Couldn’t work today…stiff back from sleeping on the medieval torture device we like to call the fold out sofa bed last night. Why, you ask? Well, it all started when I laid down in bed and discovered a nice present left by Isabel, our oldest female cat. She wanted to show her undying love for me by peeing on my side, near the pillow. So I grabbed my pillows and first tried laying on the sofa, but alas, I am too tall for that and my feet rested on the armrest. Not wishing to have my blood rush from my feet, I retreated to the recliner to see if I could sleep there. No luck as I wasn’t napping. For some reason, I can only fall asleep there during the day. So in desperation, I pulled the cushions off the sofa and pulled out the bed, which by now it was 3am and I was exhausted. Laying down on what I can only describe as burlap over a plastic cover on a wafer thin mattress which is supported by gigantic metal rods, I noticed my feet were not only hanging over the edge, but my whole body felt like it was being tilted back towards my head. So I shifted positions, then shifted again, laying diagonally across the rack then finally at 3:30am, went searching for sheets in the dark trying not to wake anyone to no avail. Thankfully, I grabbed a nice soft comforter and tossed it on the “bed” in a position in which I could attempt to fall asleep, which happened sometime around 4am. This would give me two and a half hours of sleep before I had to wake up and get my daughter ready for her first day back at school from winter holiday. I set the alarm on my watch and attempted again to fall to sleep. That’s when the cat wars began. First it was Sabrina, our black cat. She was nice and just curled up beside me…a cat teddy bear. Then Isabel discovered that the sofa bed was pulled out and this was her cue to jump on the bed and crawl down in the space where the bed folds up inside the sofa. So that’s where the jingle ball toy went to! Back and forth, back and forth, jingle, jingle, jingle. This piqued the interest of Tiger of skidmark fame. He decided to try and sing me to sleep. But of course, this woke Sabrina up and she joined Isabel inside the sofa shell. Then Tiger, feeling left out, decided to join in the fun and squeeze through the opening into the shell. Three cats, one jingle ball, one extremely tired cartoonist. Sometime about 3:45am, they got bored with the jingle ball and leaped out, well, Isabel and Sabrina leapt out, Tiger just kinda oozed out…think Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in the window…there ya go…Isabel and Sabrina decided to jump over me and around under the bed to do a little workout. Grabbing the underside of the mattress with their claws, they scaled under the rack inching towards the still struggling-to-free himself Tiger. With ninja-like skill, they “walked” upside-down and then around the side of the mattress to ambush Tiger. Which they did as he made the final push out of the shell opening and onto my chest…all 12 pounds of him. Thankfully, they got bored of this and ran off to some other room in the house, leaving me to finally collapse into a deep sleep.
At 5am, the wife awoke to shower and get ready for work, waking me up in what I discovered a makeshift sleeping bag that was once the comforter. I turned over and went back to sleep. At 6:40am, my daughter woke me up to tell me it was time to get up. I had slept through my watch alarm. She heard it, but I did not. So up I got off of the torture device to discover, I could not move without pain in the lower, mid and upper back. Oh joy! Getting her ready and off to school, I chugged back home and tried again to fall asleep on the rack. Nope, this wasn’t going to happen. Up I creaked to the bed, stripped the sheets off of it, washed down my side, sprayed it with Febreeze and Lysol, plopped my pillows on the wife’s side and fell back to sleep for an hour when the dogs decided it was time for them to go outside and drink about three feet worth of water out of the pool.
Work? Well, I had planned to ink another three comics, a week’s worth of which I have two weeks sketched and scanned. I thankfully have a week’s buffer, but I wanted to get another week hammered out today and the third tomorrow. Not going to happen as I have to sit in my make-shift office, which is the kitchen table with the oh-so-comfy wooden chairs. No way that was going to work, so I retreated back to the recliner to sit with the heating pad.
UGH!

Stumble it!

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