Thirty Days of Blogging Day 23: On Daily Routines

My wife says the posts of mine that she likes the most are the ones about our daily routine.  My mother says the same thing.  So, here's a post about daily routine.

The routine we have for waking and sleeping is that the wife goes to bed first, around 10:30, and I stay up for another few hours, reading and working.  When I stay up, I'm in the den.  (Which has a terrible reading lamp, for which reason I end up reading less than I want to in there.  But never mind that).

Before the wife goes to bed we move the Bink into the kitchen.  He has a dog bed that he sleeps in.  During the day, the bed is in the front room, the one with the window that looks out onto the street.  From there he can survey the neighborhood and alert us -- via loud and prolonged yowling, and the grabbing of his bed by the mouth, and subsequent angry shaking of said bed -- of the approach of anyone suspicious (chiefly: the mailman, neighbors, and alien cats).  Then, at night, when we watch TV with dinner, we move the Bink's bed into the TV/den room so that he's not alone in the dark of the front room.  We do this b/c we've learned that if he lies in the dark during the early evening, he's less likely to sleep through the night when he's actually put in bed.  So, really, we keep him in the den with us during TV/dinner so that he's around lights and noises, and can't fully sleep.

Anyway, around 10 the wife starts getting ready for bed.  Bink follows her and keeps watch as she brushes her teeth and lays out her clothes and drinks her twelve shots of vodka and eats her herring.  Then, when she closes the sliding door that separates the bedroom area of our house from the living room area, Bink knows it's time for him to go to bed.  He ambles into the kitchen, gets in his bed, and sleeps.  But during the time he's in the kitchen, in bed, I'm still in the den working, writing, reading, and eating the rest of the wife's picked-over bits of herring and vodka.

Then, when I finally go to bed, around 12:30, I silently creep to the kitchen and latch closed the baby gate that separates kitchen from dining room.  In doing so, I lock Bink in the kitchen.  We've tried letting him roam around the entire living quarters area at night, but inevitably, at 4 AM, he sees a cat through the back window and starts yowling and going crazy.  And that's no good.  (Whereas, in the kitchen, there are no windows set low enough to allow him access onto cats).

So, that's the routine.  Most of the time it works fine.  Though once in a while Bink, when enclosed in the kitchen by me as I creep silently toward bed, rebels.  And by rebel I mean "barks loudly throughout the night, tears all the towels down from their racks and, if he's feeling jaunty, poops on the floor."

For some odd reason, he almost never rebels if I'm the one who stays up in the den.  But once a week, I abstain for a day from caffeine and go to bed early.  On those nights, the wife stays up later in the den.  Whenever that happens--whenever she's the one who has to latch the baby gate closed on the kitchen before bed--Bink ALWAYS rebels.

The loud yowling that goes through the night can be countered, however, by means of 1) closing our bedroom door and 2) turning on my fan to high, which fan then makes a noise that sounds roughly like a Sopwith Camel lifting off for battle, and which obscures the anguished howling of the small Maltese in the kitchen.