What time is it?

Cassie, half asleep in her box by the radiator, is adapting slowly to DST.

I can almost persuade myself that it's high noon when it's really only 11 a.m.

No worries. I'll get into the new routine soon enough.

But I can't explain Daylight Saving Time to the cat. Cassie listens to my explanation politely, then switches her tail and walks away.

It's not that she can't tell time. She can. Or at least she has some rudimentary grasp of when things are supposed to happen -- if those things have some bearing on her.

She's usually waiting at the bedroom door when I get up. She knows that an hour or so later she'll get a teaspoon of canned food. She knows that she gets another teaspoon of canned food at lunchtime, and another at dinner time. In the late afternoon, she wants to sit in the front window. In the evening, she sits in my lap while I read or watch TV. And at about 11:30 p.m., she heads for the cardboard box next to the radiator in the living room to sleep.

(What is it with cats and boxes? No box comes into the house without her wanting to sleep in it. But that's a subject for a future discussion.)

This morning, when I got up, Cassie didn't meet me at the door. She was still asleep in her box. An hour later, I put a teaspoon of cat food in her dish. It wasn't food time on her cat clock, so the "poultry paté" sat there, untouched, for an hour. She'll be off by an hour for at least a few days, and she doesn't understand one bit about why things are happening an hour before she expects them to.

I understand why she doesn't understand. But she doesn't understand why she doesn't understand.

It's not so bad in March, when we "spring forward" for DST. But this fall, when we revert to standard time, the problem will be worse. Things will happen an hour later than she expects.

From a cat's perspective, things happening an hour early is not a major catastrophe. But when things happen an hour later than they're supposed to, well, that's a profound violation of her basic feline rights.

And she won't take it quietly.


(For those of you who have been following Cassie's URI saga, there's good news: We seem to have hit on a winning formula. Since mid-February, she's been taking one dose of antibiotics per day. She's not sneezing. Her eyes are bright. She plays with her little red felt mouse and with crumpled sticky notes. And she often races around the house as though she's being chased by the demons of hell. Life is good.)