I live with two cats. One of them is a black female. Her name is Holly, after the main character in the superlative movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The second one is a male cat, grey/bluish, named George after the fantastic George Costanza in the TV show Seinfeld. They are siblings.

Holly and George have a strange relationship with me. I think they have a plan to drive me crazy. The main issue is that we all have a completely mixed up sleeping pattern. It’s out of sync. When they sleep, I am awake. When I sleep, they are awake. The main difference, though, is that I don’t bother them when they are sleeping, while they seem to enjoy bothering me while I am sleeping.

Here are a ​few things they like to do only when I am sleeping. George is a big fan of the kitchen cabinet. One would think that he likes to stare at the cabinet, but that’s not the case. George loves to open the cabinet, or even better he loves trying to open the cabinet. Many times, while sleeping, I hear him scratching the cabinet and then trying to open it, banging its door back and forth. He is doing this because he is searching for his treats. He might have seen me some times pulling the treats box out of a cabinet and now he thinks each and every cabinet might contain something good. He is on a hunt, opening cabinets like a kid opens the little windows on the advent calendar the days before Christmas.

Holly is not interested in cabinets. She enjoys crying out loud in the middle of the night for no reason. I think she is studying cardiology and wants to test how fast my heartbeat can go when she wakes me up with a big “meooowww”. The funny thing is that every time it’s enough for me to call her and she immediately​ stops meowing and starts walking towards the bed, happy like a baby. I still have to understand whether she is meowing because she wants to wake me up, or whether she is trying to tell me something (maybe she wants me to go to the other room).

It’s always fun to sleep half an hour a day and see what the cats will do this time. And maybe tomorrow, while they are sleeping, I’ll just try to open some random cabinets and I’ll scream for no reason. It might be that they will realize how nice I can be while they are sleeping.