I love Isabella. She’s my little sweetheart (most of the time), but we’ve been on the outs since yesterday morning. She began at 3 am trying to woke me up, and it wasn’t her usual touching me either. She was full on meowing. I needed my sleep, so I shut her out of my bedroom.
Then she began trying to get in from under the door, but that was impossible. Nevertheless, she was making such a ruckus that I got up and opened the door. This was around 4 am. She began to meow again, over and over, insisting that I feed her. So, I did the one thing that I know will hold her off for a while; I grabbed her and wrapped her in my arms for a hug. Isabella hates to be held, so she wriggle away from me and sulked off. She then let me sleep for another 45 minutes before she tried again. At this point, I just got up and fed her. I wasn’t going to get anymore sleep anyway.
So, from the time I got home yesterday until I went to bed, I refused to let her fall asleep. I’m hoping that by not sleeping all evening that she’ll sleep through the night, or at least longer than the night before. Cats are wonderful creatures, but they have a mind of their own. Some people don’t like cats because they think they are aloof and independent. The truth is that cats domesticated in just that way. Anthropologists believe that cats actually sort of domesticated humans.
When humans began to move away from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural society, they settled in villages, towns, and eventually cities. They began to store the grain they were growing, which naturally attracted mice, which in turn attracted cats (the true story behind “This Is the House That Jack Built”). As cats were around more, people began to feed them, and they began to stay so that they trained the humans to feed them regularly. Cats still hunted the mice, but they realized that humans were a steady source of food. Unlike dogs who were domesticated by humans as hunters and companions, cats domesticated themselves and tricked humans into thinking that they were their companions, which is why they have retained their independent streak for millennia.
So, here are some of my favorite cat memes. Some of them are just humorous, it others have a bit of truth to them.
And here is my own personal alarm clock, Isabella, looking down on me from the top of my kitchen cabinets while I cook dinner.
Joe
The Closet Professor 
June 17th, 2022 at 10:02 am
Twenty years ago, I lived on the back of an old farmhouse in rural New England, near a swampy pond. Around 2 a.m., a beaver gnawed at a power line pole to the house and the pole fell and the power went out. I needed to awaken at 7, so I opened the door to my bedroom and, sure enough, my fuzzy alarm clock wandered in at exactly 7 a.m. to wake me for the day. I would not let him sleep with me normally because he liked to chew on his toe nails at 2 a.m. Cleaning at 3:30. Wake up at 5 a.m. But that morning he came through.
June 17th, 2022 at 10:13 am
Occasionally, I have had problems with my blood glucose level dropping too low. She has always woken me up for that. Apparently, cats can sense the change in body chemistry. I didn’t check my blood sugar when she started in at 3 am, but when I checked it later it was a little low. That is one possibility to why she was so insistent on waking me up.