Free to Good Home: Cat

12 years old, spayed, front declawed, answers to the name "Peanut, NO!"

You ask, "But Cor, why would you want to get rid of Peanut? You love her!"

You're right, I do love her. But I just might kill her if I don't vent my temporary hatred for her.

You see, for the past five nights she has been waging a campaign of sleep deprivation against me. The moment I begin to nod off to sleep, I hear it--the sound of her 12-pound body thumping up onto the bed. She has arrived for her nightly regimen of tapping me in the head with her paw until I turn myself into a position that satisfies her insatiable need to sleep in my armpit with her face burrowed in my hair and neck.

"Just ignore her and she'll go away," you say. Silly, ignorant reader. You are wrong. It doesn't stop. It never stops. If I ignore her, she will leave once, returning within ten minutes just as I am again on the verge of sleep. She taps me on the head again. Again. Again. Again. I continue to play dead. Then the crying starts. "Meowwwww." If I don't respond to the crying, she will take to biting me until she gets her way. Biting me! What kind of savage have I raised? If I swat her away for biting, she leaves. But you know the routine. She's back 10 more minutes later, and by then I'm wide awake and have lost half an hour of sleep time. So it's best to just accommodate her.

But then there she is blissfully resting in my armpit with her face in my neck, and I can't move. I can't move from that position or I will destroy her nook and open a floodgate of her trying to reposition herself within my next sleeping position. The worst is when I'm sleeping on my back and she must...must burrow between my legs like they're her own personal warmers. My lower back where I hurt it over a year ago always kills the next morning when she pins me down like this.

And this, my friends, was the position I found myself in at four o'clock this morning when I decided I loved her but that she was going to have to die. We had already had our little hour of fun with her walking all over my body trying to find the most opportune position for herself. (In case you're wondering, it was in my armpit with her head burrowed in my neck--the usual--with the added twist of her pushing off of me slightly so that her back claws dug into my stomach.) At some point I had managed to get to sleep, and she left me to get herself a snack.

I don't know what it was, exactly, that made me realize what was happening at four in the morning. I was sleeping soundly. I had my earplugs in, which I wear often now because of my husband's pesky little snoring problem. Perhaps it was the dull, repetitive shaking I felt toward the end of the bed, definitely occurring between my lower legs and not coming from me. Perhaps it was the faintest hint of an audible gurgling sound I perceived just barely through my earplugs.

Then it hit me. Peanut was lying on top of me...retching. Heaving.

I jolted up and kicked her off the end of the bed as I yelled, "Peanut, NO!"

It was too late. She barfed a full, steaming loaf of undigested cat food on me at four o'clock in the morning.

Actually, let me clarify. It wasn't on me directly. Rather, it was on the 40-year-old patchwork family heirloom quilt my great-grandmother made and passed on through the generations, which, incidentally, had been my main covering. Gee, thanks Peanut! You're the best!

If the fact that she vomited on me in the middle of the night isn't bad enough, she has spent almost the entire day attempting to jump on tables she knows she's not allowed on, and then went and dropped a load in her litter box literally ten seconds after I finished cleaning it, tying up the bag, and throwing everything away.

So, as you can see from the evidence I've presented today, she and I are going to rumble. And I am going to win.