You Can't Get There From Here

"When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.”  - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Last I left you, we were on the Red Stage - a solid pan, filled with litter, sitting on our toilet, making a Friday night drunken pee twice as difficult as it should be.

Well, we're back on the Red Stage.

Yes....back...on the Red Stage.

We were so proud of the babies!  They hopped right up on the toilet and took to the red tray as if it was what they'd been doing forever.

Coal's aiming problem was pretty well under control with the state-of-the-art-cd-cases-duct-taped-together-because-no-one-listens-to-cds-anymore.  Bean could care less about any of us as long as we gave her a spoonful of pumpkin and turn on the faucet for her to drink out of once in a while.

So, maybe we were over-zealous, so impressed with how great they had done, so maybe we jumped the gun a little, maybe, like a highschool freshman, we were just a little premature.

We moved to the Orange Stage.

We recorded the cat's reactions to this strange new tray:
 

Next: They held it.

For hours.

And then, they poo'd on the floor.

To be fair, poo is far more pleasant to clean up than pee.  Why?  It's not the smell.  They both smell.  Each definitely has their own, individual aroma.  It's that poo stays in one spot.  It covers...maybe three square inches on a really good day.  Pee, we have discovered, when held in for a number of hours, can cover a much larger territory more quickly that poo could ever hope to.

As if scientists, trying to test a theory, we sought to disprove that pee covers more territory for two days.

Our conclusion: we were wrong.  Pee always wins, particularly when the bathroom floor is just slightly slanted.

Both cats had near successes.  Coal did actually stand on the LitterKwitter once....to pee on the floor.  Bean got to the Kwitter while it was on the floor for a minute and actually managed good stance and good aim....and peed on the floor.  *sigh*

What now?

We went back to the red tray and everything has been fine.  Coal still needs a pee-barrier, but otherwise, no one seems particularly upset or injured.  In preparation to go to the orange tray again, we've cleared all the litter from the middle of the red tray hoping this will help them transition.  They're fine with that.  I may work on a way to rig the orange tray with some smaller holes to start with, so that we can work up to the one big one.

Vacation Count:

7 weeks

49 days
1176 hours

70,560 minutes

4,233,600 seconds