Ai-yi-yi

[telophase]

So. This weekend, Toby picked up the ConDFW room party supply boxes from the staffer who had them and brought them home so we can take them down to Worldcon. They've been sitting in the hallway near the kitchen.

Yesterday afternoon, I started smelling something that was reminiscent of cat pee in the general area, although I couldn't pin it down to a specific location, and figured that the boxes had been stored somewhere that a cat had gotten to them and sprayed them. I don't know why I didn't put them in the garage right then and there. I woke up in the middle of the night, and got a faint whiff of it all the way in the master bedroom, in the back of the house, and spent some time worrying if Sora was freaked out because of the smell of another cat. I got up to go look, and he was happily snoozing away on the back of an armchair, not hiding. So.

When we woke up, I told Toby about the smell, and he dragged the boxes into the garage. But we still smelled it. After I finished getting ready and wandered out for breakfast, he told me that he thought it was coming from the disposal in the sink, that maybe Sora had peed there, and that he was going to grind a bunch of ice cubes in it to clean it out.

As Sora wasn't displaying any of the behaviors that we associate with his crystals-in-the-urine problem, I speculated that as Toby does the majority of the dishwashing, maybe Sora considers that Toby's territory and was staking a claim.

Aaaand then...I noticed...you see, we own a mat that we use for draining dishes. It's the previous version of this one. It sits out by the sink. And...it was damp. Suspiciously so. I took a whiff and OH MY GOD RANK.

Yeah. That's where Sora peed. (Or possibly Nefer. But Sora is the one that pees in weird places usually.) We're not sure if it's territory-establishing or if it's just Sora being weird, as he looooves nasty-smelling mildewed sponges and washcloths and has been known to pee on them. So it's possible that it got mildewed and he did his thing.

It's currently in the wash on hot (although as I discovered that the second generation version is only $8, we may just toss it and get a new one) and we have a new plan of action for use, which is to emulate Toby's mother and put the thing away after each use instead of leaving it by the sink.

Comments

[umadoshi]

...yep, that's pretty bad. O_O I hope ours don't wind up with any bodily-waste quirks. (I've never actually had a cat that did, but I've only had three before, and they were all back when I lived with my parents, so it's not a high sample.)

Oh, kitties. ^^;

[telophase]

Never had aaany problems until Sora. GAH. Well, right when I got Nefer she sprayed a lot, but she quit that after she was fixed. And she refused to sleep on the kitty bed I bought her until I saw her pee on it. I washed it immediately afterward, and she slept on it just fine after that. But nothing else.

OK, I lie a little, Nefer's big problem is one of aim. She likes to perch on or near the edge of the litterbox. As a result, we buy puppy pads and put them on the floor in front of the litterboxes. And today, as I was going in to put the dish mat into the washing machine, I noted that today it wasn't just pee on the edge of the box and the pad...

[umadoshi]

I'm hoping that once we transition them to the robot litter box (!), it'll make it harder for them to miss or track anything untoward out of there. *fingers crossed very, very hard*

I get the feeling that cat ownership is gonna make me a lot more comfortable discussing bodily functions. O_O We had to apply some tissue to Girlkitty's butt earlier, and I definitely hope that doesn't wind up being an everyday thing. But their fur is going to get awfully long, so I suspect we'll have to be eternally vigilant.

[telophase]

We tried all sorts of litterbox contraptions and ended up with the Breeze system. It's basically a litterbox with two levels--liquids filter down into the second level, where they're soaked up by a pad, and the solids stay above with pellets, where we can scoop them.

They both disliked the boxes that they had to go all the way inside, and Nefer's a digger, so she didn't really like the automatic litterbox I used to own, which couldn't be overfilled or the litter would clump up behind the rake and the rake would. not. stop. raking. (I had friends look after her while I was on vacation once, and they overfilled it, not believing me. Nefer, not daring to get into the constantly moving box, resorted to a small throw rug nearby.)

[umadoshi]

Oh, I've heard of that! It sounds neat. ^_^

I hear very mixed things about automatic litter boxes in general, but the robot we bought seems to have excellent reviews, so I'm optimistic! (And it has a 90-day return if the kittens don't like it, although I think thirty of those days are up already, because it shipped so much faster than we expected.)

[telophase]

Ooh--And THEN there was the day that Sora, as a kitten, helpfully tried to cover his doings up in the box and scratched everywhere, including the wall. Only he did it after stepping in his poo. It was on the wall, the carpet, tracked through the bathroom...That earned him the name of Senor Poopaws.

[rusty76]

It's nice to know that I'm not the only cat owner staff that daren't walk though a dark room in bare feet.