Day 8 - In Which Gromit Solidifies His Status As Evil Fiend

Last night my friend Linda came over to bring me a yummy dinner and hang out for a while.  She left six or seven-ish, and then I finished "Don't Tell Anyone" (a nice thriller, but interestingly enough, the film adaptation is much, much better) while HGTV played in the background.   Went to bed ten-ish.  At 1:30, I was awakened by, yes, Gromit howling.  He's always been a nighttime noisemaker, but in the past few months he's become much louder and more ear-piercing.  This was really loud.  I got up and tried to placate him with food, but he wasn't interested.  He continued howling and howling and howling. Unless you've owned a (bad) cat, it's hard to understand how nightmarish this is.  It's sort of like being next door to someone having a really loud party, except you can't call the police or hire a lawyer to file an injunction.  Instead, you have to get up in the morning and feed them breakfast and clean their bathroom.  

Anyway, I get the impression Gromit doesn't quite understand that he's in a completely different place.  It's like he thinks he's in some new adjunct of our house, and all I have to do is open the door and he'll be back home.  So he doesn't understand why I'm depriving him of this by keeping the door shut.  And, as he's spent his life getting what he wants by engaging in obnoxiousness, he assumes this behavior will continue to work.  By 3:00, he was still yowling, but had gotten wound up enough to decide to take his frustration out on Fidget.  I'd managed to doze off, but was awakened by Fidget screeching.  Her reaction to his jumping on her is to emit deafening screeches.  I guess if I weighed seven pounds and a fifteen pound hulk jumped on me, I'd screech, too.  I kept separating them, but Gromit kept going after her, so I finally threw some water at him.  This managed to short circuit the attack brainset, but not the spoiled rotten acting out brainset, so he returned to moaning and howling.  I threw a pillow at him, which accomplished nothing.  I turned on the AC fan to try and drown him out, but his voice cuts through most machine noise.  The aptly-named caterwauling continued until 4:30, when his voice gave out.  I got a couple hours sleep and awakened to him happily curled up on the bed, oblivious to the fact that he came very close to becoming one of those sad abused cats one sees on ASPCA commercials.

The good news was that I saw the floors this morning, and they are spectacular (to reference Seinfeld).  Perfectly done.   Assuming my ongoing lack of sleep doesn't trigger some sort of stroke or coronary episode, the job is well worth the inconvenience/irritation/suffering.