The Night Stalker

As much as I kid about Vio-kitty being a little too frisky now that she has regained her health, in all honesty, I am happy to see it. I'd rather her have extra energy than not enough. But, although we didn't know it, Vio was sick with feline luekemia from birth. Consequently, she was a much quieter cat when she was younger. What we have now is like..."Kittenhood: The Sequel" or something...

I honestly don't think the dog minds when she pretends he is a woolly mammouth and she is a saber tooth tiger. She leaps out from behind a door frame and attempts to latch onto his haunches. Winston has a smooth coat, so half the time she just slides right off. The other times he just kind of shakes her loose, at which she looks indignant.

Actually, she looks indignant all the time. I have 17 different photos of her and she has the same experssion - the one you see above - in all of them. Every time I get the camera out she glares at me, as if I were a tabloid photographer and she was Greta Garbo. Maybe she's the re-incarnation of Greta Garbo. Or Cleopatra. Or some other distant queenly figure. Who knows?

So I don't mind her attacking the unsuspecting dog. I don't mind that she has shredded the clothes hamper. We hate the clothes hamper anyway. It's alvocado green wicker, and it once belonged to Angela's mother. The lid falls unexpectedly which can be tough on fingers.

But the one habit she has, which I wish she could break, is attacking my feet in the middle of the night. I mean, it's not like I'm getting loads of quality sleep here to begin with. I stagger into bed, exhausted at about 1:00 every morning. The dog hops up and gets situated, which, since he weighs 175 lbs is sort of a production. Then comes Vio-Kitty.

First she jumps up in bed and settles down as if it is her plan to curl up and continue the long naps she has been taking in the wing chair all day long. This is a ruse, to keep from being shut out of the bedroom. And she's very clever, because at least 40% of the time, she actually does sleep until she goes downstairs at some point to take all of the plastic shopping bags out of the dispenser. We get up in the morning and the dispenser is half empty and there are 30 plastic bags all over the first floor half shredded. This is a pretty weird way of recycling - turning plastic grocery bags into cat toys, but if it keeps her away from her other nocturnal pass time then it's okay with me.

Because the rest of the time, she attacks my feet. Long about 3:00 in the morning or so I wake up with a telling sharp pain in my big toe. I sit up in bed to try to grasp the situation, and in the glow of the street lamp can easily see the problem. I have a cat attached to my foot. My foot will be under the covers, but Vio-Kitty will have both front paws wrapped around it, and be gamely chewing on my toe. As soon as I shake my foot to try to dislodge her, she goes in "for the kill" with a kicking motion from her back claws.

"Vio! Knock it off!"

This wakes the dog up. The dog has many fine points. He has caught me when I have fallen, he has woken me up to keep me from having a bad asthma attack. But as either an alarm clock or a watch dog he is utterly useless. He wakes up and looks confused. Yawns and looks at me hopefully. Is it time for breakfast?

Meanwhile, Vio has gotten down off of the bed, but it's only because she's gearing up for her next assault, somewhere in the shadows. Shortly after I lay back down and just start to fall asleep she makes a flying leap over the dog onto my knees, which she then proceeds to attempt to dispatch in a similar way.

"Vio! You damn cat! I'm not prey!"

At which point she sits down and looks at me, curiously. What are those noises I'm making? She curls up and considers this. Then, just as I am about to fall back to sleep, she comes up near my face as if to ask me about it. She puts her nose up to my nose. I open my eyes. She looks like an alien. She crooks her tail in that way cats have when they're saying hello. "Hi. I'm nocturnal!"

I sigh, pick her up, and close her out of the bedroom. The dog garumphs. He stands up, cirlces around and settles back down taking the warm spot and also most of the covers. Then he starts snoring. I head over to sleep with The Hub, but he's snoring even louder. Now, with Winston taking up the entire spare bed and The Hub snoring like a locomotive, I have no choice but to camp out on the sofa....Where, you guessed it, Vio-Kitty has engaged her first plastic grocery bag. She's inside the bag, tearing her way out. I tell you, at 4:00 in the morning, this is really kind of creepy. You expect to see some strange life form pop out like on the Sci-Fi Channel.

I thought having animals in the house was supposed to make you feel better!