Once our cats are gone, we're taking a break from having pets...or at least that's what we tell ourselves.

We owned all of these guys at one point. Now only the two on the left remain.

We currently own three cats: Ginny (11 years old), Molly (9), and Cheddar (age unknown, but probably 8-ish?)

I love them all. They're affectionate – each in their own way – and they cause minimal damage to our house.

Actually, they cause zero damage as long as Ginny is on her meds. A year or so ago she started peeing in places she wasn't supposed to, so the vet prescribed some Happy Cream. Every night we rub a small dab of the cream inside her ear, which keeps her both content and continent, if somewhat zoned out.

Apart from that, all three are pretty healthy felines, at least for the moment. We've been down this path several times before, so we know in a few years they'll start declining.

It will be sad, and we will love them until the very end, but Terry and I came to the decision a while ago that these are the last three in a long line of Tennant cats.

We've owned cats together since before we were married. For the three months leading up to our wedding in 1992, I lived alone in the house we had bought with a little kitten named Alex. He was the first of our many four-legged, fuzzy friends.

Over the subsequent 34 years, we've owned as few as one or two cats at a time and as many as five. Our current three feels like a good number, especially to me as the person who daily feeds them and cleans their litter boxes.

When we lost our boys Fred, George, and Charlie in a 15-month span in 2022 and 2023, we were down to just Ginny and Molly. And that seemed fine.

Then Cheddar unexpectedly joined the team in the spring of 2024. You can read about that here, if you're interested.

Now I truly think we're playing out the string. I don't mean that to sound heartless. As I said, we love our three kitties and will continue loving them until it's their time to go.

But I've been doing the litter box/cat feeding thing almost every morning for 3+ decades. I wouldn't mind hanging up my scooper. And Terry and I would both be OK not having to worry about aging cats using our basement armchairs as scratching posts or surrogate bathrooms.

I say this as someone who has had at least one pet in the house consistently since birth. I grew up with dogs and fish, while our kids have owned cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, rats, chinchillas, mice, and fish of their own.

I've taken care of more than my share of furry and non-furry creatures. As sad as I'll be to lose Ginny, Molly, and Cheddar, I'm ready to take a break. A permanent break.

And this time, I mean it.

With gainful employment on the horizon, I need to get back to my 5am wake-up time

It is rare that anyone in the house is awake before me. Even over these last couple of months of not having a job, "sleeping in" for me is when I don't roll out of bed until after 6am

I have always been an early riser, and presumably I will always be an early riser.

Still, my current schedule, while not exactly what you would call "decadent," won't do once I start work at Goodyear next week. I need to get back to setting that tried-and-true 5am alarm.

I could get up later than that, but I'm not willing to sacrifice any part of my morning routine, which will generally look like this on days I'm in the office:

5am-5:30am: Get up, get dressed for exercise, get the cats fresh food and water, scoop their litter boxes, sweep around those litter boxes

5:30am-6:10am: Exercise, cool down

6:10am-6:30am: Shower, get dressed (only 20 minutes...this is the advantage of being a 51-year-old man)

6:30am-6:50am: Eat breakfast, scan the papers

6:50am-7:00am: Brush teeth, get ready, get out the door

7:00am-7:45am: Drive to work

7:45am-8:00am: Get in, get to my desk, get coffee, and get going

Right now Goodyear staff are only in the office two days a week, and that arrangement is likely to last several months while they figure out what their workplace model is really going to look like. I could potentially sleep in a bit on work-from-home days, though I'm still likely to be up at 5:00 and maybe exercise a while longer, or take some extra time to empty the dishwasher, start laundry, etc.

I know many of you get up much earlier than 5am, and many are up, shall we say, significantly later in the morning. Either way, I'm looking forward to getting back into more of a rigid schedule.

Who do you want to die first: You or your spouse?

No, really, I'm asking this seriously. Would you rather die first? Or would you rather that your husband/wife die first?

And don't do that noble "Oh, I would willingly sacrifice myself so that my spouse could live on" thing. I want a straight answer: Deep down, if you could make the choice and no one would know, would you choose to live longer yourself? Or would you let your significant other carry on while you're six feet under?

Short of homicide, none of us has a say in the matter, of course. And statistics tell us that in the majority of cases, the wife lives longer than the husband, since women tend to outlive men.

But if you had to decide, what are you going with?

If you say you would rather live longer, there are some pros and cons to consider:

PROS
The most obvious one, duh, is that you get to live longer. That falls right in line with natural survival instincts. Also, all those years of waking up cold because your spouse pulled the covers off you? Gone. You can now spend the remainder of your days (or nights, I guess) in toasty warm comfort. You're also a Committee of One when it comes to making such important decisions as what movie to watch on Friday night or how to hang the toilet paper (NOTE: It should definitely be "over" and not "under.")

CONS
Well, let's be serious here. You're going to be awfully lonely if you're the only one left. I watched my mom make a series of painful life adjustments after my dad died 15 years ago, and I give her credit for doing it as well as she did. I'm not sure I could handle it. Also, all of the chores the other person always did – which they probably took over because you hated those jobs so much – are suddenly your responsibility. It's something to think about.

There's also this complicating factor: If you decide you want to be the one to go first, that means you're purposely saddling your spouse with all of the "cons" listed above. Nice going. You just made their Life After You even MORE miserable.

I've always joked with Terry that, given my family history of heart disease, this isn't even a question for us. I'll be dead and buried and she'll still have 20 or 30 good years in front of her. But if I had to choose? Wow....I don't know. I guess I would still choose to die first.

NOTE TO TERRY: When I'm gone and you have to take over cleaning the cat litter boxes, you should remember to always keep at least 3 inches of litter in each box. Otherwise those balls of smelly cat urine tend to stick to the plastic and are hard to scrape off. You're welcome.

When you can't figure out why your spouse married you in the first place

I've heard it said that women enter marriage hoping to change their husbands, while men enter marriage hoping their wives never change.

I don't know how true that is, but I do know this: After nearly 23 years of marriage, I think my wife knows that I'm pretty much a what-you-see-is-what-you-get proposition. You're either driving me off the lot as-is or you're walking the other way.

And so far, incredibly, she has chosen to stick around.

Which is saying something, because if I lay it out in a balance sheet format, I'm finding that life with me has a lot more debits than credits.

There's the whole has-no-mechanical-aptitude thing, which gets pretty annoying (and expensive) if you live in a house, since the guiding principle of home ownership is that anything that can break most certainly will, and so will everything else that you thought couldn't.

I'm also a worrier who is constantly reassessing his life plan. You probably don't even have a life plan. I have something like four of them, and I switch from one to the other every week or so depending on which way the wind blows.

I don't cook much. I have little interest in yard work outside of cutting the grass. I'm not especially spontaneous. And I eat foods you probably don't like and listen to music you almost certainly don't like.

I allow my mood to be dictated on autumn Sundays by the fortunes of a perennially losing professional football team.

And I complain about not getting enough sleep but won't do anything to actually get myself to bed at a decent time.

What a catch! I know you ladies are lining up to see if you can steal me away.

On the plus side, I always wash the dishes because I can't stand to leave them in the sink. I'll clean your litter boxes if you have cats. And if you're playing Trivia Crack, I'm handy to have in the room if you don't know the leading hitter on the 1962 St. Louis Cardinals (Stan Musial, of course), the guy who invented the helicopter (depends on who you talk to, but usually thought to be Paul Cornu), or various other bits of minutiae that fill my head.

Aaaaaaand, that about wraps up the positives.

I don't say this to be self-deprecating or anything. It's just kind of the way it is. Unless you have a huge ego, you can probably come up with a lot of negatives about yourself, too.

For the most part, I actually don't mind my flaws. They're what make me who I am. I just don't know if I would go so far as to marry me, or someone like me. But Terry did, and I've never thought of her as especially crazy. So there must be something there that attracted her.

I think it's my blog. Chicks totally dig low-profile lifestyle bloggers.

The older I get, the earlier I wake up

My wife is philosophically opposed to the idea of, as she puts it, "getting up in the 5s." By which she means waking up before 6 a.m.

You might take from that that she would be OK with getting out of bed at, say, 4:30 a.m. And you would be wrong. Terry would no sooner get out of bed at that hour than she would eat blue cheese.

(Terry hates blue cheese, you see. I love it. Terry prepares the food in our house. Guess which ingredient you never see in our meals outside of the occasional rogue bottle of salad dressing?)

Anyway, Terry does not like to get up early, or at least what I consider early.

Most days, I'm out of bed at 5 a.m. Occasionally it's 4:50 a.m., and I don't need an alarm to do it. I just wake up, lay there for maybe a minute, and my feet hit the floor.

I realize there are many people for whom a wake-up time of 5 o'clock would be "sleeping in." These people generally fall into one of three categories:

(a) They deliver newspapers
(b) They have blue-collar jobs that require them to be at work at some unacceptable time like 5:30 a.m.
(c) They are 104 years old

That whole thing about needing less sleep as you age is true, right? I assume it is. How else do you explain the line of senior citizens at the buffet restaurants every day at 4 p.m.?

My sister Judi used to get up around 4 in the morning. She would use the early hours of the day to exercise, clean the house, and watch reruns of "Cops."

My family loves "Cops." It's a thing with us. There's something about seeing shirtless white people of Southern descent getting arrested that appeals to us.

Anyway, I get up fairly early only because I have to. If I'm not up by 5:00, there's no way I can do everything I have to do in the morning. That list, in order, includes:

- Get dressed for running
- Feed the cats
- Go downstairs and clean out the litter boxes and sweep around them
- Go outside and get the newspaper
- Get a drink of water
- Lace up my running shoes
- Go and run 2-3 miles depending on the day
- Stretch
- Come in and record the run in my running log book while getting a second drink of water
- Shower
- Dress
- Read the paper and eat breakfast
- Brush my teeth and head out the door for work

If I'm not out of bed by 5:15, something on that list is going to get sacrificed. And I don't want to sacrifice any of it.

Well, I would gladly sacrifice the cat-related items. But those have been my jobs for many years now, and I'm fairly certain no one else in the family is going to take them over. So I'll continue doing them.

During the summer I have the house all to myself in the morning because none of the kids have to get up for school, nor does Terry have to pack their lunches and see them off. My teenagers would, if given the opportunity, sleep until 3 p.m. every summer day.

We don't let them do this, of course. (Most of the time.)

As I type this, it's 9:20 in the evening, which means I'll be waking up in a little more than 7 1/2 hours. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and eat my nightly chunk of blue cheese and head off to Dreamland with the rest of the old people. Good night!