I love my kittens
The kittens tend to follow us around the house, particularly Abby who is a very social cat and likes to have company. I still find this odd, my previous cat was very independant and mostly just wanted to be left alone. It often feels like we have at least six cats, because there's one in every room we enter. Odd, but nice.
Ms Abigail Eliza Trouble
Kitten masseuse
and acupuncturist.
Getting ready for bed, Abby is waiting on the bed expectantly. Work calls, so I apologise to the kitten and head upstairs to see what's up.
Abby follows me up with a concerned meow, and when it becomes apparent I'm going to be there for a while she settles down to wait.
I politely tell work to bugger off, test systems are not supported out of hours. Head down with kitten at my heels, she jumps onto the bed and makes herself comfortable at the point where I would really like put my knees.. I hop into bed and we negotiate on position.
Half an hour later work is back, they've escalated and $newBoss has agreed under protest that I will get their test system working. I pat the cat then head up, feeling quite hard done by. Abby follows, makes some pointed meows which I agree with entirely, then she curls up to doze nearby while I do my thing.
Abby has worked out that I don't want to play while I'm on the work laptop. Ella still thinks it's a good time for a cuddle, so David took her with him when he went to bed.
Over an hour later I admit defeat. Something is very odd with their system, possibly environmental, and I see no prospect of getting it working tonight since no one else is going to be daft enough to work on a test system at 1:30am[1]. Call it in, feeling sorry for myself, and tell sleepy kitten that I'm off to bed. She follows me down with a few meows to the effect that it's about time.
I hop into bed, Abby comes up and gives my shoulder a kitty-massage, licks my face and sticks a furry nose in my ear to purr with emphasis. Then curls up beside me, purring loudly for a while before returning to her usual position by my feet.
My kitten knows how to make me feel loved.
Or possibly she was telling me that if I didn't go to sleep this time she was going to have to hurt me.
I was less impressed with her when I was woken again at 4am to the sound of cat gagging, but she doesn't seem to have left any mess.
[1] In case you're wondering, it looks like the test system came good on it's own overnight. Which makes it all the more annoying that I got called again at 8am to ask what I was doing about it. Since I was now awake I got up and came in to the office vaguely on time, which turned out to be just as well because we've had a plethora of system problems all day[2] and our team is currently at half-strength. Barely escaped for my scheduled and much needed remedial massage.
[2] Apparently a switch got changed last night, we're suspecting arcane cross-site networking problems[3] for today's issues. Which kind of fits with my 2am thoughts that the test system problems looked environmental. It got stuck around the point it would be trying to initialise the LDAP registry and it's a remote LDAP. It's just that normally WAS is very good at telling you clearly about LDAP and connection problems, so it's still weird that it just sat there spinning it's metaphorical wheels.
[3] Don't get me started on our network support team. Kitten posts shouldn't need to be locked.