I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but since getting here, I have slept an obscene amount.

Me at Parc Guell in Barcelona

The first night – and thirteen HOURS of sleep later – wasn’t so shocking, as I’d slept maybe nine hours in the two day prior. Obviously I was paying off a sleep debt.

But last night? And the 11 hours I slept then? Until 1:30pm? And five feet from the super noisy, mopeds screaming by at 120 kmh and at all hours? How is that possible?

Tomorrow it will not be possible, as we have to catch a 10am train to Valencia. And need to leave the apartment by 8:30 am. And have a dinner reservation for tonight at 11pm.

I think that’s the only thing that makes getting up so ridiculously late in the day seem less wasteful…knowing you’ll be eating dinner in the middle of the night. It’s sort of like the Spanish have skewed the entire day forwards four or five hours.

No wonder they need a two-hour siesta in the middle of the day.

If you were up eating dinner until well past midnight, you’d be tired too.

As for me? I like to combine my sleep and my siestas into one long, uninterrupted Sleeping Beauty-esque slumber.

He's a bold little fellow.

In other news, my cat Siddhartha is missing.

If your first reaction to that statement is “You have a cat?” then you are probably not alone. He doesn’t get much press coverage because he doesn’t tend to open pantries or ravage countertops or eat poison or do much of anything to give me a heart attack…apparently because he’s been waiting the nearly five years of his life to pull a real doozy (a.k.a. disappear for four days) and give me a possibly fatal heart attack just for show.

It started Tuesday night when he missed dinner. Sid loves to eat and has missed no more than a single meal in his entire life, so the sight of his still-full food dish Wednesday morning before I left was upsetting. Since word from home is that he still hasn’t appeared, and I can still see the food dish in my mind’s eye… it’s still upsetting.

See? Remember the egg thing I was talking about? Why can't they do this in America? Take the guesswork out of it?

It’s times like these I wish I was a pet psychic (or knew a pet psychic or cat dowser or a feline empath or any kind of far-out resource of that kind), as the worst part of a missing pet is wondering if they’re still alive. I’m vacillating between thinking positive (he wandered into someone’s garage or basement or shed and is stuck there, and they just haven’t figured it out yet) and extremely negative (a hawk grabbed him).

In the net, and as I’m both a believer in positive thinking and unsettled by the idea that anything painful would ever befall my furry kids, I’m choosing to visualize that Sid is currently wearing a velvet tuxedo, a large purple Mad Hatter top hat, and eating tea and krumpets and sharing a hookah with Alice and the Caterpillar, while the White Rabbit anxiously urges him to hurry up, as he’s now been sitting there for four days.

And knowing Sid, that’s not entirely impossible.