just can't win!

So about a month ago, Kosh and I started getting sloppy on the whole keeping the cat's litter box cleaned out every 3 days or so. I would keep meaning to, but would remember only once I was in the shower, and I just didn't feel like "dirtying" myself afterwards with kitty litter dust and aroma, y'know? So I'd postpone it to the next day, forget again, postpone it, forget again... At one point, I was about 3 days overdue, meaning that her box hadn't been cleaned for almost a week!

Around that time, the cat made her irritation known:

• She peed on the threadbare handtowel left on the bathroom floor as a temporary rug while the real rug air-dried along with the other apartment rugs after a particularly comprehensive laundry session.
• She peed on Kosh's scrubs he'd left on the floor.
• She peed against the closet door which trickled onto a nearby mat.

The thing is, every time she did that, she had been rewarded with an immediately cleaned litterbox [and curses, let's not forget the curses!!], and these occurred within a few days of each other, so it's not like the box was no longer up to her standards... afraid that she was regressing, we decided to limit her exposure: keep both bedroom and bathroom doors closed.

Of course, this is the bathroom where the air vent is something we can't control, it's a centralized thing that has been NOT working more than working for the 1 year + that we've been here. Right now it's technically working, but not by much. So to avoid the worst of mold formation, we need to keep the bathroom door open, for circulation.

But we can't have anything on the floor. So the rug gets "stored" over the curtain rail when we're not in the bathroom. Oh, and other bits of stuff on the floor, like the kitchen rug and the little placemats that are mini-rugs within the kitchen? All collected and stored in the bedroom for the moment. All to reduce the opportunity for the cat to decide something else was going to be her pee spot [did I mention we went through TWO cat beds before deciding it wasn't worth it because she'd use them for a while then one day we'd realize it was now full of pee?]

So right now we're in this whole keeping-an-eye-on-the-pee-crazy cat. About the only positive outcome is that Kosh doesn't leave his clothes willy-nilly around the apartment anymore, whoohooo! :-) It's no fun without rugs on the floor especially in the kitchen. Having the bedroom door closed sucks. Seeing the bathroom floor nekkid is just plain weird.

And then, yesterday, it happened. The rolling of eyes, the exasperation at the cat reached a new level. Because we'd forgotten about another little quirk of hers. With the bathroom door open to air out the post-shower humidity, she is now free to hang out on the bathroom sink, waiting for a drink from the faucet, which is well and fine.... but while she's there, perhaps also to express her annoyance at having to wait for water, perhaps just because she's a cat, she loves to mess with the toilet paper.

Yes, this cat likes to claw at the toilet paper, which is attached just by the edge of the sink/cabinet. Still don't understand how and why she does it: her claws rip deep into the roll PLUS the process of clawing at the roll usually unrolls the thing, ruining over half the roll at one go... and it's only her HIND legs that have claws. You figure out how she needs to perch with her butt over the edge in order to achieve this feat.

I'm just glad she's not decided to pee on the couch - I think that would drive Kosh mega mad!