Potty Box Humor

On the Jukebox: "The Love Cats" by The Cure
Quote: "You know... like when you pee in the cat box how it stings your eyes." ~ Haven Snow, 1995
Flair: #2

I used to cringe when my friends would refer to their offspring as ‘little poops’ or other more colorful excrement-related words. Why would anyone bestow such an awful title on the very beings they loved the most? Fast forward a few decades and I’m finally beginning to understand although I didn’t push my ‘children’ out of any of my orifices. Ironically my fur babies were born in a litter and that’s what I associate with them. I’m often quoted as saying I got the pick of the litter box and I picked the crappiest cats ever! Grant calls them poop monsters.

It’s not so much that we got terrible cats. They’re not bad for being self-absorbed creatures who are used to being waited on hand and foot. That can’t be blamed on them since they descend from felines that were worshipped as deity in Egypt. When that is taken into consideration, my cats are incredibly self-sufficient. I think the problem is that we’ve had a long line of bad litter boxes and related products. No matter how hard we try or what litter products we experiment with the substance gets tracked out of the box and into other places where we definitely don’t want it. We’ve used Astroturf mats, boxes, ramps, and have even put the litter box in the basement so that the cats would have to climb up 26 stairs before arriving at the master bedroom.

All to no avail – I am still the princess and the pea gravel. I can’t sleep because even with fluffy feather pillows, satin sheets, and a silky nightgown I can still feel that miniscule piece of clay that managed to make it in between the sheets. It’s become one of my nightly rituals to pull back the sheets and brush them off before climbing in. I bet I empty close to 35 pounds of litter out of the vacuum cleaner every year.

What’s a girl to do? I’ll tell you what she’s not going to do… clean the litter box. Yep, that’s a pretty sweet scam that pregnant women got their doctors to pull. Since we’ve been trying to have kids for years Grant took over panning for cat turds long ago. Of course, he gets plenty of breaks when he runs off to play war in places like Iraq. Nothing says romance like a self-cleaning litter box. That’s what he got me for our 8th anniversary right before he took off for Honduras. It worked pretty well until we added the third cat.

Much like people, our cats have their own potty preferences. Some people get in and get out as fast as they can – usually on commercial breaks. Others like to take reading material into the library. My Sari-cat likes to dig, dig, dig to China and then do her thing. She also comes back and buries anybody’s business that wasn’t covered to her satisfaction. Flora is usually the guilty one when it comes to leaving things exposed. Tamsin was great until she reached old age. Now she tends to hang her tail too far over the box so that she’s standing in it and peeing on the corners. It clogs up the works for the automatic box and we have to come scrap it all out. I’m to the point of training them to use the people bathroom like Mr. Jinx in “Meet the Parents” except I’d be afraid of them not flushing. It’s always something! Meanwhile, I'm open to any suggestions that don't include killing or dismissing the poop monsters.