Cat Time

Cats can tell time.  Living with 40 pounds of housecat, I am perfectly aware of their abilities in this matter.  I am convinced that my cats are accurate to within a minute or two.

My cat are particularly interested in feeding time.

I usually give them an afternoon snack at 4:00 PM.  Sure enough, a few minutes before 4:00 my cats will appear at my feet.  At first, they simply stare at me.  If I fail to feed them immediately, Carmel will whimper like an electrician just handed a shovel and asked to dig a ditch.  If that fails to motivate me, my two cats will begin whacking each other with stirring spoons and banging on drums.

Okay.  They don’t actually use spoons or whack drums, but they fuss with each other enough to make it seem like that.  After enough of that, I feed them to stop the madness.

Their late night feeding is the real problem.

A while back I started waking at around 2:00 AM—at which time I wandered off to the bathroom so I could pee on the toilet seat and floor.  This activity eventually evolved into me offering a snack to the cats.  Obviously, this soon became a firm requirement for a late night feeding.

The problem here is that cats operate on cat time.  Cat time does not account for daylight savings shifts.  When we “fell back” for daylight savings this fall, my shift from 2:00 AM back to 1:00 AM did not translate into cat time.

Now, each night, a few minutes before or after 1:00 AM, I wake in my bed convinced that someone just whacked me with a spoon.  There on my bed or maybe on the floor, I will find either 20 or a full 40 pounds of cat glaring at me.  Failure to feed them is not an option.

--Mitchell Hegman