It's happening again. The sun is rising after 8 in the morning. At the end of the month, it will only rise at 8.30 am. Then the clocks will go back an hour, we'll get some 7.30 sun, but by the end of November it'll be back to 8.30 again.

The sunrise clock at googol.com can be a bit depressing like that.

The cats, of course, aren't happy. They just love those long summer nights. And who can blame them? I've been doing some of my notoriously bad arithmetic, and here's what I conclude.

An average human lives 72 years, an average cat around 12. That means one of our human years is equivalent to 6 cat years. So the six years our cats spent in quarantine, was like 3 years in jail for human. And of course, the six month seasons from equinox to equinox are also 3 cat years long.

That means the cats are now facing three years of winter! Yikes! Followed by three cat years of summer. I know which one I would prefer.

It's a strange concept, seasons which are three years long. I wonder how humans would react to that kind of time stretch. Could be a good setting for a science fiction novel, though now that I think about it, Ursula le Guin wrote a book called "Winter." Except I don't think they ever got any summer in that one.

Anyway, this got me thinking even further. If one of our years is six cat years, how long is one of our days? I guess the answer must be six cat days. No wonder they seem to sleep so much: they need six sleeps to every one of ours. And probably six meals too.

Now why is my cat smiling me at me so?