I am cranky. Monumentally cranky. Unprecedentedly cranky. Not even for any good reason. Just a combination of hormonal fluctuations and my damn cats being incredibly annoying since they’re still adjusting to a new feeding regimen and think I’m starving them.

Oh, and sleep deprivation because Schroedinger has suddenly regained his kittenhood habit of climbing up onto the pillow next to my head, purring madly into my ear, and then grabbing hold of my cartilage piercings with his teeth and trying to pull them out. Fortunately, my ears are pretty sturdy and those piercings are long-since healed (even the one I had done with a piercing gun because I was an idiot), so it doesn’t really hurt. It’s just absolutely impossible to sleep through. The good news is, it’s still better than the trick he had as a kitten, which was officially the most awful way a cat can possibly wake you up. He would climb up on my chest, purr into my face for a moment, and then bite my eyeballs through my closed eyelids. Very gently, fortunately, more of a gentle pressure than an all-out chomp. But I lived in fear that someday he would really bite down and wind up biting into my eyeball and blinding me. Creepiest. Behavior. Ever.

While this is less creepy, it still wakes me up earlier than I want to wake up. Which, on top of wacky hormones and worry about a friend of my sister’s who ran away from home a few days ago and is squatting somewhere in NYC, has me in a deeply cranky mood. There is a little black raincloud over my head everywhere I go. Yesterday I wore my Grumpy Bear socks in honor of the raincloud thinking it might cheer me up, but instead I just got blisters. Yet another petty-yet-disproportionately-annoying reason to be cranky. All of which is by way of explaining why I haven’t had much to say for the last few days — it would just have been several days of exactly this sort of whining, and I think just this one fit of whining is enough.

On the plus side, I’m having fun watching the fundraising totals go up at Howard Dean’s weblog during this big last-day-of-the-fundraising-quarter thing they have going on. It’s nice to be feeling a tiny spark of optimism about politics in this country. Plus, he’s the first candidate who’s ever inspired me to donate to his campaign, so it’s kind of cool to look at these gigantic sums of money and know that a tiny fraction of it came from me to support someone I believe in. I feel all involved in the process. It’s pretty great.