The plight of Grover

A week or so ago, Rita was visited in the middle of the night by a raccoon. Ever since she was injured a couple of months ago, she's been sleeping downstairs on our futon because it's hard for her to get up & down the stairs with her broken foot. The raccoon frightened her quite a bit, but now she understands that they're more mischievous than dangerous. However, that knowledge hasn't made her any more amenable to having "the fella" as she likes to call him, entering our house at will to flip over Grover's food bowl for a midnight snack. To this end, we've been sealing our dog door each night to prevent his ingress. This isn't a problem for Lola, she rarely goes out at night (that I'm aware of anyway), but Grover is used to coming and going all night as he pleases. He's been able to do this for all of his thirteen or so years, so now having the door closed is a problem for him, and us. Grover & I have an agreement, he gets to sleep & eat in the house, & I get to feed him. That's about the extent of our interaction. During the summer we almost never see him, and during the winter he spends more time in the house bulking up on chow & snoozing in remote corners like behind the piano or under a couch. When it's cold outside, he'll generally spend the night in the house, or so I thought. It turns out that this is not the case, he likes to go out around 2:30am or so to carouse or whatever it is that he does in the middle of the night in the middle of winter. This is a problem for us if he's in the house and the dog door is closed because he will voice his displeasure by loudly meowing until something's done about it. The other problem is, he's afraid of Rita, so even if she goes & opens the door for him, he won't go out, he'll cower somewhere out of sight. So this means that if we want any peace the rest of the night, I have to go downstairs & open a door for him to get out. Like last night. Can you say sleep deprived? I have a hard enough time getting to and staying asleep, so getting up to let a cat out is tantamount to getting up for the day. So here I am, up since 2:30 or so, trying to make it through the day. Stupid cat.