Attention all burglars: I may have alluded to this before, but in case there is any confusion allow me to reiterate: Mojo has THE WORST WATCHDOG on the face of the earth. It is to the point that, when I hear a car in the driveway, I look over at Rosie snoozing away in her bed and I say "Okay, someone's here. How long will it be before you notice?" Generally speaking they have to be walking in the house before she'll get up. I've come in and hung my coat up and flipped through the mail and checked for messages, and then finally shouted, "Okay, I'm here! I think I'll rob the house!" before I finally hear her rise up from her bed and come look at me through the balcony railing. Not come DOWN, mind you, until I ask her to--no, she'd just stand there wagging her tail if I didn't insist she come greet me properly. (And you think MOJO's lazy!)

Of course this is not the case when my Favorite Husband comes home. Oh, no, heaven forfend! Him coming home involves some sort of national holiday, the shameless flirt. Yay! Daddy's home! He's SO much more fun than Mojo, the woman who FEEDS me and BRUSHES me!

So anyway. Lately I've been waking up around three or four in the morning. I'm sure this is NOT due to perimenopause, as one friend has suggested, but instead due to a combination of my going to sleep around eight in the evening and living the vibrant, exciting lifestyle Mojo so enjoys. But since my Favorite Husband needs his beauty sleep, I tend to sneak out of the bedroom and bop quietly around downstairs until he happens to get up, which is around five. Early on I tried to get the dog to come with me, but she is such a slugabed I usually don't try anymore.

So this morning I am bopping around per usual and decide to make myself some coffee. Which thanks to my quest for good coffee even though I wouldn't know it from pond scum, means instead of boiling water I have to go through this ritual of coffee grounds and grinding and all this stuff. Which I originally liked to think of as some sort of tea ceremony sort of ritual, but the truth is it's just a big pain in the butt.

So I don't bother to rinse out the press pot until I need to use it again, so it sits for twelve hours or so with old grounds in it. And in the morning I used to fill it with water and walk it out to the compost heap. But at four in the morning, when you first wake up, the LAST THING you want to do is walk out into freezing cold dewy grass when it's pitch black out. So this morning I decided instead I would dump the grounds in the trash. Which means I tiptoe out into the three-season room, where the big plastic trash can resides, open it up, and dump the grinds therein. And, just to make sure I've got everything, I tap the pot oh-so-gently against the side. Tap-tap. Like that, only quieter.

So Guess Who decides to suddenly become the World's BEST Watchdog? At FOUR IN THE MORNING? It was like a freakin' DINO explosion. (Meaning Dino, the doglike pet from The Flintstones.) "Baa-baa-baa-baa-baa-baa-baa-wow! Baa-wow!" She spends the first solid minute SCREAMING in the bedroom, and then BANG! She comes barreling out the bedroom door and down the stairs to do FIERCE BATTLE with me.

And poor exiled Ratty sees his chance and goes sneaking INTO the bedroom, where he starts yowling in the manner that got him exiled in the first place. So I have to drop EVERYTHING and turn off the water and go upstairs to fetch the cat. And it's pitch black in the bedroom, and so I'm whispering "here, kitty kitty" and he slows down his yowling because he knows I'm trying to CATCH him and he is determined not to be caught, and I can only find him when he YOWLS. So there's this big Marco Polo game going on, and the dog decides the house is burglar-free and simply HAS to join in the fun, so as I'm reaching down to pet the cat (prior to grabbing him) suddenly it's NOT a cat but a BIG STUPID DOG and the cat is FIVE FEET AWAY for his next yowl. All of this is attempted in hushed whispers, needless to say.

I finally get the beasts OUT of the bedroom, and back downstairs to my coffee, but whatever tea ceremony relaxation I might have imagined from my coffee-making ritual might as well be thrown out the window. To say nothing of all the running around up and down the stairs. Why, again, do I put up with the furry little morons? Isn't pet ownership somehow supposed to LOWER blood pressure? Not happening here....

Mojo