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August 30, 2008
An evening gone sideways
Last night I decided, somewhat on a whim, to shuffle around some furniture. We have two sets of sofas - one set that in the game room, and one in the front room - and I wanted to swap them; both to change up the look of the room, and because we use the ones in the front room more often, so spreading wear more evenly seemed like a good idea.
It seemed a simple thing - 'till I went into the game room and discovered that one of our cats (the one formerly known as a diabetic) had decided that one corner of the room was supposed to be his personal litter box. He's got a history of ignoring the litter box when it comes to solid waste, but more recently he's decided that no form of waste needs to be in a box, and has designated two corners as his personal toilets.
Due to his scatological habits we've had a cage for him since just before he was diagnosed with diabetes, and the idea was that he was only out of the cage while supervised. Of late we'd gotten sorta lax about the supervision part, which was clearly a mistake.
I calmed down enough not to summarily throw him out of the house, found him, showed him that I was unhappy with him (which he didn't understand, and at this point doesn't event make me feel any better) and tossed him in his cage.
I then came back down stairs, got out the carpet cleaner, and spent the rest of the night spot cleaning carpets - something that was sort of a low priority on my list of things to do and got catapulted to the top by the smell of cat urine.
The carpets look pretty good, and while you can never really get the smell of cat pee out of carpet, it's significantly better than when I found it.
We have three cats, and two of them bring me joy and companionship - sure, occasionally I have to clean up sick, and there are about a million things I'd rather do than clean a litter box (clean carpets is not one of them), but overall the balance definitely falls in the "plus" column.
The third cat however, is increasingly a pain in my side. I'm torn between my sense of responsibility - we took him in, and I absolutely abhor people who abandon animals - and my unwillingness to live in a cat box. He can't have free reign of the house, and letting him outside isn't an option (he's getting old, he's never been the brightest, and we've seen both coyote and bobcat in the back yard). That sorta means he stays in his cage - and I have a pretty strong dislike for keeping animals in cages.
I don't see any good answer - at least one of us is going to be unhappy, and since I've got the opposable thumbs, I guess I 'win.' Trouble is that really means all three of us are sorta unhappy - the cat hates living in the cage, and Dawnise and I hate him having to.
...Couldn't we all just get along?...
Posted by dberger at August 30, 2008 5:46 PM