Galen update

[madbaker]

As I mentioned some time ago, Galen has learned how to open doors. We've been thwarting this by keeping the study door locked, and then picking it when we want to access the room. Galen runs over when we do this, but since he doesn't have thumbs we’re not too concerned that he'll pick this skill up too. A couple of nights ago I apparently forgot to lock the door - when I got up, it was open and Galen was sleeping on the desk chair with a smug "I belong here" expression. Very cute, but he still got thrown out of the room.

I bought a laser pointer last week. Galen adores it. Being relatively smart (sigh) he has figured out that the little red dot comes out of the pointer. If he sees you grab it, he goes into hunting mode with a specific "Mrrrr" that he doesn't say any other time. The hard part is getting him to look down from the pointer to the floor, so he can chase the dot. He doesn't seem to mind that he can't ever catch it.


One of the names I proposed when we brought him home was "Edmund Hillary". Because he's a climber, y'see. Well, his latest hobby is climbing onto any available horizontal surface. Presumably because "it is there." Two nights ago, it was the 6" wide glass shelf in the bathroom. He couldn't actually get up there - good thing as it certainly wouldn't support his weight - so he settled for knocking off all the wife's cosmetic-type products stored there. One by one. For two hours. Eventually we stopped trying to dissuade him and just disassembled the damn shelf. Maybe we can put it back up in a couple of weeks.

This is just the latest manifestation of his nocturnal thrashings about. He's cute and sleepy during the day; then when the wife turns off the lights to come to bed, he has the place to himself and takes full advantage. Which, of course, makes it near-impossible for us to sleep. We can't lock him out of the bedroom; we've tried that. He sat at the door and scratched incessantly. Can't sleep through that either. Now, he'd also open the door himself. We could lock him in the bathroom (the door opens in and he hasn't figured out how to pull it - yet). But the bathroom is only six feet from our bedroom, and his scratching there still keeps us awake.

The wife played with him for four hours straight last night, which mostly tired him out. But that's not a good long-term solution.
Any suggestions? Kitty valium? Another cat?