We have started watching this show on the Animal Planet, My Cat From Hell. It’s sort of the cat version of The Dog Whisperer, and you get to see some poor, terrible cats with lots of emotional problems, but then the “cat-wrangler” Jackson Galaxy comes in and teaches the cat’s “guardians” how to help them feel better. It’s pretty amazing, and very educational. We pick up a lot of good tips, even though our cats are not “from hell.”
If you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time, you’ll know that our older cat, Boogie, has had some problems in the past with his digestion. We’re mostly under control at the moment, but not 100%. We may never be 100%, since he is an older cat, and we’re not emotionally willing or financially able to do all the testing, treatments, maybe even surguries, that would be required to completely “cure” him (if it would even be possble to completely “cure” him.) But I do believe he’s currently a lot more comfortable than he was a year ago.
Anyway, by watching this show, I was reminded of something that I already know: that it’s always a good idea to have at least one litterbox for each cat in the house. 
This gave me the idea that maybe we ought to get Boogie his own litterbox. If he has a place that he feels is uniquely his, he might not feel so compelled to do his business just outside the litterbox, in the hallway. So today, we bought a second litterbox, and we’re going to set it up where he’s been “going,” to give him the idea that this is a better alternative. Once he gets his own smell in the box, hopefully he will feel, “Hey, this is mine, I OWN this.”
And if somehow we can keep Squee from taking over this second litterbox as well, that would be great. Actually, this second litterbox is much smaller than the first, so Squee, who is a big boy, may not even be able to comfortably get inside it, so that may discourage him from trying to use it. We’re hoping that will be the case.
I know this is an unpleasant subject, but it’s part of my reality, and I’m just glad that we found this cat show which makes us a little more aware of what’s going on in our cats’ lives, what they might be thinking and feeling, and gives us ideas on how we might be able to help them.
I’ll let you know how this goes.
In other news, this was the first day of my vacation, but it pretty much felt like any other Saturday, doing laundry, food shopping, working on the new Marvel blog. We did watch a show on TV, a documentary about Jules Verne, which inspired me to want to read some of his books. We have a book on the shelf which is actually a compilation of SEVEN of his books, so it’s a bit large and unwieldly. I’ve put it on my nightstand, for reading before bedtime, but in the meantime, today we took a drive out to the public library and picked up some more reasonalbly weighted volumes, which I can easily take with me if I want to do some reading on my lunchbreak. I think I’m going to start with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Let you know how that goes as well.
One of the things we learned on this documentary today is that in the 1860’s, Jules Verne wrote a book called Paris in the 20th Century, in which he imagined all kinds of ideas and inventions which might belong to the future, and now of course we can see that a lot of his ideas have been realized, to some degree. Apparently he envisioned “a worldwide telegraphic communications network,” very similar to…the internet. So. If Al Gore tells you he “invented” the internet, don’t believe him. It was Jules Verne. About 100 years before computers came into existence.
