Human roommates can be annoying. I’ve gone through mean drunk roommates; pathologically clean roommates; pathologically dirty roommates who didn’t mind roaches, rats, pigeons or termites; roommates whose out-of-the-country friends stayed with us for months (some of them coming in multiple batches - imagine the bathroom lines); roommates whose crazy abusive boyfriends had to be chased away by other sword-wielding martial arts roommates; and roommates whose stance against recycling compelled them to sneak out during the night and merge my recyclables bin with the plain old garbage.

Living with a cat roommate is not always easy either. Sometimes we misunderstand each other. Sometimes the cat refuses to play by the rules, just like the human roommate who always smoked in her room despite the strict no-smoking rule. Yes, we do get into arguments too.

Thus, here are my top ten cat roommate pet peeves:

1. He uses our white carpet toilet paper to wipe his butt after #2.

2. He always has tuna breath.

3. He licks a lot. Sometimes he licks my hands while I am trying to get to sleep, then I get nervous that I’ll touch my face with said hand and get a whiff of his tuna breath.

4. He is very noisy when he licks his privates. He vibrates a little. The bed shakes a little. I am grossed out.

5. He sleeps at the foot of the bed, thus stealing leg room from me.

6. When he climbs on my sleeping body, he always stops to survey the landscape from atop my boobs. He is a 16-pound cat.

7. He always follows me into the bathroom and demands I turn on the faucet so he can drink. He never turns off the faucet even though the fixtures are cat-friendly.

(Note on the above photo: this faucet is not cat-friendly. We now live the house with the cat-friendly faucet.)

8. His hair gets in everything. I can be at work, 30 km away, and will be drinking water from a glass, when I see one of Ivan’s hairs float away and land in my glass of water. These hairs stick to everything as well.

9. He always has to be the centre of attention. Whether it’s sitting on top of our boardgame as we play, sitting on our mouse hand as we do computer stuff or sitting beside us as we eat dinner, he’s there.

10. He is menacing around our other, smaller roommates and sometimes to the neighbourhood kids.

(This Halloween one kid ran away in fear, crying to his mother that he saw a big black dog.)

I swear, we did not fart on his pillow.

Yesterday afternoon, Matt laughed at Ivan who, resting on his muppet cushion, seemed to be unable to open his left eye. “Sleepy head,” we thought.

On closer inspection, we realized that Ivan’s eye had puffed up and was tearing up. We felt the swelling and Ivan did not protest. He purred, thinking we were lavishing more cuddling.

Four hours later, one sketchy after-hours veterinary emergency clinic visit later and his human slaves a few hundred dollars poorer, Ivan was home again. As Ivan did not take kindly to the anal thermometer, the vet sedated our guy and he staggered about for the rest of the night.

Now we have to rub ointment on his eye twice a day. Matt and I also have to both pin him down and shove antibiotic pills down his throat. I had to explain a few new claw scars to people I met today.

His eye is still puffy. Hopefully we will have our handsome cat back soon. He looks like a boxer. Ugly.

The most obsessive part of my current WWI obsession is reading a book called Intimate Voices from the First World War. Compiled by documentarians Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, the book takes on WWI chronologically with diaries, letters and oral histories. Starting off with Gavrilo Princip’s co-assassin, Vaso ÄŒubrilović, who recounts the day when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie met their deaths and set off the war, in a letter to his sisters, Palmer and Wallis amazingly found sources from both sides of battles, sometimes fighting opposite each other that very day. At one point, on November 5, 1914, diarists Dr. Ludwig Deppe, a Dresden doctor working in Tanga in what is today Tanzania, and Richard Meinertzhagen, a British officer, meet and each write about the meeting that evening.

After each diary cuts off, I flip hurriedly to the back to see if the writer lived. Most live, perhaps the reason why their diaries also survived. Yet, a couple have died so far.

First, my lovely Dr. Josef Tomann on May 16, 1915. Trapped in PrzemyÅ›l during the siege, Tomann had a sense of humour about the citizens’ predicament (”What is the difference between the heroes of Troy and those of PrzemyÅ›l? The Trojans were in the belly of a horse, while we have horse in our bellies!”) Two months before his death, he had commemorated an anniversary in his diary: “Mitzl, it is seven years to the day since we first kissed!” (Mitzl was his pregnant wife, back home in Eger, Hungary.)

Then my self-righteous Austrian - despite his confidence in the sanctity of his side’s mission, he remains a human and the chance to know him through his writing makes him precious - dies. His July 19, 1915 final entry is:

It is enough to drive you insane. Dead, wounded, massive losses. This is the end. Unprecedented slaughter, a horrific bloodbath. There is blood everywhere and the dead and the bits of bodies lie scattered about so that …

The compilers explain:

The diary breaks off here in mid-sentence as the Austrian officer unknowingly records the moment of his own death. A Hungarian officer finds the body when the firing dies down at the end of that day, adding to the diary underneath the Austrian’s last words: ‘I found this diary in the hand of a dead officer on the Doberdo plateau: God bless him.’

My poor nameless Austrian never met his Maria, his Italian love that the war turned into an enemy, again. I wish that Hungarian took care to note his colleague’s name so that we could find Maria and tell her descendants that he always thought of her.

Lately, apart from work - I am going through a temporary promotion - and a professional course that is taking over my life, I am cultivating some obsessions during my personal time. Who needs sleep? I already look my age and it seems that from here on there’s no going back to youthful splendour. Besides, I could always pretend I have kids, like every other human female my age, to explain my less than virginal looks.

The obsessions are going well, thank you for asking. They are extremely fulfilling and give meaning to my life.

What are they, you ask? I’m glad you want to know.

The first one is Belgium. My third vacation from now will be in Belgium, the mystery state of Europe. We don’t know enough about it here in North America: Belgium is famous for its beer, chocolate, pedophiles and for being trampled through by Europe’s armies. And then it gets better! There are at least three comics museums (the Tintin Museum is opening in 2009), a couple of peeing statues, museums of French fries, hearts, bird nests, Belgian endives, playing cards, laundry, sewers, barbering, shoes, jukeboxes, and finch-catching - after all vinkensport is a popular competitive sport for finches in those parts and the human spectators are rather keen on it. With so much weirdness, Belgium has earned a place among my list of potential vacation countries.

But while I started off with Belgium, another obsession developed. Its roots were not only the initial Belgium one but also a surprise WWII one. The former obsession is about WWI, while the WWII obsession started from a recent acquaintance made with the sister of a member of the Dutch resistance. I know no one who is old enough to remember the first world war, but all sorts of people have told me about their lives during the second world war, about the war in Burma, Poland, Britain, and Moldova.

My fourth obsession is an Anne Boleyn one - which will, with any luck and plenty of tangents, spin off into a Moorish Spain obsession with an Iberian vacation in the works. Someone highly recommended The Other Boleyn Girl, which I listened to during my commutes, thought it decent for popular fiction, and picked up Eric Ives’ more weighty nonfiction The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn. I also cracked open one of my two unread Elizabeth I biographies in a Tudor fit. Both this latter book and the Cherry-Garard bio (he’s the guy who went looking for penguin eggs at the height of the Antarctica winter) now lie beside my side of the bed while I try to finish off the library books.

Aside from work and the obsessions, boardgames, card games, and, I am embarrassed to say, TV shows (True Blood, Supernatural and The Big Bang Theory) now squeeze the blogging out of my life. Plus, somewhere in there, I have to slip in a re-write of my novel. It is National Novel-Writing Month, you know.