My feelings apparently don't count. I have four or five Sam Adams swishing around in my gut and need some sleep. Now I have to be on the lookout all night for this stupid cat.
Who knows what the cat's going to do in the darkness? He could leap into the bed and scratch our eyes out. There are strangers on his turf. You don't know how he'll react.
Long story short, I get hardly any sleep. All night long, I can hear the cat padding around on his little cat feet and clawing at his little cat pillow. It really gives you the creeps.
He's even playing with his little cat toy, with the ribbon and the jingly bells. Try sleeping with that going on.
We leave at about 8 the next morning. Just before that, I am sucking down coffee so as not to fall asleep at the wheel and send us into a ditch. The cat is in the kitchen to see us off.
"Can you say goodbye, Cosmo?" Ellen says.
The cat glares at us. Then he saunters outside to find something to kill in the woods. This is how they say "Have a nice trip" in the cat world. Unbelievable.
Anyway, if you're a big cat person and feel all this is unfair, save your calls and e-mails, because this is probably my last column about cats.
After 22 years as a features columnist, I'm moving over to The Baltimore Sun's sports department to write columns. I hope you continue to read my stuff in the sports pages and on baltimoresun.com; the new column starts tomorrow.
I'm looking forward to the change of scenery and the change of topics, too.
Oh, years ago I interviewed the great boxer Roberto Duran and tripped over a cat, which was skulking outside his hotel room, and almost wrote about that.
But what are the odds of something like that happening again?
