Basement Cat and the Scot, or why you should keep up with laundry

Or, maybe, why you should have more than two sets of bedding if felines outnumber humans in your household.

This is most definitely a TMI post. If you are squeamish, stop now. Click away from the blog. Delete this post from your reader.

Have I mentioned that I believe it is the human condition to have to talk about poop? If you have kids, you know about those conversations. But if you think you will avoid them by not having children, the universe will laugh at you, and give you cats. Or dogs. Or aged and incontinent parents. Or any combination of the above.

If you are a childless, petless orphan, the universe will visit poop problems on you, yourself. It's just how, you know, shit happens.

OK, don't say I didn't warn you. I even gave you time to get away. Even now, I'll start with Basement Cat; you can stop before I get to the poop.

So the Scot's eye problem was a big old scratch across the eyeball, undoubtedly caused by Basement Cat. That delinquent can't leave well enough alone. The Scot is the only cat around here who doesn't hate his guts; so what does he do? Walks up to the mellow, tolerant Scot and hits him in the face. This mostly happens before meals, not without remonstrations from us and the squirt bottle, so we can probably keep it from happening in future by feeding Basement Cat in his own room.

Of course the vet trip was traumatic for the Scot, who is very shy. Even more traumatizing was the Elizabethan collar he was issued, which he tried to back out of, and then to remove by getting stuck between the bathroom door and the under-sink vanity. He tried lying down and looking pitiful, and then he ran into things with it, and finally I took pity on him and removed it, because I'm sure he's not rubbing his own face. Basement Cat is the culprit here, and Basement Cat is grounded for the rest of his life. Or the rest of the Scot's, anyway.

At least the laying-on-of-hands aspect of the vet trip inspired the Scot to eat more readily than he has been doing lately. (The vet also took blood for the vampire cats CBC, since he's been off-color for nearly two weeks now, long after he should have recovered from the last chemo dose.)

Are you still here? You can leave now.

The Scot spent most of the afternoon on our bed. He got room service for dinner, and since Basement Cat was allowed out for dinner, I shut the bedroom door for a little while, after spending an hour or so in with the Scot.

I came back ten minutes later to find a pile of poop in the middle of the bed.

Naturally, I just felt sorry for the Scot. He's sick, he gets shut in, he feels too bad to kick up a fuss, maybe he's taken short. He's a cat; he doesn't want to poop where he eats and sleeps. I remove the top layer of bedding, do some clean-up, pop it in the washer, spray some Simple Solution on the next layer (a wool blanket), and decide I'll wash the blanket in the morning.

Only I really hate the smell of Simple Solution, because though it's all right by itself, I associate it with much more noxious odors. So when I'm on the verge of going to bed, I remove the wool blanket. Oops. There's a big wet patch on a far corner of it, and sure enough, the wet has soaked through to the next blanket, and the sheets. And the bed pad. And the cover that goes over the memory foam pad under the bed pad.

And the other set of sheets, and other bed pad, are still in the dirty laundry heap basket (we have baskets. Really).

I'm still sorry for the Scot, but now I'm sorry for me and Sir John, too.

So, check out the time stamp. I'm still up, waiting for the first load of laundry to get dry. And then there will be another. It might be quicker to make a WallMarche run.

This is why I read the mommy bloggers' blogs. Even though my kits don't drive me crazy asking "why," and they do let me sleep in the middle of the day when I need a nap, and they are rarely loud enough to give me a headache, I like knowing that there are other people who wake up to middle-of-the-night barf, and who run out of sheets because somebody's wet or soiled the bed, and who understand that talking about poop is the human condition.

Oh, and the Shakespearean Heroine is still constipated, which is like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

(I will remind you that I actually had a request for more cat blogging. I bet Nicole and Maggie are sorry now.)