I put my alarm clock across the room on my dresser, so I have to get out of bed to turn it off. Both the kids have used this strategy with much success, but it wasn’t necessary for my silly self until this past winter. Even the sunrise function, where the attached lamp starts glowing a half-hour before the alarm and ramps up to simulate dawn, wasn’t helping. I would roll over, turn the damn thing off when it began to glow, and roll back, all without waking. Miss B loved it, because I would also somnolently scratch behind her ears for a little bit before passing out again.
She also hated it, because I wouldn’t get up, even when she put her nose in my face. There’s nothing like feeling whiskers tickle your lip and opening your eyes to see a carnivore’s big sad eyes–and sharp pointy teeth.
Odd, of course, didn’t mind, since it meant his early-morning nap blurred into his mid-morning nap. The only thing he did mind was brekkie being a bit late, but since brekkie happens after he gets up, gets his morning song, and unloads, world without end, amen, that wasn’t a huge problem.
Odd remembers the one and only time he missed breakfast at our house. That was back when he went to the vet as a pup, got an umbilical hernia fixed–and got neutered, too, all in one go. You don’t want to do surgery on bulldogs if you can avoid it, since their airways are already so compromised sedation becomes a hazard. Odd didn’t mind the crate-ride there, and didn’t mind coming home minus a few bits–he was already too roly-poly and corkscrewed to be able to reach his stitches, so he didn’t need a Cone of Shame. What he did mind, and complained LOUDLY about, was the lack of breakfast that one notable morning.
Dogs are mostly Zen creatures of the Now, but he remembers the one day brekkie was not delivered. Miss B, of course, shrugs and yips at him when he starts grousing about it. “BEFORE I CAME HERE, BREAKFAST WAS NEVER CERTAIN,” she informs him, and Odd, aghast, begins running in circles and barking loudly, as if this is a prospect.
“You’re just making it worse,” I tell B, and she looks at me with a certain gleam in her eye.
“HE’S GETTING EXERCISE,” she says, and I rub behind her ears.
Yesterday, since we went on a run, she was reasonably mellow. Which made that afternoon’s Squirrel Antics somewhat easier to handle–the little bastards have awakened after the cold snap, and are digging in the garden to see if I’ve put any more peas down there. (I haven’t. Yet.) Of course, the Mad Tortie sees them, and while they are not birds, she still yearns to nab a specimen. (Despite, I might add, a squirrel being roughly her size if you take off her tail and poufy fur.) It’s one of her great unfulfilled desires, like constant catnip and a door she can lie across the threshold of, neither inside nor out. The damn squirrels, including the new queen of the backyard heap (and Lord, she is a story unto herself) think the garden boxes are a buffet; the Mad Tortie thinks the squirrels are a buffet, Miss B longs to herd them all up, and Odd Trundles knows very well Mum gets mad if you go digging in the boxes but the prospect of New Friends drives what little sense he lays claim to straight out of his capacious, rock-hard noggin.
But that’s another blog post, since I’m nursing three separate burns in three separate places only left hand from the red sauce yesterday. That didn’t happen during the squirrel hijinks, mind you. It was just an added fillip to a very strange day that ended with yet another hilarious scene in the nutless kangaroo shifter story. (Its working title is Scrotum Search, because I can’t help myself, but it will probably be Jozzie & Sugar Belle if I decide to do it as a serial.)
Since I’m up and have taken down a tankard of tea, I might as well go for a run. Maybe today I’ll tire Miss B out enough that she won’t want to herd everything in the newly-unsnowed yard.
I’m not holding my breath.