scooter

When we get orders delivered from Amazon, we usually leave the open boxes on the living room floor for a couple days (okay, weeks) for the cats to play in. The latest Amazon delivery came three or four days ago and Scooter’s been having one hell of a time jumping in an out of the box we left open for him. Trouble is, we found out just this morning that he’s been jumping in and out of the box to pee in it.  I noticed the other day there were little brownish spots in the newspaper we piled in the box.  (I know, I know; it’s like we were asking him to pee in it, right?) On the bright side, he could have been peeing elsewhere. At least he’s been peeing in a box. Okay, I’m reaching.

So I folded the box up and threw it in the trash, and Scooter just had to get over not having a box in the living room to jump into any more.  A couple days later, B asked me, “Have you seen that new tablecloth I ordered?”

“No,” I said, genuinely ignorant of the tablecloth in question.  “What tablecloth?”

“The one that was delivered just last week,” she said.  “Came in a box?  The one Scooter peed in?”

“Well, I threw the box out,” I said, thinking this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do with a box the cat peed in.

“Did you take the tablecloth out?”

“Nope,” I said, “and I’m assuming you didn’t either, which means the cat peed on it, as well as the box.  Did you want to use a tablecloth that’s been peed on?”

In the end, she did not, so the search for the tablecloth ended almost as soon as it began.

Scooter did something almost like this a few months back. We have a plastic wash tub in the kitchen sink to pile dirty dishes in, just to keep them all in one place and to one side. There are typically always a couple of dishes, cups and glasses in there but every once in a great while after I unload the clean dishes from the washer and load up the dirty dishes, the tub will be empty for as long as an hour or two, and then someone will have lunch or a cup of coffee and it’ll start to fill up again.

Well, Scooter apparently saw that plastic wash tub and it made him think of his plastic litter box, because he jumped in there are least a couple times and marked it as his own. I didn’t notice until he also marked a corner of the sink.  I was tempted to throw the wash tub out, but after scouring the sink clean I decided to soak it in chlorine bleach, just to make sure, and I figured, why not try that with the wash tub, too?  Everything gleamed a bright white afterward, so I kept the tub.  Sprayed it with vinegar, though, to keep the cat out of it.  He hates that smell.