How to Wake Your People -- by the Cats

There are various ways, and we hope this will give you just a few ideas. Feel free to build on them and come up with your own variations and additions.

The Kida Method: It helps if you are an asthmatic, and being a Siamese with great patience doesn't hurt either. Stick your nose and whiskers in your person's ear and wheeze loudly. Continue until the desired behavior is achieved.

The Horizon Method: (also used successfully by Fat Boy, now deceased, for over 18 years) Learn how to knock at the door. Yes, you can do it with paws. One paw, slipped under the door at just the right angle to rattle the door does it, as does learning to use your forehead to move the door just enough to make a knocking sound when you pull back. They cannot resist a knock at the door.

If you are in the room and want out, jump from the bedside table, to the pillow, to the windowsill, and back again, over and over and over until someone gets up to let you out.

The Hope Method: Easy to do, as Hope is mildly mentally retarded (yes, really, she gets lost in the hallway, and it is a short hallway). Sit on your person, or get lost in the hallway just outside the bedroom door and wail plaintively.

The Badlands Blackie Method: Start a very loud cat fight with Kida outside of the bedroom door. Make sure it is over a dominance issue, and make sure you keep it up until the person comes barreling out of the room to break it up.

The Newborn Foster Kitten Method: Get hungry. (Easy enough to do when you are a bottle fed baby.) Scream with that newborn baby cry, continuously, until the noise finds the spine of an adult person, who then cannot remain in bed but has to come make a bottle and feed you.

The Little Girlie Method: Stand by while one of the other cats uses an above method for you. C'mon, sweetie, you can charm one of them into it!

Additional tip: For real fireworks, several cats get together and employ a combination of methods, either one after the other until it is normal person wake up time, or all of you use them all at once for maximum noise. The latter usually results in the fun effect of having a large male human run out of the room yelling about how he just can't stand it.

We hope you learn from these, and share you own methods so we can learn new techniques.


Today is:

Bad Poetry Day

Cupcake Day

Long Tan Day a/k/a Vietnam Veterans Day -- Australia

Mail Order Catalog Day (Do yourself a favor and opt out of the doggone things, save a few trees: www.catalogchoice.org )

National Ice Cream Pie Day

National Science Day -- Thailand

St. Agapitus' Day

St. Helena's Day (Patron Saint of Archaeologists)

Toe-Pogling Season begins -- Fairy

World Peace Festival


Birthdays Today:

Malcolm-Jamal Warner, 1970
Patrick Swayze, 1952
Elayne Boosler, 1952
Martin Mull, 1943
Robert Redford, 1936
Roman Polanski, 1933
Rosalynn Carter, 1927
Shelley Winters, 1920
Greta Garbo, 1905
Max Factor, 1904
Meriwether Lewis, 1774
Virginia Dare, 1587


Today in History:

Founding of the oldest known Roman temple to Venus, BC293
Rome is occupied and plundered by Visigoths under King Alarik I, 410
Death of Genghis Khan (fell from his horse), 1227
A Portuguese ship drifts ashore in the Japanese province of Higo, 1541
The Boston, Massachusetts Evening Post begins publishing, 1735
Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, 1834
Pierre Janssan discovers helium, 1868
German engineer Karl Jatho allegedly flies his self-made, motored gliding airplane four months before the first flight of the Wright Brothers, 1903.
Mayor of Tokyo Yukio Ozaki presents Washington, D.C. with 2,000 cherry trees, which President Taft decides to plant near the Potomac River, 1909
A Great Fire in Thessaloniki, Greece destroys 32% of the city leaving 70,000 individuals homeless, 1917
19th US Amendment ratified (gives women the vote), 1920
Premier of The Wizard of Oz, 1939
James Meredith becomes the first black person to graduate from the University of Mississippi, 1963
Massive power blackout hits the Indonesian island of Java, affecting almost 100 million people, 2005