I Sometimes Think They Are the Devil's Familiars

My cats are driving me crazy. Apparently they ran out of food during the night, and decided at 7 AM that they were hungry damn it, and I was bloody well going to get up and feed them. Happiness, being frighteningly intelligent given the miniscule size of her brain, has long since figured out that if she really wants me to get up, the key is to do something destructive that I absolutely cannot ignore. Usually, this involves my books, and, in the past, has occasionally included knocking books off a shelf and directly onto my sleeping head. Unfortunately, there are no books on shelves at the moment, as they've all been packed, so she went for the piles of unread books sitting on the floor. And apparently just knocking them over doesn't do it, because they have less far to fall and don't make as much noise, or something.

So I woke up to the sounds of shredding paper.

Aaargh! What's particularly disturbing is that she apparently deliberately chose a book from the middle of the pile to wreck. That ten-years out-of-date calorie-counting guide to fast food restaurants I bought for some reason a very long time ago and have been figuring I ought to just get rid of wasn't good enough, even if it was lying right there on the top. Instead she felt compelled to pull four or five books off the top and sink her claws into my nice hardback copy of Sting's Broken Music. I don't know what she has against Sting, but I now fear his words are as broken as his music, all jumbled up and held together with tape there in the middle of his life story. (Yes, that's right. She wasn't content to attack the title page, either, but opened up to the middle of the book. She's a fiend in feline form, I tell ya!)

This isn't the first time she's done something like this, either, although it hasn't happened very often, thank goodness. But there does seem to be a weird pattern to the books she picks on. On two separate occasions, in two separate parts of the house, she's seen fit to savage Stephen R. Donaldson, which, OK, I can kind of understand, because his writing sometimes makes me want to do that, too. She's done the same thing with Douglas Hofstadter, though, and I can't imagine what her problem is with him, unless maybe she's a fanatical opponent of Strong AI or something.

Anyway, so, I got up and fed the damned cats and tried to go back to sleep, only to hear the sounds of Nova bolting down catfood at a breakneck pace, followed inevitably by the sounds of Nova throwing the catfood back up because he ate it too fast. The idiot animal never learns. What really disturbs me is that it's now two hours later, and I still haven't found where he did it. I have the distinct feeling I'm in for a very nasty surprise as soon as I let my guard down.

And then, a little while ago, he tried to eat some of the needles off of an artificial Christmas tree I have sitting out in an open box, destined to be donated to a friend for her yard sale if she wants it. He ended up getting a fake pine needle stuck to the roof of his mouth, and I had to pull it out by a comically protruding bit of green.

Sheesh. Cats.