So you stay up late, hope to sleep in and curse when the bladder tells you you need to get up somewhere around one.
That wouldn’t be a problem if the cat didn’t enter the equation.
Now, under the circumstances I didn’t want to think about cats at all, but crossing to the bathroom allowed me to see that the door to the extension was open, which in turn means the interior is free of cats.
The whole saga of Lik Lik, Ninja and Tee Tee is rather lengthy so we won’t go into it here. The long and short of it is that Tee Tee went missing around Melbourne Cup Day last year and hasn’t been seen since. Faced with an impending absence you make arrangements to feed them and hope they’re going to be all right. The Little House of Concrete Garden is close to cat heaven, so they should be.
We’d prefer to keep Ninja and Lik Lik away from the bird life by staying indoors at night, but Ninja appears to be somewhat brighter than your average run of the mill cat. That might not be actually true, but we’ve only got Lik Lik to compare him to. Lik Lik is to put it bluntly, one of the intellectual proletariat.
Ninja, on the other hand, has learned that he can escape from confinement by banging on the extension door.
Whether this equates to the feline equivalent of a comprehensive appreciation of quantum mechanics is dubious, but he has learned a second lesson. If something doesn’t work the first time, you should repeat the procedure. Do it often enough and someone will eventually notice.
He manages to produce a remarkably loud thump on the door, and there’s no doubt about what he’s looking for. Ignore it at your peril, because once you’re awake you won’t be nodding off again until he’s been assisted to the egress.
There was no one inside last night, but as I lay in bed musing on the beginning of the 1200 words I tapped out earlier today there was what sounded like a familiar thump on the outside door.
To date, there’s no evidence that someone has figured out he can use the exit strategy to gain admittance, but as the thumps continued I was forced to investigate. Predictably, there was no one there.
I managed to get back to sleep eventually, but the body clock decided enough was enough and four-thirty found me up and about. There's an almost invariable half hour time sink once the computer goes on in the morning, what with the start up process, the checking of email, and a surf around the favourite sources of updated information. On a good day that can run closer to an hour, but this time around the incoming was, predictably, slim.
I was about to start on Safari when a croaking frog reminded me I needed to check bom.gov.au. That's usually the second stop, but this time I gave it the prime slot, which took out another time sink.
There were bands of cloud scattered along the coast and offshore waters, mostly just to the north of town, which looked to be enough to take the morning walk out of the equation.