after I crawl out of bed? I give them fresh water, put food in their bowls, open the kitchen bird-watching window, and each of them eats exactly three bites of food before beginning the morning Running of the Cats … which generally lasts for one hour and ends with a lengthy period of boisterous bird-watching in the kitchen window … as seen in this photo.
You will notice Ronin is sitting on a stool. A stool placed there solely for the use of bird watching cats. Yes, they are spoiled, but at least there’s no bickering about who gets to sit in the window. I enjoy having a peaceful household.
Since I have now been wide awake for hours, and Lin is off to work, I suppose I shall now pretend today is just another weekday and go do something constructive … until it’s time to close the kitchen window, turn on the air conditioning, and hopefully, take a nap with the then ready-to-nap cats. Well, they better be ready to nap eventually, because I know I will be.
They are so lucky all three of them are adorable in their own unique ways, or I would have made them into hats and gloves ages ago.