The Poop Room

If we ever get around to doing any remodeling, we have to create a room solely for the cats' litter boxes - far away from main living areas - which will be ventilated with state-of-the-art equipment and the entire room shall be tiled with a drain in the floor and a fire hose sprayer.

These old homes are lovely - the best, especially for charm and character - but they're not best for some modern uses. Such as the Jack & Jill bathroom that connects my office with my husband's. Where one of the litter boxes resides.

This morning I walked into my office and was smashed in the face by the heavy stink of a fresh cat turd. I mean, SUPER fresh. Hot off the poop line. There was no escaping it, but I have to work in here. All my stuff is in here. I can't just pick up and relocate every time a cat takes a stanky dump - I'd never get any work done.

So even though it's a cool 50° outside, I opened the windows & turned on the ceiling fans. If I could, I'd install a jet engine fan in the back of the litter box cabinet because why not share that with the neighbors? Why keep that all to ourselves? There's so much to go around.

Happy Annipoopsary

This weekend we celebrated our wedding anniversary, but we've been together many more years than we've been married. It's not been dozens of years - yet - but long enough that we have to try to think of memory landmarks to help us remember how long.

The tried & true method - the cats. He got Shitfoot before we moved in together, and that was in 1998. Wait, or was it 1999? I think it was 1999... It was definitely one or the other, so we're accurate to within a year - close enough.

That poor cat. So enamored, were we, having a cat - really his cat but quickly became our cat - that for months David traveled with him on Bart to stay at my place in the city, almost every weekend. So many trips on noisy, stinky, scary Bart. We're certain that's what caused him to go mental. But it also could have been the plane trip out to Georgia to visit his parents that one time...

So stupid, were we, taking him with us. I had someone watching my bird at my place - we could have left him there, but nooo.... had to have that damn fuzzy baby with us. And then the airline had no record of me booking the flight with a cat in the cabin. But this was pre-9/11...

I asked my dad what we should do, seasoned traveler that he is, and he asked me if the cat ever made any noise and I said no. He said we should throw a jacket over the carrier bag and just walk onto the plane. Which was exactly what we did.

The only noise he made was during descent for landing, which is when he lost his ever loving mind and tried to claw his way out of the Sherpa bag. We sat there ignoring the puzzled looks and pointing fingers like we always travel with a rabid wolverine. Don't you? Why the hell did we do that to him?

Now when he wants something from us - usually, food - and we don't act fast enough, he jumps onto something he knows we don't want him on and then he proceeds to knock our shit onto the floor. I hate that goddamn cat. But I love that goddamn cat.

Happy Anniversary.

Harsh Poop

When it's late at night or we've just watched The Walking Dead, I won't go out into the backyard. Too dark. It's a big yard full of zombies waiting to eat me alive. So if I scoop the boxes late, the trash goes right outside the backdoor where I can grab it in the morning.

I forgot this morning, having come & gone through the front door, so it was there when David and I came home from dinner. I'd been telling him a story about a totally ineffectual boob at a temp staffing agency when he said "wet bag of poop" as we approached the back door. I stopped and told him that I thought that was going a little too far, that she seems to mean well but just can't get the job done, and then in his tipsy state he pointed to the wet bag of poop sitting there on the step. Yup. Wet bag of poop.

Whiz Cats

(Tthis is the catalog photo, as you can tell by the lack of litter flung
everywhere and the non-peed-in interior. Also, that pan is way too
short - that cat just sprayed the entire insides of that pretty cabinet.)

Last year I got all motivated to do a little home improvement and invested in a "cat washroom" that would hide the litter box inside a nice-looking piece of furniture, instead of having ye olde plastic shit box right there in the bathroom where we get to look at it every day.

The cabinet, which I put together myself with wood glue on the dowels for added stability, even looked like it was part of the bathroom. It also seemed to cut down on the litter flinging, something our idiot cats excel at. So happy was I, having the litter box hidden away but still in a convenient place to keep it clean... And then one day...

A particular fuzzy little a-hole didn't put his rear all the way down into the litter box (a "high-sided" box) and peed over the side, making a cat piss puddle inside the cabinet, which of course seeped through the joint between the floor and the side, onto the litter mat below.

Thankfully I had the foresight to put the damn litter mat underneath the thing, or else we'd have cat piss seeping into the floorboards (since the linoleum adhesive recently decided to quit and you can pick the linoleum tiles up off the floor and wing them through the house like square frisbees.

Now that same fuzzy a-hole keeps doing it and now I have to put another litter box inside the cabinet that has a freaking lid on it so he cannot keep pissing all over the insides of the cabinet.

But first, I get to maneuver the cabinet out of the spot it's wedged in, thoroughly clean it with copious amounts of bleach, wait for it to dry, then put a seal of caulk around the joints, wait for that to dry, and then clean the litter mat so it can be used again without reeking of cat piss.

I cannot tell you how excited I am to add this project to my list of shit to do. It's going to be a latex glove and chemical festival. And maybe when I'm all done I will take a ginormous crap in their brand clean litter box. Give them something to think about.

Sooper Poop Scoop

The guest scooper gig went great. No one dropped any atom poop bombs or piddled anywhere she shouldn't have. Good poopers, those kids.

But there was one problem... My dear friend has the flimsiest poop scooper I think I've ever seen. How I didn't snap it like a toothpick, I've no idea. The contents of our boxes would have caused that thing to explode into a kajillion plastic shards.

So I'm going to get her a belated housewarming gift. It might seem silly, but when you have a sturdy - possibly bulletproof - poop scooper, it makes the job so much easier, and easier = not as sucky.

With a sturdy scooper you know you can dig into every corner without any concern that the handle's gonna snap & fly up and spew litter every fricken where. Like into your face. Which has almost happened to me. It only takes that one scare. Cold shiver. Can't let that happen.

Guest Scooper

Very exciting... tomorrow I get to be a guest scooper in beautiful Walnut Creek for my friend Steph's poopers, Olive & Daisy.

A whole new scooping adventure in the burbs. I wonder if they're cooking up something special for me. Let's hope not.

Facepoop

Spent the day working... Actually working, like, on a project, using my words, writing about technology stuff, and at the end of the day checked Words With Friends to see if was my move and already tired from searching for just the right words for work started playing my turns in each of the five games I'm in at the moment only to have my opponents immediately take their turns and have it be my turn again which caused my turn to seemingly never end and already so very tired from all the words and having mostly all consonants in one game and only all vowels in another was reduced to playing words like "elf" and "nay" and "tire" which aren't at all as valuable as words one might be able to play with a reasonable mix of both vowels and consonants and having to play boards that are either almost full or totally fugged up by going only in one direction jammed all up into a corner made me wish I'd never clicked that stupid link and instead went straight to the couch with my blankie and a kitten.