CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- I have no psychic abilities whatsoever, but feel I can safely predict with great accuracy that somewhere out there, someone has had to fight a cat off their paper in order to read this.

I suspect I know why.

I think the secret ingredient in newsprint is catnip.

And I believe they use it in computer keyboards as well.

The act of opening a paper or pressing on keys must be what activates the catnip, thereby drawing the feline.

My keyboard is new, so I looked on the box. No ingredients are listed.

Perhaps the catnip content is why newspapers come in little plastic bags -- to lock in the scent so carriers can toss papers on porches and stray cats strolling by don't catch a whiff and tear them to shreds.

My husband doesn't agree. He insists the attraction is a matter of mathematics, that cats calculate the location or item upon which the placement of their body will cause the most nuisance or draw the greatest attention.

Sometimes I try to trick ours by carrying an old paper in along with the new, just to see if they can determine which holds the freshest news. They've never been wrong. (I'm pretty sure I once caught one checking the dates.)

Sully, our longhaired black cat, was mostly feral when we first met. It took a vast amount of time and patience (and meat) to tame him, but these days, he's my most constant companion when I write.

He's also my most frequent impediment.

There's a window behind my desk that leads onto our roof. When I started writing the paragraph above (the one that starts with his name), Sully tapped on my window asking to be let out. Before I finished typing the word "roof," he was tapping on the glass, wanting back in.

In spite of the feeble barriers I construct to prevent him from walking across my keyboard, he finds ways to interfere. Block the left and right sides, he'll leap onto my lap. Block my lap, he'll come up and over from behind.

Lock him out of the room, and he'll yowl so pitifully (and relentlessly) at the door that concentration is impossible.

And yet there's something about his wicked determination to be right where I am, to participate in what I'm doing, that feels like a high compliment.

Our other cat, Squirt, is generally content with draping his ample girth over my printer like a blanket. There he'll remain for hours on end, so diligently inert you might believe he's posing for the world's slowest sculptor.

Squirt serves as our family's alarm clock. He's accurate and reliable, impervious to power outages. If a snooze button exists for Squirt, we've yet to learn how to work it. Of course, his mission isn't so much to provide a service to us or to a duty he's honor bound to perform, but to himself: He's out to procure his breakfast. Once his meal has been presented, just as often as not, he'll take a mere nibble or two, and then walk away. For that, we've been yowled from our beds.

Still, it's allowed us to stop using alarm clocks. He's not failed us yet.

Including on weekends and holidays.

And I don't have to be psychic to predict that's not going to change anytime soon.

Reach Karin Fuller at karinful...@gmail.com.