Sometimes I feel like just giving up

It's disconcerting to be outmaneuvered by a skinny beige cat. And yet Reynaldo beats me, and beats me down, every time.

Lately he has decided to awaken me in the middle of the night -- usually between 2 and 3 am. He eats my hair. He meows. He pulls on my lower lip with his paw. He knocks everything off my dresser. He does whatever he can to wake me up.

He wants me to feed and play with him. If I do this so he'll leave me alone, he will do it again the next night. And the next. Trust me, I know.

He is not hungry. I always find the meager remnants of his dinner in his bowl when I give him breakfast. He just would prefer a cat treat or canned food to his kibble. And he's not lonely. He has two other cats and a box of toys to amuse him while I sleep. He doesn't need me. He just wants me.

Last night we went through our little routine, with him misbehaving and me yelling, and finally I just tossed him out of the bedroom and closed him -- and the other two cats -- out. And, unintentionally, away from the litter box that is tucked out of sight in the back of my walk-in closet.

So this morning when I woke up, I found catshit on my kitchen floor. Gee, thanks! And cat urine on one of my handbags -- that'll teach me to forget to hang it on the chair -- and on my bathmat.

Maybe now that Reynaldo is older (he just turned 8), his dietary needs have changed and he truly isn't getting enough of the food he likes. Or maybe he's just fucking willful. At any rate, I'm going to give him a midnight snack before I retire. Not Joey -- though he's sweet, he's already too chunky and I worry about the impact his weight has on his health. But Miss Thing herself, Charlotte, can partake in a dollop of canned food too, if she'd like.

I've got to come up with something. We can't go on like this!

Mommy's Home

My mom was released from the hospital yesterday afternoon and I'm so grateful! She is going to be tired for a good long time, has to remember to drink -- preferably water -- almost constantly because she is at increased of dehydration, and she shouldn't be too far away from a bathroom for a while, but she's home. In her own bed. With her cat.

The house my mother currently lives in -- where I lived from ages 2 to 18 -- has only ever been owned by her family. Her mom and stepfather built it when she was in high school. It's the house she moved away from when she married my dad. When I was a toddler, she and my dad bought it from her parents, and that's where she's been ever since.

To me it's a ranch house with shag carpeting in the world's most boring suburb. But it's as important to my mom as Tara was to Scarlett O'Hara. So I'm so glad she's home!

Plus, I wasn't at all crazy about the hospital she was in. She and my kid sister love it because it's new and in a wealthy suburb -- where I was in an old hospital in a more working-class neighborhood when I had my surgery last September. Yet in my dumpy old hospital, I never saw food trays in the hall. Every hospital worker who came to visit me actually USED the hand sanitizer stuck to the wall. Glad she's home before she could come down with some sort of infection -- albeit a decidedly upper middle class infection.

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