Thought I'd talk about Deli a little today. I'm feeling awfully beat down and tired, fighting through the effects of the second Unisom I've taken, in order to bring you this illuminated missive about a psychotic cat.  I'd rather be in bed, of course, sleeping, or even lying there with my head down and my eyes closed, pretending to sleep. Mistress Deli, however, had other ideas, and here I am, as awake as I can be, typing up a thousand words about my cat.  Sucks to be me, don't it?  Saturdays are really very bad for me.  I usually wake up very early on Saturday morning, sometimes well before five AM, and spend the rest of the day trying to go back to sleep. People don't seem to understand that Saturday is the one day of the week when I really need to get sleep, too. I get more phone calls from people on Saturday than any other day of my week. I don't do anything on Saturdays then maybe clean house, sleep, and cook myself something to eat.  I have to be back at work, after having been off Thursday and Friday, on midnight, Sunday morning/Saturday evening. The problem is, I'm often not at all tired all day Saturday, and I can sometimes lie there, not feeling tired, until nine, ten PM--when I have to wake up and get in the shower anyway to get ready for work--I rely on Unisom or Benadryl on these bad days, to get me a few hours of sleep.  This problem can be greatly compounded by an insane cat.  I woke up today at right around five-thirty AM. I lay in bed, thinking I might be able to fall back asleep if I just lay there quietly long enough.  No dice.  So I got up, took a Unisom, had a little something to eat, and read a book until the Unisom kicked in.  After what seemed like an eternity, I managed to fall into a fitful, surface-level sleep that isn't at all restful. Just when I was settling into the rhythm of the thing; really getting down into a nice, heavy sleep, Deli, having thought I'd slept more than enough, decided to wake me up.  It was 1:00 PM, nine hours before I needed to wake up.  It's at times like this that I give serious consideration to having her made into a fur hat. I exaggerate quite a bit. I do it for comedic reasons, I do it for sarcastic reasons, and I do if for reasons I couldn't quite give you.  If you're reading something of mine that makes you laugh and go, "No way, Nescher." you're probably right.  I exaggerate about Deli more than almost anything else in my life. For a five pound wad of blonde and black fur, she seems to have a lot of influence and this is, as mentioned above, largely exaggeration.  She is a very sweet kitty. She likes to cuddle, she licks my nose when my face is close to hers, and she likes to play. As I type this, she's climbing up on my computer desk, doing her level best to sit on my keyboard. If I let her, she'd chase my fingers as they stumbled and stuttered their way across the keys. All very sweet, feline behavior.  One of her kitty-er tricks is to sit right next to my right hand in the space in between the edge of the desk and my keyboard, making it effectively impossible for me to reach the right-hand side of the keyboard. If you've ever seen typos in my writing and wondered what the heezy I was drinking when I wrote it, well, now you have some idea.  Deli can't stand to have her back feet played with. I'm not sure why. I have a theory that the same people who fixed her and had her front claws removed used to fuss with her back claws as well. Or maybe she's worried I'm going to take those from her as well. It's a tempting idea, I have to say. With her slaps from her front paws, I often wonder if I'd have fewer scratches if she had no back claws.  She gets cranky a lot, and she bites and snaps at me, often while sitting in my lap, purring, snuggling with me. This is one of the indicators I have that she's insane.  She likes to have me stand over the top of her while she eats. She can be snarlingly hungry. She'll yowl and meow and twine her little body in between my feet. She'll jump in my lap, giving me her pupil-dilated version of a 'hopeful smile'. All in the hopes that I'll get up and stand over the top of her while she takes two or three mouthfuls of cat food that she's got available to her at any time, day or night.  Of her insanities, this one makes me the craziest. I am not a maître d. I am not a waiter. I am not a butler for a spoiled cat. Yet, I often find myself standing there, while she dances in and out of my feet, trying to fulfill the OCD-driven ritual she's following so she can eat. After several moments of feet snuggling, she may have a bite or two. Then she walks out into the living room to take a bath. All that eating, don'tcha know. Five, ten minutes later, she's back, looking for me to get up and stand over her again.  If I'm sleeping when she’s hungry, she'll get in my face, bat at me with her velvety paws, meow or lick me.  I do love my kitty, I really do, but on those days when I really just want to sleep, she's far closer to that large tuna bar in the sky than even she knows.