Author’s note: I am not on the Anti-Icky Poo* payroll. I do not get kick-backs. I do not own stock in the company, though perhaps I should. Just sayin’…
One of the great pleasures of having a cat is cuddling with it in bed.
Thankfully for my cats, there are other pleasures besides this one, because the fluffy one’s maddening habit of peeing on the bed has barred both of them from the bedroom.
Honestly, I am not a violent person, but finding a puddle of cat pee on the bed is enough to make the most dedicated pacifist go ballistic.
I’m talking fantasies of throwing the cat out the window.
The second story window.
(Fantasies, people. Fantasies. Geez. Don’t have a cow. Admit it, you’ve had the same fantasy.)
The thing is, when you get into the habit of keeping the door to the bedroom closed at all times, the cats obviously don’t get into the bedroom, so no peeing on the bed occurs, and you kinda forget that the reason the door is kept closed in the first place is precisely because one of the little monsters has this lovely habit.
And when your bedroom is at the back of the house on the second floor, it doesn’t get a lot of air circulation. So when there’s a heat wave it gets pretty darned stuffy and you think, “Gee, maybe I’ll just open the door for a few minutes to try and get some cooler air in there, so maybe I can, like, sleep.”
And you know there’s a reason you vigilantly keep the door closed all the time, but it’s been so long since the cat peed on the bed that it just doesn’t seem like a big threat. And it’s so hot, and you’re only keeping the door open for a moment, and for good measure you even put an enormous box left over from a recent delivery in the doorway, completely blocking the lower half (knowing full well that this doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of keeping a determined kitty out, but surely [you think] it’ll be fine for just a few minutes).
And then you blithely head into your now much cooler bedroom to get some much-needed sleep, and you reach down to pull back the comforter…
And it’s soaking wet.
[Expletive deleted.]
[More expletives deleted.]
[Foot-stomping, teeth gnashing, eyes blazing expletives. Also deleted.]
So you grit your teeth and strip the bed, doing your darnedest to keep the puddle of cat pee from dripping onto un-peed-on parts of the bedding, which is really, really challenging, because there are, like, a zillion different layers to deal with — the top and bottom of the comforter cover, the two-layer really expensive organic wool comforter, the top sheet, the bottom sheet, and the mattress pad.
(Which is, thankfully, waterproof, because long before your brain took a vacation and allowed you to leave the door to the bedroom open for a brief moment when you knew this was not a good idea, you had an intelligent moment of realizing that if you had to clean the mattress one more time you would more than likely go completely postal. So you invested in a waterproof mattress pad. To which the fluffy kitty at this moment quite likely owes her pathetic, fluffy little life.)
And you somehow manage to shlep all zillion pee-soaked layers downstairs and into your tiny little backyard to drape across the patio furniture, the bicycle, the rosemary bush (lacking any kind of clothes line) (in the dark, I might add, because the outside light went out before you even moved in and you have never managed to figure out how to open it to change the bulb).
And you spray the sh*t out of both sides of everything with Anti-Icky Poo*, which you buy by the gallon*, because although as previously stated you normally keep the door to the bedroom closed at all times (and sure as hell will be again, starting now), the fluffy kitty doesn’t limit her peeing escapades to the bed.
However, because the fluffy kitty doesn’t limit her peeing escapades to the bed, and you’ve been trying to get rid of the persistent kitty pee smell that welcomes visitors by the front door, there’s not a whole lot of Anti-Icky Poo* left in the spray bottle, or the gallon bottle. Which puts you in an even crispier mood.
And then you still have to put clean sheets on the bed, by which point it’s about an hour or maybe even 90 minutes later than you had intended on going to sleep, which also doesn’t help the mood situation.
If anything will put a girl in a ranting mood, that will.
Next time, I think I’ll opt for a Chia Pet.
*Yes, that’s an affiliate link for Anti-Icky Poo, so I’ll make a few cents if you click through and buy it. I buy it by the gallon at my local, family-owned pet store (support your local business!) This stuff works, though be forewarned, it can take weeks for the smell to completely go away.
