Cat Blogging, Don't Expect This To Be A Regular Feature Edition

For practical reasons, neither of my pets is fed at a set time everyday. Each, instead, is aware that a series of signals will indicate they are soon to be fed. For my cat, in the morning, these signals are drawn from some combination of time, number of cups of coffee consumed (the cat will jump up from wherever she is when she hears an empty coffee cup put down on the table), and whether she has woken up my wife. Once these have been done, the cat must bump my hand with her head in order to signal she wants food, and must bump my hand again to get her food from the scoop to her bowl. (How I trained her to do all this, I do not know. But I do know it was done in about a week.) When she feels that this process is not moving along at a speed of her liking, she will let me know, loudly and constantly.

Except when I wake up before I usually do. In these cases, though wide awake and active, she will completely and pointedly ignore me. It's not a question of hunger (she is on something of a diet and so always hungry; she is also always hungry when not on a diet), so the explanation, if any, is baffling.