This:

is not my house.

This cat wakes mommy by purring sweetly. The room is light. It's morning. This is advertising agency fantasy bullshit.

This is not my house.

In my house, no matter what time I plan to get up, The World's Most Annoying Cat somehow knows, and begins screeching his awful, awful, screaming smoke alarm MEEEEOOOWWWW! 30-40 minutes BEFORE I intended to get up. This morning I planned to get up at 6, so the screaming started at about 5:30. If I have to be up at 5, he'll start screaming at 4:30. How does he KNOW?? I have no idea, but it happens all the damn time.

But even before the screeching, he started the non-verbal torture. I have vertical blinds on the huge slider to the balcony, and he has figured out how to riffle them, making a noise like shuffling a huge deck of aluminum playing cards, over, and over. That's the warm-up before the actual screaming starts.

So I get out of bed to feed the miserable sonofabitch, and put down the can of food. He takes two bites and walks away.

He's asleep now in a patch of sunshine in the bedroom.

Fancy Feast can shove their sweet commercials. I wonder how many people have gotten cats based on those lovey-dovey cat food commercials, then ended up living with a cat like mine?

I am tired of my days starting with this torture - it's stressful and cannot be good for my blood pressure. It's a figure of speech to say that something is "killing me," but in this case, I have started to realize that it's actually possible that he is harming my health. I can feel the surge of tired anger when the pre-dawn screams start, every goddamn day, and then putting down the food only to watch him turn his nose up and stalk off, content that he got his way, he got me to wait on him - yes, it makes me angry. I know it's stupid to be angry at a cat, but I swear to God I feel like I'm living with daily mental abuse inflicted by an animal. It's crazy! If he were a man, I'd kick his ass out and divorce him.

I have quite a lot on my calendar this week, including that long-overdue haircut. I think I'm going to go for it, put my head in the stylist's hands, so to speak, and let him do whatever he thinks would work best, given my guidelines of "Needs no more than a dryer and a round brush, doesn't turn to crap if I'm showing houses all day," and see what happens. I'm truly hating this long, boring, shoulder length bob thing.

Another thing I MUST get onto my calendar ASAP: Eye doctor appointment. I cannot see with these glasses, and my contacts aren't right either. I find myself wearing magnifying readers over my contacts just to do basic tasks like wash dishes, and that's ridiculous. I've put it off and put it off, but I cannot put it off any longer.

School has started in Seminole County, and my daughter, who teaches on the Orange County schedule, is back at work preparing for her new crop of pre-K munchkins who start next week. It's still godawful hot, it's still storm season, it's still very much summer, but in other ways summer is over. I feel like it flew, and like the calendar pages are blowing away, like they used to do in old movies to illustrate the passage of time:

Maybe it's just the sleep deprivation caused by that screaming cat.