Who is this person?

I have never been a morning person.  According to my mon, when I was a toddler, I would sleep until 11:00.  The summers of my junior high years, I regularly stayed up until 4:00 or 5:00 am and then slept until 11:00 or 12:00 (maybe 1:00) and then rode my bike to the pool, swam all day, played softball in the evenings, and then did it all over again.
What in the world, you may be asking, did a teenager do until 5:00 am in 1987 and 1988, before there were a gazillion cable channels, before the internet, before Playststion, Facebook, Pinterest and Candy Crush Saga?  I read.  Books.  Lots and lots of books.
I still remember the first weekend in our apartment after JJ and I got married.  It was Saturday, glorious, glorious Saturday, the day for sleeping in.  Around 7:30 am, I felt a poke in the arm and could feel someone staring at me.  I opened my eyes just a slit and there was JJ, all smiles.  "When are you going to get up?" 
What?  A 7:30 wake-up poke and ear-to-ear grin is enough to push me into a murderous rage on a Saturday. 
Fast forward a few (17) years and here I am, willingly getting up at 5:45.  To golf. 
That, in and of iteslf, is a joke.  The first time my dad took me to the driving range, I was seventeen years old.  We were there for 45 minutes and I connected with exactly three (THREE!) balls. 
Here's how it went:  Take a practice swing.  Address the ball.  Whiff, whiff, whiff, whiff some more.  I had it in my head, after years of softball, that swinging something down into the ground was a bad idea.  So, I would raise up just a little with every swing so that I wouldn't beat the club head into the ground and then I would miss the ball.  I cried a lot.
So now I am getting up before the sun to play a game that makes me cry.  Well, I don't cry anymore.  I just swear a lot.  It's cathartic.

Evil Genius

Chester. Allegedly a short-haired boy kitten. Turned out to be a long-haired girl kitten. Named for the brilliant cat from the Bunnicula series.

  Look at her. She doesn't look like the sharpest pencil in the box, does she? Maybe only playing with 48 cards. Elevator's not making it to the top floor. You get the idea. We routinely catch her with her tongue hanging out. I look at that face and I think how sweet she is. And how dumb she is. And my heart swells and I just want to hug her and love her and call her my own.

And then 5:30 am comes along and she shows her true colors.

I am a sleeper. I love and cherish my sleep. If I wake up one minute before my alarm goes off, I am completely irritate. I don't get up a single minute before I have to. My love of sleep is part of the reason I only had two kids. Call me a quitter, but it's the truth.

Chester thinks that she should eat at 5:30 am. I think that's bull(you-know-what.) I can normally sleep through anything. I slept through a tornado once.  It went down our street and knocked down the tree in our front yard.  But I can't sleep through my iPad being knocked off of my nightstand.

It all started a few months ago. She would come in and gently paw the plastic bag in the garbage can, making that annoying crinkly sound. I got the better of her. The garbage can now sits on top of my tall dresser. Score one for Shannon. A few days later, I heard her next to me, making this flopping noise that I could not identify. I did NOT want to open my eyes, because once she sees the whites of my eyes, it's game over. I finally figured out that she was picking up the corner of the area rug and letting it flap back down on the hardwood floor. And looking at me expectantly. I'm not sure if she is smart enough to be proud of herself, but that furry little face sure looked smug. 

She has figured out how to make noise in any way she can. She paws at the closet door. There's a shoebox under my bed that she has started eating. If you don't think listening to a cat chew on cardboard (smack, smack) at 5:30 am is annoying, I would be happy to let you cat-sit Chester for a while. Barrettes and bobby pins are a favorite. They make a fun little tinkling noise when they hit the hardwood floor. My glasses make an ever bigger noise when she knocks them off.

Locking her out of the bedroom helps, but then she just goes in and annoys the kids.  I have too much mommy-guilt to let that happen.

The morning that I thought I might kill her was the morning she knocked the iPad off the nightstand. I chased her down the stairs, muttering incoherent threats. She hasn't done that again, but I only think that is because I keep it farther from the edge.

  It hasn't kept her from trying to eat it, though.