Couldn’t sleep, finally fell asleep, and then Tunch jumped on my head.
Why?
Because he could.
When I got pets, I didn’t truly understand how much I would be at their whims. I do, now, and still don’t regret my decisions, but sometimes the behaviors can be irritating as hell.
Like, for example, being sound asleep and having a fat cat box your ears, startle you, purr for a bit, knock your glasses off the nightstand, then jump down and walk off, having accomplished his mission.
Fucker.
Sly
Chris Cornell unleashed the awesome at an Obama fundraiser in California over the weekend.
SiubhanDuinne
The cold wet nose in the ear is good, too.
Also, having your eyelids licked by a rough kitteh tongue.
Better than any alarm clock.
Comrade Mary
Sounds like he didn’t have his claws out, so you got off easy.
/settles into clean, comfy, pet-free bed
kdaug
@SiubhanDuinne: Yeah, what is it about the licking eyelids thing?
Got a German Shepherd who does the same thing. She’s small, ~60 lbs, but she jumps up on the bed and goes to town on my eyelids.
Never the wife’s, mind you, just mine.
Usually at about, say, 3:00 AM.
Then I come to Balloon Juice.
SiubhanDuinne
@kdaug:
Eyelids as salt licks, maybe.
Arclite
Um… Isn’t that what doors are for? Just a thought.
Allen
My youngest cat, T.C. (the spawn of Satan) likes to come out of nowhere, jump on the bed, walk the perimeter around me (include stepping on my head), then run into front room and hang from the door knob till I let him out. This must be done at three A.M., no exceptions.
RoonieRoo
Having just been jumped awake by one of our furry crew, I’m here to join you. Tonight was supposed to be a cat free night in the bedroom but two of them snuck in before we closed the door.
Greg
@Sly:
That was beautiful,Sly, thanks for the link.
I’m up at 3 am to walk the new puppeh, who is the cutest creature in the world, but will be even better when he grows into a little more bladder control.
BD of MN
@Arclite:
yep, it’s “dogs in, cats out” here at bedtime… well, off to work for me, while my state employed bride gets the day off…
Sarah Proud and Tall
Now I have Desmond and Molly and Desmond’s pretty face in my head and I can’t get rid of them.
Thanks for nothing, Cole.
capt
It is just the feline sense of humor.
Schlemizel
I have been sleeping so badly recently that we had to shut our cats out of the bedroom at night. It didn’t help that our ‘special’ cat chose the down comforter as her favorite spot to leave hairballs. One dry cleaning bill for that convinced Mrs. S. it was time. For the last few weeks they have been unhappy about the situation but I really have been sleeping better.
Sarah
I have to keep my glasses in the nightstand drawer, my electric toothbrush on a shelf, my toilet paper in the cabinet under the sink. These cats are running my life.
linda
So a fatcat messes with you because he can? Sounds like a house of rep committee meeting.
mzrad
Dude, get a small spray bottle, fill it with water and keep it by the bed for nocturnal feline activity. And feed fattie right before bed.
Dogs have owners; cats have staff.
harlana
there was a time when i could not so much as leave a glass of water on the table because it would invariably get knocked over – someone found that to be quite entertaining.
no plants on floor, no drinks on table, i-would-kill & disembowel-you-if-i-were-bigger stares, etc.
Rich Webb
Or, maybe Tunch was just checking to see if you were okay. Cats can be really sensitive to “Something is different!” and may have picked up on a change in your breathing pattern. Worst case, you had stopped breathing for a moment and this was just cat CPR.
On a related note, when people snore do cats interpret that as human purring?
gnomedad
Mission Accomplished
Pitch-perfect.
Maude
@mzrad:
And Tunch would have his revenge for that.
Mino
I dunno. With mine I think it’s more equal in abuse. Yes, they wake me. But I am a very restless sleeper, so they get bumped a lot, too. Doesn’t discourage them much, though.
CynDee
“NO PEACE,” we sleepily used to call that type of regular occurrence with our three doggies.
Though they were all random walk-ins, they were about the same age. We had them about 10 years, then over the course of 18 months, they passed away one by one. The “peace” of the broken heart wasn’t so good. Like most folks of our peculiar ilk, we would gladly have (almost) all the trouble back again in order to see their intelligent, captivating faces and hold them and look after their surprisingly numerous needs, and watch them be busy busy busy.
Fortunately we now have precious Disruption and Expense in the person of a 94-pound black lab from up the street who voted with his feet and moved in with us. This guy, Luke, is the sweetest Large Farm Animal Friend anyone could wish for. LORD, I wash rugs all the time. And he snores like a moose. However, Luke wants to please once you are able to figure out how to tell him what you want.
Yeh, you can shut the bedroom door, but there can be problems with that, too. There are fortyleven ways an animal can show you what a fool you are, but so what?
See, we once thought that the reason we came to Florida was for good work and to dwell in and restore a really worth-saving 1925 house in a beautiful climate.
But
we found outit descended on us that our real purpose here is to provide a home for creatures who come into our care. We call our almost-fixed up place the biggest air-conditioned dog house in Florida.BTW, Tammy Faye was right; you DO need AC for animals in the South, and not the type Romney is prone to.
Cheers, everybody. Woof.
Biscuits
Isn’t 3am the witching hour for teh ebil spirits? And thanks Sly. Momma loves Chris Cornell! Yummy!
imonlylurking
He was playing trouble cat.
That’s a well-known game in our house.
JohnMcC
“May the warm tongue of freedom lick your inner ear”
Grace Slick
Tokyokie
I used to have an orange tabby, the late (and sorely lamented) Cat 9 From Outer Space, who used to literally sleep on my head every night. He’d just curl around the top of my head purring when I’d go to bed until we both drifted off to sleep. After a few days, I found it comforting.
Nowadays, Keyser, my Balinese, starts head-bumping me as soon as I lie down. (The best way to stop him from doing that is to toss him under the covers, then he’ll curl up next to me.) Lyle, the gray tabby (and a big scaredy cat), loves to lick the salt off my watchband, so I have to sleep with my left hand under a pillow. (If I were to remove it at night, he’d find it and carry it off to some unknown corner of the house.) Vladimir, the big and big-haired gray kitty, will invariably and pretty much immediately jump on my chest, making it difficult to breathe, should I make the mistake of lying on my back. (Although he’ll sometimes perch on my shoulder, too.) Should I make the error of moving in my sleep (which, luckily, I don’t really do), Marvin, the loony lilac-point Siamese, will take it as an invitation to play footsie, and if I don’t move, at some point, he’ll probably decide to start an impromptu wrestling match with Vlad. Should I get up to go to the bathroom, invariably one of them will move into my spot on the bed and start taking a bath, then look at me sorrowfully when I shoo them away. And no, shutting the door doesn’t help because then the little buggers will start scratching and yowling and I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
Damn, I love these little guys.
auntie beak
this is a regular occurrence at chez beak. my cat’s preferred method of jumping on to the bed is via my head. he walks in by the end of the bed, walks to the top, jumps on my head, then walks back to the end of the bed and his blanket. it hardly even wakes me up anymore, except for last night, when he did it immediately after coming in from outside. his paws were both cold and wet.
jeff
I love my cat and I also foster cats and study their behavior, but I get so annoyed when people make excuses for “kitty’s naughty behavior.”
The cat is knocking shit over because it’s bored. It would also knock shit over if you quit your job and played with it all freaking day. A lot of cats just think it’s hilarious to throw glasses to the ground, or stick their paw in their owners eyes while they’re sleeping, or whatever.
As someone above said, this is what doors are for. Unfortunately, I live in a studio.
Ken
Remember that cats, and all animals, are not moral agents so their actions cannot be evil – no matter how well they seem to emulate it.
boctaoe
If you whine about such minor happenings, I understand why you don’t want children. You can’t lock children in a closet. And Children are forever. Except around the age of 30 yrs they suddenly realize how irritating they were as children.
Hob
My girlfriend has a cat who is a hair-chomper. You’re about to go to sleep, and then there’s this deafening purring coming from behind your head and your hair is being eaten. It’s a little disconcerting.
kindness
John you need another cat to balance the energies at home. Really, two cats works better, especially with two dogs. This advice from someone who has two dogs and currently just one cat. I’d had a pair for 18 years and they died of old age. I’ve replaced one, still have yet to find the zen match for the family for the second.
AndE
Our cat is so fat that during last summer’s earthquake here on the east coast my daughter and I both thought it was just the cat running down the stairs. He loves to jump in bed, wake me up, and move on to his next victim.
someofparts
I pretended to be asleep one morning just to confirm my suspicions about my cat’s strategy. Sure enough, he strolled across the desk until he spotted something promising, my house keys, and then knocked them to the floor to make a noise, then looked at me to see if I was awake yet. No? So he kept going. Stroll at bit. Knock something else to the floor and make a racket. Look at mom to see if she is awake NOW. No? Wash, rinse, repeat. It was calculated, deliberate and wickedly clever. I sure miss the little fucker.
Anniecat45
My two cats love to stretch out across the bed just before bedtime so that there’s no way for me to get into bed without moving them. I solved this by putting cat treats in their dishes just before I go to bed — the Greenies rattling into the dish are a total cat magnet.
Nancy
We warned you when you showed us the picture of Tunch stuck outside that you would pay for it.
Paul in KY
@kindness: Agree here. Another cat (a cute lassie) would give Tunch another semi-equal to contend with (because, let’s face it, Tunch thinks the dogs are his pets too & not someone he can relate to as an equal).
Rawk Chawk
Or…you could close the bedroom door so the little monster can’t come in.
Just a thought.
Constance
Curse you John Cole. I’ve been humming that song since 5 a.m. PST.
I have a noticeable scar next to my mouth where Sweetums pushed off on my face while running across the bed. I consider myself lucky not to have lost an eye to cats in my bed.
ReflectedSky
Tunch is a piker. We had a cat who used to jump on us EVERY NIGHT at 2:00 a.m. I diligently pretended to be asleep, and he eventually gave up on me. But the dude didn’t have it in him to do that. So the cat would jump on his head, he would spring up with a curse, the cat would then race around the house with sleepy, pissed-off dude chasing him, yelling, and when the cat got bored with this very entertaining game, he would slide under the couch. Every. Single. Night.
If we locked him out, he would just hurl himself against the closed door howling until the neighbors were ready to report us to the police as possible Satanists.
I really miss that cat. He used to spread his big belly out when the kid was learning to walk, so that if she fell, she would fall on him, and not get hurt. When he was dying, he waited until she was away at preschool to finally end things. I realize non-cat owners would say that’s crazy. But I swear, it was clear that he was making a choice. Really a great being. Sigh.
Diana
look on the bright side: they’re not using the 4:00 wake session to try to teach you how to catch a mouse, which invariably involves putting a still-living, scurrying mouse into your bed.