What's New In The Land Of Luna

Luna has learned a few new things in the past couple of weeks.

As you may or may not know, Luna likes to eat. She likes to have her breakfast anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour before I like to get out of bed. She has always walked on us in the morning to try to get us up. She used to try crunching on the plants we had in the bedroom, but now those plants live on the patio, so Luna has expanded her bag o' tricks.

For the past week or so, Luna has started kneading and then gnawing on my hair. You know how cats knead something before lying down? Imagine this, but with claws, at 6:00 in the morning, and the kneading continues until 1) Luna gets bored and starts chewing on my hair or 2) I get crazy and put a pillow over my head.

Once again, James is spared this torment. Instead, Luna decides to cuddle with him at night in front of the TV when we're all awake and she's not in the mood to shred anything with her claws.

Luna has also recently discovered that if she runs out the front door and into the heavily fortified and largely inescapable patio, James and I might let her explore for a few minutes. We let her hang out there with us for about ten minutes yesterday. This made her SO HAPPY. She got to sniff things to her heart's content. I don't know about the rest of your cats, but when Luna sniffs something, she moves her whole head up and down with each breath - she looks like a stuffed-up octogenarian.

The upshot of this whole "letting Luna explore the patio" deal is that now, when we're on the patio and she's inside, she gets EXTREMELY PISSED OFF, howls with frustration, and - when we come inside to try to comfort her, shrugs us off, seething with anger. Apparently we are no longer allowed to sit in the patio without her. The patio is just another part of Luna's domain, to which she will not be denied.

I think we've created a monster.