In an effort to keep up with a creative "baby"-- or project-- this week, I went to bed late, last night.  A lot late.  As in 3:00 AM late.

But no worries.  'Cause 3:00 AM is usually about the time that Chris gets up to use the restroom, anyway.  And so my settling into our warm bed in the middle of the night is no trouble for his light-sleeping self.  I hardly stir him at all with my gentleness.  And if I do wind up stirring him, it only propels him into the bathroom for a wiz.  So, all in all, our sometimes weird schedules are a win-win.

What can become a problem for Chris, however, is an after-late-night-peeing random series of sounds.  They make it difficult for him to return to sleep.  And, unfortunately, last night was one of those nights in which almost every sound in the house became amplified by a sense of calm.  

It all started with a drip.  We couldn't figure out if it was coming from the bathroom or the kitchen.  But we had two sinks and logic dictated that the drip must've been coming from one of them.  And since the bathroom door was already closed, the drip had to be coming from the kitchen.  So Chris ventured into the kitchen to tightly shut the keys, and no sooner had the musical relationship between the faucet and a bowl of dish water below come to a complete halt.

He came back to bed.  I snickered just a little, JUST a little, becoming the next annoying noise on his list.  But he hugged me, said "you-- you're gonna get it", and then I laughed and laughed for a few seconds until the snicker was no more.

But then came the beeps. 

"What.  The.  Hell.  Is.  That?" Chris asked of someone, or some force, other than me.

The beeps weren't my fault but that of a truck just outside our apartment.  It was backing up. 

"It's a truck," I said.  "It's backing up."

"Ah-h, a truck," Chris said.  "Great!"

I snickered at a slightly louder level than before.  Didn't mean to.  But had to 'cause laughter was inevitable in Chris' presence-- it was all his fault!

We hugged even tighter, forming some kind of weird pretzel shape. 

"It'll go away," I said. 

And a couple of minutes later, the beeping did, in fact, go away.  Along with the truck. 

But then came the scratching sounds.

Turns out that Milo had taken a liking to Chris' messenger bag.  The nylon item was on Chris' side of the bed, on the floor.  So, naturally, the cat was desperately pawing at it (he has no front claws) for comfort.  I surmised it was a cat's version of the humanistic fluffing of pillows?

And then I lost it.

"Oh, great.  First, the drips.  Then the beeps.  Now the scratching... followed by about twenty-minutes of your laughter?  I just can't win!" Chris exclaimed.

"Hey!  I'm the innocent bystander here," I laughed, defending myself.

So, yeah, I can go into hysterics from time to time  But this fiasco was more about Chris' annoyed state than it was about me.

And so, alas, our attention was brought back to Milo's late-night oddity.  There were far more comfortable places in which to snuggle in our home.  So just what the hell was the feline doing?  Really, we couldn't quite bring ourselves to terms with Milo's vision of a restful night's sleep!

Chris made the scratching noise stop.