I spent the morning atop a step ladder, painting the ceiling in one of the bedrooms, which freaked the heck out of the cats. They always get a little twitchy whenever we’re not sitting on our butts or sleeping because, really, that’s what they see us do most of the time.

In the morning after our showers we sit down to eat our breakfast, then we disappear for the whole day. When we come home from work we sit down to eat dinner, then we sit down to read or otherwise relax in the living room, then we go to bed. On the weekends we usually go somewhere. If we don’t, we usually sit and read, or sit and eat, or go to sleep.

Breaking the routine is apparently so weird they just don’t know what do to with themselves, prowling restlessly and making distressed little mewing sounds.

But you gotta do what you gotta do, no matter how unhappy it makes the cats. When we moved here almost five years ago, Tim asked if he could paint his room. The walls were a, shall we say, vibrant shade of burgundy. He wanted plain old blue, so we bought him a pail of paint and said have at it. He did a pretty good job of it, too. Masked off the baseboards and put down lots of newspaper, but he never masked off the tops of the walls, so the blue ended up all around the upper edges of the ceiling.

Now that Tim’s moved out, we want to use that room as an office, put a desk and some shelves and a filing cabinet in there. But before we move all that crap in there, tidying up the paint on the ceiling would be a good idea, so that’s why I was scaring the cats this morning. And I got to sniff paint fumes for a couple hours, too. Latex paint, though, darn it. It’s like trying to get high off watercolors.

LATER: As it turned out, it wasn’t the quick tidying-up job I thought it would be. The flat white paint made the edges of the ceiling look a little too good, and now the rest of the ceiling, paint faded with age, will have to be completely repainted. Isn’t that just the way?