Old cat, new tricks.

I suppose Mia isn't all that old, although she'll turn 11 at the beginning of October. She continually learns new tricks, though. I just wish they were tricks that I taught her, instead of ones she thinks up on her own to torment me.

Normally, she's a good sleeper. An excellent sleeper. At night, she sleeps at the end of the bed, and not only doesn't stir when I get up, she sometimes will sleep in until 10 or 11 before deciding that it's time to get up and eat. Last week, she learned a new behavior: she wakes me up fairly early and demands that I feed her. And she doesn't just jump up and yowl at me - she's more subtle than that. She sits close to me and tickles my shoulder with her whiskers. Or she walks around the bed, and carefully steps on my hair, making sure to pull it enough to wake me. Very passive-aggressive of her. "Oh, no. I didn't wake you. But since you're up anyway, why don't you take this opportunity to feed me?" Once she dines, she goes back to sleep, of course. But I can't, so I get to see what 6:30 looks like.

On the other hand, she seems to be fairly brave, at least during thunderstorms. Last night and again this evening, we've had huge, violent thunderstorms nearby. The kinds of storms where the thunder arrives no more than a quarter-second behind the lightning, which itself was bright enough to light up my bedroom at 2 a.m., where the thunder sounds like an artillery brigade on the street behind me, and the rain is coming down so hard that I cannot see the house across the street from me. Sabrina, my previous cat, would bolt at the first, faraway sound of thunder, and hide shivering under a bed until the storm had passed. But the storms don't faze Mia in the least. She happily sleeps through the thunder, and wakes only when I pet her to comfort her. She glares at me that I should go back to sleep, the better to be rested and ready to feed her every three hours the next day. I don't think she's hard of hearing, although she certainly pulls that particular trick if I try to call her. But since she can hear the opening of a refrigerator from the opposite side of the house, or the click and opening of a can of cat food while asleep on another floor, I'm discounting the possibility.

Always interesting to see what she'll do next. I just hope that her next trick allows me to sleep relatively uninterrupted at night. Well, I can always hope.