Creatures of Habit

It's been a long time since I've blogged... I've been traveling a lot in the last 6 weeks: New York, Montreal, Washington DC, and Austin. Now that this round of customer visits is done, it looks like I'll be in town for awhile. Whew!

After going to bed last night, I got up to investigate a noise. Not a scary noise, just some sort of mechanical noise that I would swear was a far-away train, although we've lived in the house since November and would probably have noticed a train by now. I was trying to tell whether it was inside the house or out so I opened the back door for a listen. The noise was indeed coming from outside, so I went to bed knowing that I didn't have to worry about the air-conditioning or washing machine blowing into a thousand little pieces while Doug and I slept.

This morning Sienna woke me up just before 5. That's not unusual: cats are creatures of habit. Sienna's mission in life is to open closet doors, and she takes her job seriously. She doesn't want to sit on the shoes or anything, she just needs to open the door. Like clockwork, once in the wee morning hours, then again mid-afternoon, she opens the closet doors in the hallway and in the bedroom. The doors are solid and somewhat heavy, so she takes great pride in her accomplishment.

The morning routine is "scratch-scratch-scratch" and when I wake up to shush her, Sienna jumps on the bed all purry and wants to be petted since she completed her very important task, and at this time of the morning the boys are asleep and she doesn't have to worry about getting pounced on. After doling out the obligatory pets, I realized I wasn't pinned to the bed by any other cats, so I got up and stumbled into the bathroom.

Did I mention that cats are creatures of habit? We've had Felix for less than a year, but already he has established that I am not allowed to go to the bathroom by myself. I mean, I am capable -- it's been more than 35 years since I had to hold on to my big sister for fear of falling in and getting flushed. But if I get up in the middle of the night, it is only a matter of moments before I hear THUNK (Felix weighs 14+ pounds, and he usually sleeps on the desk in the den)... thwup-thwup-thwup-thwup-thwup-thwup-thwup-thwup (yes, 14 pounds of cat moving along hardwood floors does make a noise)... "URD?"

Although Felix is capable of meowing, he prefers to say "Urd?" It's the same noise many cats make if you wake them up from a sound sleep... a feline version of "WTF?" But instead of reserving "Urd?" for a surprise wakeup, Felix uses it in his everyday communication. He has learned many other tricks from Sienna and Casper, but he has not yet learned to open doors, so in this case "Urd?" meant "I have noticed you are in the bathroom all by yourself. I feel duty-bound to jump on the edge of the bathtub, rub my face on the shower door, jump back down, walk around the room, and fall over at your feet. I can not do this if the door is closed, kindly open it." Falling over is another one of Felix's peculiar habits... I thought he had a neurological disorder when we first found him, but he is surprisingly agile for a cat that in profile looks somewhat like a pot-bellied pig.

Only this morning there was no THUNK, no thwup-thwup-thwup, and no "URD?" On leaving the bathroom I heard a faint meowing off in the distance. A quick sweep of the house turned up Casper, but no Felix. It was then I noticed the shadow in the back door: Felix spent the night stuck between the back door and the screen, having snuck out when I opened it to investigate the noise last night. Funny thing is, he wasn't traumatized by the incident. When I opened the door he didn't scramble out as though he'd spent the night being tortured by Satan's minions: I'm fairly certain that would have been Casper's reaction (but then again, Casper would have screamed so loudly that this would never have happened). But Felix's morning routine continued as though nothing ever happened: he made one "Urd?," circled around my legs, fell over, then ambled off to the food dish.