Sunday, August 31, 2014

Sunday Morning


Sunday morning. The universal day of sleeping in. Everywhere people are having a good scratch, a small snore, and turning over for another hour’s sleep.

Not here.

We may be living in the magical land of retirement, but at our house the wake-up call comes early every single morning.
 There are several factors at play. 



  

    

 Factor #1   

 Small (or shrinking with age) bladder. 



You first have a dream in which every toilet is either unavailable or unusable. In this dream there is usually an audience, further restricting your hope for relief. (Probably just as well, this being a dream and you actually being in bed.)
     You then wake up and lie there, taking stock of just how urgent your need is. Could you ignore nature’s call and catch a few more winks? No.  You surrender and stumble to the bathroom with only one eye open in order to ease your return to the land of Nod.

     This trip also serves a second purpose, to relieve the second factor:





Factor #2 

   The lodger who arrived a few years ago, refuses to leave, and whose presence is growing more pronounced with each day.

Mr. Arthritis. 



You climb into bed in the evening feeling pretty darn chipper. You’ve been fairly active all day, climbing stairs, pulling weeds, hanging laundry.
During the night, however, you become the Tin Man.
Joints that were kept warm and happy by all that movement during the day have turned on you. As the years have gone by, your cartilage has taken on the profile of an anorexic teen, growing thinner by the day. As a result, your joints have been getting up close and personal with each other, and like your relatives at Thanksgiving, are rubbing each other the wrong way.       
This is most apparent at night, when that familiar sharp pain in your hip arrives at about 4 or 5 a.m. and

There. Is. No. position. On. Earth. That. Makes. It. Go. Away.
    
Movement sometimes helps, and flailing a leg around in bed with a
few scissor kicks will loosen things up, but this isn’t usually received very enthusiastically by anyone else who happens to be within a three-foot radius of you.
          Thus, the one positive aspect of Factor #1.





Factor #3 

The Cat That Will Not Be Ignored










5:00 a.m. – The first incursion. This is pretty low-key, consisting mostly of padding around on the bed or curling up next to you.
5:30 a.m. – The sound of water being lapped – loudly – from the nearby bathroom toilet.
6:00 a.m. – More padding around on the bed. And around. And around.
6:15 a.m. – Heart-stopping mews/yowls from the floor. Satchel is now almost completely deaf, and like other hard-of-hearing members in his age group, has no idea how LOUD he is.
6:30 a.m. – More mews/yowls from the bathroom down the hall where some inconsiderate person left the toilet seat down, making it difficult for him to get to the water in that toilet, which of course is better than the water in the first toilet.
6:45 a.m. – All-around, purposeless, mews/yowls emitted at four and a half minute intervals, just enough time in between for you to   a  l  m  o  s  t
drop off.
7:00 a.m. – Generalized stamping around on the bed, wet nudging of any body part not covered by the sheet, and the piece de resistance – pawing reading glasses to the floor with a crash.

Once up, we go downstairs where Satchel smells his dry food, ignores the fresh canned we ladle out, and settles down for a morning nap.





12 comments:

  1. you must be living in my body. I get the bathroom dreams...when I finally find a toilet it's broken or nasty or so complicated to use. sometimes I even manage to find one I can use but it never relieves the urge until I finally wake up and stumble to the bathroom. and the arthritis only for me it's my hands and most especially my thumb joints that zing me with sharp pain. and the cat. only mine starts up at about 5 AM and doesn't stop until you get up to let her out!

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  2. Yep. Opposite ends of the country but parallel lives.
    (Aside from the fact that I have no - I repeat NO - artistic ability.)
    With what you do for a living, the arthritis in your hands makes perfect sense.
    Now if I had ever been a dancer. . . .

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  3. Hi Marty, I tried to sign up to follow your blog but it seems the only way I can do that is through Google+, which I rarely if ever use. Could you maybe add a signup through email? It's one of the gadgets blogspot offers us. Anyway, I hear you about those bathroom dreams. I'm up at least twice during the night and totter to the bathroom half awake. :-)

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    1. Hi DJan - Thanks for the idea on email sign up!! Hadn't thought of it before and it looks useful for people without their own blog and a place to store other blogs that they read regularly.

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  4. Life is exactly the same here! Except Dumperoo starts walking on the bed at 5:30 am. If I don't respond he nudges me with his wet nose. If I pull the covers over my face he meows. Then I jump up before my husband throws the covers and Dumperoo onto the floor. The bathroom thing...I waste a good 30-45 minutes sleep time wondering if I should get up or try to go back to sleep. Of course it's get up!

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    1. You've gotta go to the Simon's Cat address I have below.

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  5. Ditto everything and especially the cat. See that Y on his belly. That's for Why are you a human when it's a cat's world.
    Happy Sunday, ours is wall to wall rain and I am so sorry for the Labor Day picnics planned for today. Not mine.

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  6. To My Readers:
    If you haven't been there before, you MUST go to site for Simon's Cat. All cat owners will see moments from their own life. Some of the funniest stuff I've ever seen.
    http://www.simonscat.com/

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  7. Oh my gosh- this is so my world. The split second I wake up- I talk myself into having to go. LOL! And my cat plucks the plastic doo-hickies that are attached on the edges of our box frame.

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    1. One of our previous cats completely shredded the bottom of our box springs. I guess evil things were hiding there.

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  8. Sometimes when we actually look at exactly what we do it's funny. Except for the arthritis. I know that enemy.

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