The thought of travelling down to Melbourne with M has been at the forefront of my brain since the whole valuation drama finished. However, as keen as M is to go to Dr Grass’s Phd Party, he’s not so keen on wandering the streets of Melbourne while I’m at work everyday - so I’ve been trying to keep a lid on myself. For my part, having to think about someone elses likes and dislikes, worry about who is going to feed the cats, be the one that has to plan the travel/accommodation and a certain other thing I can’t mention for fear of jinxing - I am close to going out of my head. On top of this my new favourite email program, Thunderbird, has carked it and is refusing to get my mail, so I have had to trudge my way through converting all my saved email into this format and that format until I settled on using Eudora (of course I could just used Outlook Express, but that would be too easy).

M doesn’t want me to plan his life while we’re in Melbourne, so I am trying to keep everything open ended. Usually I am the queen of ‘going to dinner’ for the majority of nights - when you’re working every day, it seems like the best way to catch up with people. Anyway - with all of this stewing in my brain I have not been sleeping very well - however this has been exacerbated by M developing an intense morning hatred of Saffron the Orange Cat (StOC) . I must digress and say that I’m glad my brother is somewhere in Croatia, because he would give M 110% support in this matter.

Unfortunately we built the cathome at the side of the house quite near our bedroom window. Some mornings - not every morning - StOC sits as near as he can get to our bedroom window and miaows loudly. He sounds like a pigeon in pain. He’s started to do it more and more, and whether it’s due to our recent spate of celebration or the coldness of the mornings, I have been roused about four days of the last five with M shrieking “FuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuCK! I HATE YOUR CAT” (he becomes my cat whenever he’s bad) and then running into the bathroom and flinging glasses of water at Saff through the window. The final straw was yesterday morning when M tore himself out of bed for the third time, spent some time at the sink and then I heard pounding feet running out the back door. I sneaked out of bed and peeked through the window. M, naked from the waist down, was standing at the cage throwing water in StOC’s direction and making hissing noises. I snuck back to bed. M came back, breathing in a slightly psychopathic manner. I said nothing. For a few minutes there was silence, until StOC - damp, but unbowed - let a few more pigeon noises loose.

M’s whole body went into spasm as he made (what I assume he thinks are) cat repelling hissing noises. I couldn’t take much more.
“You know that if you’d just fed the cats a bit of dry food when you went out there they would be quiet by now?”
The logic seemed to act on M like his hissing noises acted on StOC, i.e. they didn’t.
“Shut up.”
“Buy some earplugs.”
M huffed his head under the pillow and I ruminated at the ceiling, again cursing my brother for pinching my sleeping pills.