Annoying Little Kitties

I always know when its starting to get really cold out when my cat decides that she needs to be snuggled up in bed with me at 3 in the morning. I was blissfully asleep with my husband next to me and at 3 am I get rudely woken up by a loud meow and the smell of cat food as my cat, Ellie, was demanding to be given room to sleep next to me. She spent the next ten minutes pawing at the covers to make a "nest" for herself and then plopped down with her rear right next to my face - thanks, Ellie. Needless to say with her on one side of me and my husband on the other, I didn't get a whole lot of sleep the rest of the night. Plus, since my husband took today as a vacation day from work, he didn't even have to get up this morning.

Despite the little annoyances of the cat (the smelly fish breath, the waking up at 3 in the morning, the random pooping outside the litterbox when she thinks its not clean enough), she's all in all a pretty good cat. I adopted her while I was living in CT because I was tired of coming home to an empty apartment. She had been living with a woman who had two Pugs (puntable dogs) that absolutely terrorized the cat. So I took Ellie in. At first she was really bad about chewing on cords, wires, and blinds (thankfully the apartment complex didn't notice when I left so I didn't get charged for the damage). She stopped for a while when I moved into the 2-bedroom apartment in NY, but she chewed the blinds near a table so that she could see out.

After we moved into the house, we bought custom made blinds to fit the windows. We were actually worried that Ellie would chew those, and I knew if she did, she would be in a LOT of trouble. However, as there are lots of windows with big windowsills for her to sit on, she has many "channels" to watch and she doesn't feel the need to chew things anymore. I'm sure she must have done it out of pure boredom at the apartments. But now she has the upstairs channel, the kitchen channel, the foyer channel, and the front office channel, so she has lots of opportunity to look outside without having to find a way to get there.