The Magical Appearance of Jinx-the-Cat

What a beautiful warm, sunny day we’re having here in Central Ohio on this, the first day of June. I should be grateful. I mean, we’re not experiencing any sort of catastrophic weather conditions, which in my world translates to a slightly overcast day with a few sprinkles.

Nor is the real world experiencing any real catastrophic weather conditions at this very moment. In Central Ohio, anyway.

I would be grateful, but I’m a little tired and grouchy. Or, if you ask Vince, he’d likely say that I’m a lot tired and grouchy. To wit: when he said, “Good morning, sunshine!” in a way-too-cheerful voice this morning, I opened one unfocused, bloodshot eye and growled at him. He probably thought, Uh oh. It’s obviously a five-alarm caffeine emergency. Gotta get on that – stat!

I should have had an inkling about what sort of morning I was going to have when we didn’t head upstairs to bed until nearly 1AM. I’m not even sure why we stayed up so late – it’s not like we had an urgent agenda that kept us up. And, no, watching reruns of The Office does not count as “urgent.”

So I knew that even if I dropped off immediately and slept soundly until my alarm rang this morning, I was still going to be dealing with a less-than-full quota of REM sleep.

Plus, it has been a little too warm in our bedroom lately despite running the A/C on full blast. Vince has deduced it is because we keep the door closed so Twinks and Jinx, our adorable yet far-too-energetic kittens, stay out of the bedroom and don’t startle us awake with midnight pounces. Last night Vince apparently decided to leave the bedroom door open a crack to see if the cool air would circulate upstairs a little better. But (and this is key), he neglected to inform me of his decision.

Did the kittens take full advantage of that cracked door? Pshaw! Of course they did.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I was awakened by a furry head bumping against my hand, which in cat language means “PET ME NOW!” Still half asleep, I complied. But then in some deep recess of my brain, it occurred to me that Jinx should not have been in the bedroom let alone on the bed requiring petting. And then it occurred to me that if one cat was around, the other one must be in the vicinity. But I didn’t sense Twinks in the room, which was puzzling.

So, as Jinx took full advantage of my sleepy state and reveled in all the attention she was getting, I started to awaken more fully. Not what I wanted to do at, it turns out, 3:30 in the morning.

Because I didn’t want Jinx to wake up Vince, I eventually picked her up and walked over to the bedroom door intending to shoo her out. Except that the door was tightly closed.

So I opened the door and placed her gently on the floor and then quickly shut the door again. Only now I was wide awake. How, I wondered, did Jinky-Jinx manage to get inside our room when the bedroom door was tightly closed? Do we have some sort of cat-sized hole in the wall that somehow escaped our notice? Did she learn to magically teleport herself through closed doors?

Then I started thinking that if she can do the disappearing and reappearing trick like that Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, I’m going to fully exploit her talent in a get-rich-quick scheme of the highest magnitude. Hey, she’s cute and all, but it’s about time she earned her keep. Friskies ain’t cheap, you know.

Yeah…three-thirty in the morning is clearly not a good time to try to think, well, clearly.

I almost shook Vince awake to discuss the situation, but I knew one of us needed to be relatively cheerful in the morning. Eventually I dropped back into sleep only to be rudely awakened a short time later by the alarm.

Yippee, I thought. It’s time to get up after an oh-so restful night.

But once I poured some Visine into my bloodshot eyes and had my caffeine transfusion, I was semi-awake and able to communicate with my loving and patient husband.

He admitted that he was awake the entire time Jinx was in the room, but only pretended to be asleep. Why? Maybe he was worried I’d shoo Jinx over to his side of the bed so he’d have to deal with her. Or perhaps he thought pretend-sleep was preferable to engaging in a conversation with me about our magical cat.

Turns out while I blithely snoozed away earlier, he was awaked when little Miss Motocross – Twinks – first entered the bedroom. As she zipped around the room exploring such fascinating things as tassels on the decorative pillows, the jingly bell on her collar alerted Vince that there was a cat in the bedroom. The second jingly bell told him that Jinx had followed her sister into the No-Felines-Allowed Zone. He managed to snag Twinklebelle and put her out of the bedroom, but Jinx escaped his grasp. So he shut the bedroom door with Jinx still inside the room.

Thus, the mystery was solved and my hastily devised get-rich-quick scheme disappeared in a puff of smoke once I realized that Jinx does not have “Beam me up, Scotty” abilities.

Drat. Foiled again.

So, instead of lounging around all day on a bed full of decorative pillows covered with tassels and counting my riches, I had to get up and go to work. And do I get to indulge in a much-needed after-work nap? Nooo. Instead, I have to stop by the store and pick up yet another bag of Friskies.

And tonight? Well, tonight I think we’ll be so tired we’ll sleep through any sort of catastrophic situation – weather- or feline-related. But just to be safe, I think we’ll make sure the bedroom door is tightly closed.