My No-Good, Very Bad (but funny) Monday Morning

Ugh.  I want a do-over for this morning.  In fact, I want to roll back to early Sunday night, and then skip today all together.

My Sunday evening ended as normal, but I had heard about the Pleiades Meteors and wanted to have a look, so I set my second alarm for 1 AM, the supposed "peak" time, and hit the sack with my new kitten, Olivia.

Around 12:30 AM, I woke with a horrible case of reflux.  For those of you who don't suffer from this, it's nearly impossible to describe.  Essentially, the hydrochloric acid from your stomach takes an unscheduled side trip up your esophagus and then -- if you are unlucky -- spills into your trachea.  I was unlucky.  I woke up coughing and choking from the burning acid in my throat and upper respiratory tract.  Nice.  I'll spare you the details.

My new kitten Olivia, who is only a smidge over three months old, didn't know what to make of this gasping, coughing human, so she followed me between the bedroom and bathroom, watching me with her big copper eyes.

Finally, I settled down, and laid myself down to sleep, with a now-wide-awake kitty hopping from floor to pillow to feet to floor... Repeat.

And, then the alarm went off.  Ugh.  One AM.

So I threw on my jeans, and stepped out of my bedroom onto my patio, and took a glance at the night sky.  It was not only overcast, but it was just light enough to see that the cloud cover was thick and laden with potential rain.  Great.  Abort.

I climbed back into bed, ready, finally, for some sleep.  The storm started less than five minutes later.  Considerably violent, as many Midwestern storms are, the thunder seemed to shake my concrete block apartment like the speaker cone of an Altec Lansing column, playing, say KISS's greatest hits.  And, my poor little Olivia, didn't like it one bit.

With each thunderous crash, she would jump, and land, claws out, somewhere on my body.  Now, three month old kittens don't have long claws, but they're a bit like those small thin needles doctors use to give babies vaccinations.  Not a blood draw diameter, but the baby sure doesn't think it feels good.

Trying to be sympathetic to my frantic, fearful kitty, I kept removing her embedded paws from my body and speak soothingly to her.  Ugh.

At some point, the storm abated, and we both fell asleep.

The alarm was most unwelcome this morning.  After pounding it into submission twice, I finally realized that, yes, I do have to get up.   Olivia just picked her little head up, as if to say, "Are you freakin' crazy?" before dropping back to her kitty dreams.

The shower started fine.  I was soaping my hair, when I could feel the shower liner bulge in.  Olivia has been walking on the tub edge between the shower curtain and liner all week.  It's much easier to do with the bath mat draped along the tub edge.  Unfortunately, the bath mat was serving in its role as bath mat, lying on the floor.  With an amusing scrunge noise, Olivia plummeted into the tub.

I had to look.  How can you not look when your kitten falls into the shower with you?  Soap immediately penetrated every pore in my eyeballs.  Do eyeballs have pores?  God, I think mine are pitted if they don't.

She stood there, stunned, getting soaked by the shower.  The thought occurred to me that Olivia might actually like water - how weird is that?  And, then she started to yowl.  Cat people know what I'm talking about.

Yowling is the feline equivalent of a 50 MM cannon, or banshees screaming on the moors, or an air raid siren from a foot away.  And, she began to scrabble, trying to get some purchase on the slick tub sides to get out of this damn water torture.

Laughing, despite my melting eyeballs, I picked her up and put her on the bath mat.  Good kitty.  Resuming my shower, I rinsed, repeated and went on with my morning routine.

Opening the shower curtain, a really horrible sight appeared.  It seems that Olivia had the proverbial crap scared out of her.  She had jumped, soaking wet, into the cat box to poop.  At some point during this bodily function, she realized that her wet fur was now covered with clumping cat litter.  So, poopus interruptus, and she hopped out, leaving the interruptus poopus on the floor, along with about 4 cubic meters of clumped cat litter.

Toweling myself off, I wondered what angry god I had offended to deserve this morning.  I cleaned up the bathroom floor, and went looking for the kitty.

Well, she obviously thought my unmade bed was a good place to stop and take inventory.  Clumped cat litter was laying all over the sheets.  Nice.

I found her under the lamp table in the sitting room, trying to shake the litter off her little paws.  She looked at me and we both had the same thought "WTF?"

She was very patient as I toweled her off over the cat box, letting as much of the litter fall back in as possible.  Her wonderful plush stuffed-animal British Shorthair fur was soon just merely damp, and she slowly began to recover from the indignity of a bath.

I shook out my sheet outside, threw them in to the washer for later, and once again, tried hard to justify going to work on this no-good, very bad (somewhat funny) Monday morning.

Needless to say, running out of muffins in the cafeteria was just a nice capstone to my day.

Can I have that do-over now?  Is there a mulligan for Monday mornings?  Sigh...