Aloha!!! It’s party time!!

Twice a year my family gets together to celebrate the various birthdays that have occured during a six-month period and to, well just face it, hang out together. We all get along pretty great (no evil family dynamics that some families find themselves saddled with).

Today is one of those celebrations….we’re hosting and we are doing it Luau style. So I’ve been going all out….got the leis that my daughter will hand out at the door, the Hawaiian music downloaded from iTunes (Jimmy Buffet rocks!), and I’ve even agreed to play bartender and try to mix some of those fruity drinks – mai tais, pina coladas and daquiris – even though I’ve never done it before and my knowledge of hard liquor is pretty non-existent – hey, I’m a beer and wine gal myself. I even found this great web site that translates your name into a Hawaiian name.

We’re even bringing together a lot of musical instruments (guitars and the like) under the strange assumption that we can play and sing. So we’ll see if we go Partridge Family on the world after today. 

So I gotta clean the house, start the food and turn on the blenders today. My cat (Pepper is the culprit) has stopped peeing on the couch (even though I can still get faint odors). It’s been cleaned and I’m also trying to clean it on my own in some way every night. I’ve ordered some stuff from the Cat Fairie web site (“Good Behavior and Good Health for the Modern House Cat”). My vet gave me something called Feliway that I’ve plugged into a wall in the famly room. This stuff is supposed to “make my cats happy”.   It gives off a synthetic pheromone that’s similar to the one from the cat’s face that makes them think “hey this is a friendly, nice place. I don’t think I want to pee here.” It actually has brought out Pepper a lot more and has seemed to calm him down…..I sure wish they could invent something like that for humans….oh, wait….I think they have…..it’s called a pina colada…

Well…gotta go prepare for the party and warm up the blenders!

…out…and aloha!

Urinetown – coming to a home near you…

Well, we made it back from vacation all safe and sound. Loved it…it was cool, beautiful and just plain not Arizona in the summertime. Don’t get me wrong…I love where I live…but not as much when it’s 115 degrees outside.

So, we got home and relaxed our first night back. I was pretty busy, though, trying to get the bags unpacked that I didn’t get a chance to rest until bedtime. It wasn’t until early the next morning that I realized, to my horror, what had been going on in my home while I was away for two weeks.

 

 See…we have these two cats….and these two cats seemed somewhat bothered and upset that their non-cat family up and left them alone for two weeks. Oh, yes, there was someone to come and drop by every few days to feed and water them…but they still seemed somwhat, should I say, perturbed…

I hate my cats…

So I decide to finally sit and rest the next morning back – and that’s when I noticed it…the overly pungent smell of cat urine…on my rather expensive couch (oh, and loveseat too). Yes, it became their own personal kitty litter box while we were gone.

Needless to say, I’ve been scrubbing and cleaning. The sofa is getting cleaned next weekend and I’ve tried daily to get the smell out. Very gross…and the worst part is I had scheduled my son’s 4th birthday party two days after we got back, and I was so praying that nobody would sit on my couches. And they didn’t….now I don’t know if it was because they didn’t feel like sitting in the family room, or becaue they noticed the stench that I was so desperately trying to hide!

I decided that the kitty litter box was unattractive to them in some way. I took off the cover of the box (it was one of those hooded ones that helped keep everything neat and tidy), thinking that my cat Pepper, who has grown rather large in the unhealthy sense in the past year might not be fitting in the opening of the box anymore…hey I was desperate. 

Also, I’ve been deligently cleaning the kitty litter box since then. Every morning and every evening it becomes somewhat of my own little zen garden. I scoop and then I rake. One evening I was going through this ritual when Franklin, the evil cat, decided to join me in pushing some of the kitty litter around. I was thrilled…”good kitty”, I cooed to him as he’s scratching around the box. He squats and I hear the satisfying sound of cat pee hitting the side of the kitty litter box. Then….to my horror…he lifts up his little rear end just enough to send a steady stream of urine shooting across my laundry room floor and onto my clothes dryer. I was speechless…I think he did it on purpose…

So, I’ve been trying to keep everything clean until the carpet cleaning guy is here next monday. I’ve been putting tons of stuff on the couches every night to keep the cats from getting any ideas on how cool the couch might be to pee on. We’re even finally getting a doggy door installed on Friday in our house (the cats clinched the deal on that one, even though my husband and I were both resolved to get one when our geriatric dog began waking us up in the middle of the night to go out…every night…).

Last resort? I’ve threatened to get rid of the cats…much to my daughter’s dismay…wish me luck over the next week…I do like the kitties (but don’t tell them I told you that….)

…out