Usually, I'd say it was worth it, but it wasn't and the baby was up doing the rumba on my sad miserable intestines. She wakes up about 3AM, habitually, lately, and I'm not sure if it's her or that I have to pee or the fucking cat. I sure hope it isn't a bad habit she's developing. I think the fucking cat might be meowing under my window in the hopes that I'll wake up and let his sorry ass in.

The problem with the cats is that if we leave them inside, they invariably get into a screeching brawl about 330AM and are banging off the walls in the hallway howling like screaming banshees and it wakes us and Bear up. Bear and I wake up a lot easier than Mike and a lot happier. For Mike to wake up requires nothing short of an atomic bombing and if he's awoken by fighting cats it only means one thing: cold wet kitties. He grabs them by the scruff of their necks, and hoses their backs off with cold water in the shower and throws them down the hall. Amazingly enough, they stay quiet for the rest of the night.

I'd like to get a cat door, but then I suspect we'd be getting possums in the cat food, as well as half the neighborhood kitties marching through the house to help themselves to our cats' food bowl for a midnight snack, which is why we don't do it.

The other problem with the cat door, is that Pauline's cat seemed to think we were his people, too, so he would regularly let himself in through the hanging screen we had in the summer to eat whatever he wanted. We're pet owners who always fill the food bowl so that the animal can eat whatever they want, whenever they want and Pauline isn't. She doles out cat food in a measured cup and doesn't believe in just letting them eat at will, and Tails you can tell, feels quite deprived. The vet says it works out either way, but I always feel bad about starving an animal, even though, Cowboy, really does get to be a big fat hulking cow of a cat in the winter. In the summer he thins out and looks pretty normal, but in the winter he just has this adorably fat soft warm white thickly-furred bowl full of jelly belly he lets me rub as much as I want.

After a month or two, we found out that Pauline's cat is a sprayer, so while I used to tolerate him in the house, I don't any more, and thus, went all dreams of a cat door. Pauline got rid of a kitten because unbeknownst to them, Tails was spraying all over their house to express his outrage at having a kitten on his turf. Then the kitten started to doing it, too, so they got rid of the kitten thinking she was the hideous sprayer and then were dismayed when they discovered the spraying was still going on, which is when Tails got to spend a week in the great outdoors. It was also the week in which Tails discovered that I will never permit him in my house again.

Imagine that.