Getting started

Inspired in part by Wil Wheaton's "just another day".

Some days I wake up to my cell phone alarm. Other days I wake up to a cat's meow. If it's Sisu, it's a plaintive whine, maybe delivered beside my ear, maybe exhaled as she strides peremptorily into my bedroom. If it's Ink, it's more likely an insistent wail, accompanied by a nibbling/nipping of my exposed toes, perhaps anointed by a baleful glare as well. (If I open my eyes to acknowledge him, the game is up.)

Sometimes I sit up, only to lie down again. The cats feel cheated then.

Other days, most days, when I'm determined to be productive or have an appointment to keep, I'm up and out the bedroom door to the toilet, which in this apartment can only be accessed from the kitchen. This confuses the cats greatly, because their feeding area is also in the kitchen, and I'll come out of the loo to see them waiting expectantly for me --- only to have me breeze by them to go back into the bedroom. (Because, you see, a quirk of this apartment is that the toilet is accessed from the kitchen, whereas the bathroom, with the shower area and sink with my toothbrush and toothpaste, is accessed from my bedroom.)

I might pause in the bedroom to change out of my pajamas (a rather snazzy black/grey/white ensemble, if I do say so myself) into whatever clothes I'm wearing at home for the day. Then it's into the bathroom for a perfunctory combing of the hair and a dutiful brushing of the teeth. This doesn't take more than a couple of minutes, but depending on how greedy the cats are feeling, there might be a rising lamentation in sync with their back-and-forth pacing while I'm hidden from them behind the bathroom door.

Of course, once I open that door, they both skedaddle for the kitchen. I move a little more leisurely, stopping at the chest of drawers beside my bed to pick up my glasses and my cell phone. The cell phone gets dropped off at the dining table on my way back to the kitchen, where the cats have parked themselves. I put down their feeding bowls and pour out their respective dry food, and while they set to the nom-nom'ing, I fill the kettle with water and flip on the switch.

While the water's boiling, I fill the French press with ground coffee from the fridge. Sometimes I start clearing the kitty litter; other times I wait till the boiling water is ready and I pour it into the French press, before I start on the litter.

I always have to check the time on the microwave (the only clock in the kitchen) to make sure I don't let the coffee in the French press sit for more than four minutes.

So: coffee. If I have any breakfast food, it gets set out onto suitable crockery. By this time Ink will have finished eating, so I clear his bowl. Sisu's the nibbler, so her bowl comes out with me and is set beside the dining table (where I've been working lately, instead of at my desk). I have to keep an eye on the food because the cats aren't supposed to eat each other's.

If I haven't done so already, I retrieve my laptop from the (cat-proof) cupboard, flip it open and refresh my email window. I plug the cell phone into its USB charger into my laptop. I crack open the delightfully old-school louvred windows at the front to let some light into the living/dining room.

I sit down to coffee and breakfast. And so the day begins.