It was another early morning around here. I’m not quite sure the order of events, but in the end all the CREEtures were awake by about 4:40 AM. I was the last one conscious. My guess is that Low Rider is to blame. He’s our early riser. Fat Boy is much more compliant. He keeps the rules on this one these days.

Saturday is often the one chance I have to sleep in. Today I have to drive down to Jacksonville for a job, so it wouldn’t have been an option anyway. But I still want to know why we even need sleep in the first place.

The “getting up” rule is pretty simple. The boys are not to get up before the alarm goes off. If they do, the rule is that I scoop the violator up by the scruff of their neck. A cool feature of cats is that they go stiff and stop all resistance when you pick them up properly by the scruff of their neck. Gorgeous taught me that and she would know, having been a Veterinary Technician in a past life. Then I drag off the offender to a penalty box, either a bathroom or bedroom at the other end of the house. That way we can’t hear the door shaking as they paw at it while we go back to sleep.

Once the alarm goes off all bets are off. I figure it’s not their fault if I choose not to get up after the alarm goes off. So I don’t penalize them for jumping on me once the alarm sounds. It does add a physical element to the waking up process. Somehow they know exactly when that alarm is going to sound because the moment the radio starts, Pounce, usually right on the bladder. It helps expedite the waking up process.

When we first got Fat Boy he quickly developed a routine. Once the alarm went off He would jump on me, head butt my chin and then jump back off. He did this twice. Somehow a 10 pound cat can exert about 70 pounds of force when jumping on or off a snoozing human. I am sure there is a law of physics that explains this but I’m not studied up on it. If he hits your bladder I think the force goes up by a factor of approximately 1.3 (the bladder coefficient being 30% higher and all).

If I didn’t get up after the second time, he’d go over to the spring door stop, pull it back and let it go with a very loud “Boioioirrng” sound. That got me up every time. I knew what to expect and there was a gradual escalation which I could turn off at any time by simply getting up and feeding him. It was a good system.

These days Fat Boy lets Low Rider do his dirty work for him. He seems to just lay back and watch. I get the feeling he’s thinking, “Knock yourself out pal.” He knows he’ll get fed just the same so why risk being dragged off to the penalty box? Low Rider is smarter and less compliant. Not to mention he is skinnier, faster, and black so he’s harder to catch in the dark to haul off to the other end of house.

Anyway we’re all up now. And I’m going to head off to Jacksonville for work.

Enjoy!

There are some mornings when I feel particularly violated by the alarm clock. This morning was one of them. There I was minding my own business, blissfully unaware, and suddenly I was smacked upside my consciousness with some radio announcer. I was too groggy to make out the words but it seems like he was saying something about finances. A double whammy.

Usually it feels a little less hurtful if it goes off in the middle of a song so the first thing I hear is music. Somehow that brings me around a little more humanely than having someone talking at me even before I awake. I mean even if my work cell rings in the middle of the night, at least it has the courtesy to give me a heads up before someone is talking to me. (I won’t go into the years I had a Nextel and would get walky-talky calls in the dead of night. I’m glad that’s in the past!)

I’ve lost the option of the snooze alarm too. Smokey, our Low-Rider kitty, is always there to pounce on me the moment he hears that alarm go off. And then he plays the Jump-on, Jump-off game until I get up. It’s an effective tactic. I usually end up out of bed in about a minute. I still dream about the days when I could hit the snooze button and get a full 9 minutes in. Sometimes I even hit the snooze button so fast I wouldn’t actually wake up until 9 or (oh, yes) 18 minutes after actually I set the alarm. The beauty of that was it was an automatic extra snooze situation because I would think that it was earlier than it actually was. (I know, that’s a lot of wases for one sentance first thing in the morning.)

Those days are gone, thanks to Low-Rider. And just to make the morning complete I should note that he has the uncanny ability to hit my bladder more times than not. (I’d give him a bladder accuracy ratio of about 65%.)

I used to resent those folks who wake up quickly and have a smile ready to go as soon as their eyes are open. Now I am just amazed by them. My Gorgeous wife is one of those weird morning people whose most productive time of the day is before lunch. I sometimes envy her ability to function so well so soon out of a sound sleep. I usually try to give myself an hour or two head start so that we’ll be somewhere near the same plane of civility when she gets up. Of course that approach means that by the end of a given week Gorgeous has about an extra whole night’s worth of sleep on me…

I mean why do we even have to sleep anyway? Wouldn’t it be a much more efficient system without sleep? How much more could we get done in our lives if we didn’t need sleep? Think about it. If the average person sleeps 8 hours a day (what the medical people recommend) then by the end of the year we’ve slept for about 4 months. By the time we’re 65 we’ve slept for nearly 21 years! How much could we accomplish if we didn’t need so much down time?

I don’t get it.