Siege

The cat pees everywhere but in her litterbox. I clean the thing daily, digging in the expensive odor control litter like I'm prospecting for gold. She only craps in the litterbox, so I suppose I should count my blessings. It is hard to consider the positive, though, when I am crossing the living room to step outside onto the front porch to check the mail and suddenly, the stench of cat piss hits me in the nostrils like a double-barrelled shotgun blast of yuck. The real tragedy is my golden-hued couch. I can smell that evil has leaked out of my cat, but I can't see it. There are no adjectives to describe my frustration when, half-asleep and oblivious to all sensory input, I just plop down onto the couch and squarely into a warm, wet spot.

If only I had been a dog person...

It's Saturday, which means that I am not contributing to the financial well-being of the call center today. It does mean that I was able to sleep in. Sleeping in has become my new guilty pleasure. Marines accomplish more before 7 AM than I do all day? Bless 'em, but I can get quite a bit done in my sleep. I think I dreamed about work last night; my nocturnal fantasies start to get hazy after the second cup of coffee. Anyway, in my dream, I was Magneto from the X-Men, but not the ready-to-retire-to-a-cottage-on-a-English-countryside Gandalf-looking Magneto from the movies, but the physically-fit underwear model in the comics (which seems extraordinarily realistic since Magneto was around in WWII). Magneto-me went inside the call center and generated an Electro-Magnetic Pulse. The computers throughout the building went dead. The phones went dead. The vehicles in the parking lot went dead. Everything electronic in the building dead dead dead. Being the source of the telecommunications service for the southwestern corner of the state in which I live, there would be several thousand customers suddenly without service. No technicians could roll to get the service back up. Dispatch would be unable to open new work orders for them to act upon anyway, and the customer service call center for a tri-state area would be completely non-functional for any of those states let alone the mob of torch-carrying villagers now without service gathering in the parking lot to prepare to storm the call center.

I woke up before the first attack. I always wake up before the good stuff happens. I'm always snatched from the grip of nightmare by someone down the street honking their carhorn for their spouse to hurry up, they're going to be late from work, and erotic dreams are invariably given a figurative cold shower because of the neighbor fixing his hot water heater. Today, it was the smell of cat pee. The strong, acrid scent was in my nostrils as I hauled my bulk outta bed.

I don't need an alarm clock; I just give her fresh water before I go to bed.