On Living with Cats

Apologies to Robert Burns, but I've found that the best laid plans of mice and men are often derailed by a cat.

Yesterday morning I was awoken at 5:00 a.m. by my cat Max. He likes to wake me up by scratching at the closet door. No, he doesn't scratch them because we've locked him in the closet, but because he is wickedly efficient. Our closet doors are the hanging-sliding kind so they make lots of noise when scratched, thus ensuring that I am woken up. Usually this is no big deal because I just lock him downstairs with his food bowl and head back to sleep.

But I just wasn't able to fall back to sleep. After a bit of tossing and turning I got up to start my day. As I was reading email and surfing the internet, I realized that I had time to quilt before work at 10:00 a.m. Over the past couple months, I had fallen out of the early morning work habit, but Saturday was a great time to get back into it. Gee, thanks Max.

I brewed a cup of herbal tea and headed to my studio. Max followed because he likes to see what I'm working on. I've been quilting a throw quilt that stumped me, so it's sat on my machine while I figured out what to do. It's a row quilt: I just needed to quilt five more rows and the border. If I made a quick decision, then I had time to finish almost all the quilting before work.

It was a beautiful morning. There I was working in my studio before dawn, with a warm and comforting mug of tea, a soccer match playing on the television, and my kitty cat nearby for company. What could go wrong?

I finished the remaining five rows and had an hour left. I adjusted the quilt to begin stitching the borders and then Max jumped onto the table to my left. Usually when I sew, he spends his time near the patio doors watching for chipmunks and windblown leaves. But with the snow outside, there was little to see, so he wanted more attention.

I grabbed the cat bed from the corner and stuck it on the table, hoping that he would settle down nearby, but not in my way. But then, he spotted what I was doing. He immediately headed over and curled himself up in a cozy spot on my quilt. I knew I was defeated. I mean, look at what I was faced with.


You can see the stubbornness in his expression. What can you do against something like that?

I spent the rest of the morning organizing my crochet hooks.

While Robert Burns was a great poet, he obviously wasn't a cat owner.