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new cat piss issues
Monday, July 1 2013
The garage has been a mess for years now, but it's been really bad since I finished the greenhouse upstairs project back in the autumn. Tools and bits of lumber have been strewn about and I've made no serious attempt to put any of that stuff away. Today, though, I made a few half-hearted attempts to begin tidying it up. One of the first things I did was process a bunch of quickie diagrams I'd drawn to help with cutting plywood and drywall pieces for the greenhouse upstairs. I'd thought those diagrams had captured something that is usually lacking in more formal graphics, so I wanted to scan them. Here are the results (all of which can be clicked upon to enlarge):
The diagram for the piece of exterior plywood for the north end of the east wall, with a inset diagram of how to handle the place where the girder penetrates.
Designs for the exterior plywood under and above the east window and above the door.
Left: I don't remember. Right: design for the exterior plywood on the north end of the west wall.
Designs for the ceiling structure and floor plan of the cantilevered "catform." Note that this is literally on the back of an envelope.
Design for the plywood piece to attach beneath the cantilevered floor structure of the "catform."
Drywall patterns for the east and west walls.
Meanwhile, Marie (aka "the Baby") has been spending most of her time in one of two places: either on the stairs up to the second floor (where we occasionally don't see her in the dark and step on her) and in the laboratory at the bottom of the three steps down from the teevee room (but off to the side, meaning I never step on her there). I think she likes being near stairs and doorways in the hot weather because that is where breezes tend to blow. Unfortunately, though, she also developed a new set of unpleasant bathroom habits. The laboratory started stinking of cat piss, and investigations showed puddles scattered along the west edge, where the ceiling meets the floor. She (and perhaps other cats) have had the habit of pissing there before, so I've put down plastic sheets. But the Baby added a new location: under a table near the southwest corner of the laboratory, a place where there was no plastic. She'd also been shitting there of late, though that seems to have stopped. Unlike shit, which immediately gets cleaned up by the dog, piss lingers as it slowly dehydrates, eventually turning into yellow crystals that absorb atmospheric water in humid weather and start stinking again. Today I cleaned up all the piss I could find and put down additional plastic sheets under that table. But who knows what unpleasant turn her bathroom habits will take next? Both Gretchen and I keep hoping some illness comes along and quickly dispatches her to the great catnip patch in the sky, but she seems to be doing about as well as she's ever done in terms of her health. At some point, though, she's going to have some sort of health setback, at which point we'll take her down to the Hurley vet, who will give her "the pink sleep" without question. (The one time we tried to have our visiting vet do the deed, she pretty much refused.) That said, the Baby's urination habits have never been as annoying as those of the recently-vanished Nigel, who preferred to piss on carpets, dog beds, shoes, and other things made of fabric that tended to be impossible to clean.
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