Time Change Conversations with Tuxedo

Daylight savings time is upon us, and it has someone in our household all out of sorts. That someone though, is our fuzzy feline, Tuxedo.

For people who aren't familiar with our cat, he has some peculiar habits that confound us to this day. As an eight year old cat, Tuxedo still, twice a day (and every single day for the last eight years) whines incessantly for his meals for at least an hour before each meal. "Whines" may not be the best word--screams and wails and howls and makes a goddamn racket may all work better.

He's a big cat, but his lungs and vocal chords are from some kind of banshee or howling beast.

After all this time, I've been able to tune him out, but it's not easy. There's simply no let up. But Tux's body clock is on solar time, while our schedule is on (mostly) artificial cell-phone time.

For breakfast, during the week, there is a high-pitched and shushy dance between Corrie and Tuxedo, and he gets fed right before she leaves. On the weekends, he's up right before her alarm would start to go off, and at first stirring he'll be an obnoxious beast until he gets food. Up until this past weekend, the alarm would start going off right around day break, meaning Tux would be anxious for grub right as the sun breaks the horizon, and then not getting fed until maybe forty-five minutes later, but definitely when the sun is up. Come weekends, he'll be starting at sunup.

One benefit to this is when an alarm fails, Tux acts like a fail-safe alarm.

But now, the old seven am is six, which gives us an extra hour to sleep. Tell that to the cat. He's up and obnoxious with the sun, which is kinda like his thing. When I started this blog back in Brooklyn, we didn't get any sun, so this wasn't really the same issue. He was obnoxious, of course, but not on the solar time schedule like now.

I thought cats were supposed to mellow out...silly me.