Cat-lateral Damage

I don't know how people do it. I don't know how crazy old cat ladies can have dozens of insanity-inducing cats, except maybe for the fact that they're, well, insane.

To have multiple cats is expensive and exhausting. We learned this with our recent experience with three quarters of a half dozen cats. That's four cats for the mathmatically challenged. (That's "4" for the alphabetically challenged.) Our two girls, plus my parents two boys.

Every few days our house began to smell. The smell was like cats. Their food, their pee, their crap, their little pink buttholes, their litter. So every few days we had to clean out two litter boxes; one for the upstairs cats, and one for the downstairs cats.

The winter seemed to fly by as we spent every spare minute cleaning. If it weren't for Roomba, our house would be condemned right now due to inhabitable conditions as a result of an unacceptable build-up of unsanitary elements that would pose a health risk to anyone walking within 30 feet of our home.

But even Roomba couldn't fully compete with our kitties. Their fur wasn't the problem. It was the litter that got out of hand. Digging-litterbox action fired the tiny clumping granules all over the floor. And despite our best efforts, we couldn't stop it from getting underfoot.

Kitty litter plus hardwood - and gravitational forces pulling body weight down onto said litter/hardwood combination - do not go well together.

The damage is done. The granulated bentonite clay particles, which are normally used for absorbing our cats' excrement, have devalued our home by 0.1% as they've scraped our hardwood floors with their crunchy, sand-flavoured edges. Dang. Maybe I should've titled this post 'Collitteral Damage.'