The litter box blues...

Now don't get any of this wrong. I love our animals...I do, I absolutely do. Toutle, the dog, showed up as a small pup in my work warehouse and I brought her home to the farm where she's lived happily ever since. We had three happy cats, Tuffy, Tika and Precious, until Rick neglected to catch the barn cat in time for a trip to the vet...and of course she got nailed by a roving tom, so now we have 3 identical little black kittens as well. I can't even name them because there's no telling them apart, so they're all "Baby".

For some unfathomable reason, the resident President Of All Pigheaded Peeps, Rick, wants the cat box right by the bedroom door in the hallway, on my side of the bed, natch. Now I don't know what kind of cat litter everybody else uses, but ours is gravelly. It makes a grating noise when dug and scratched and tossed in burial action against the plastic sides of the box. Tiny bits of gravel stick to little kitty paws and then to the quilt when they jump up, one by gravelly one, to sleep on the warm bed. This makes the resident Mother of All Martyrs...me...highly irritated and uncomfortable in my own damned bed. Rick will not even think about trying another variety, because "That's the kind I use. Period."

When it was that the cat nation decided that dark of night was for frolic, frantic digging and all-night defecating is a mystery. Rick cannot explain to my satisfaction why it is that we have to bear witness to each and every episode of this activity. "I want the box there, that's why!", bellows His Nibs. So I tried sleeping on the couch to "show him". HA! He never even knew I was gone; he had the cats to keep him warm. I tried sleeping in the guest room next door and all the little lions stampeded back and forth all night long from his bed to mine, with forty dumps in between.

The darlings were only supposed to be with us for a few weeks til they were sufficiently human-handled to make good pets and then Rick would take them to the local no-kill shelter. He promised! Well, so much for that, the lying rotter. You can't get anyone to take cats nowadays, there are too many of them. "Free kittens" signs all up and down the county roads out here. I don't know what to do, except give up the fight. There will be no getting a good night's sleep forevermore! Between Rick the Marblehead and Sootyfoot I, II and III, I will never have another sinking into pristine, fluffy sheets with a hint of rosewater ironed in as long as we all shall live. It will be "The Princess and the Pea" every time I roll over and get a shard buried in my posterior.

It's beyond me why Rick is so darned stubborn when it comes to this...does he not know all my exes are dead, muerto, kaput? No...I did not kill them. There apparently is some tacit understanding among Ganesha, Zeus and Quetzalcoatl that if you treat Miz Jo badly, you get to seize up, fly off the planet and go to Hell early. Wasn't my doing. It's probably the umbrella of protection held over me by my sweet Dad, rest his soul, who always prayed fervently for my soul six times a day (and phoned me up each time to tell me).

I don't know, RickyBob...honeybunch...if I were you I'd rethink all that "everything is about me" crappola. We have 40 acres, mon cher. Plenty of room for a shallow grave.