Neil Gaiman quotes from a reader’s email in his mailbag:

Sorry about your having to clean up after the cat. We have a cat here who doesn’t understand that having all four paws in the litter box is not sufficient, and so we often end up with urine under the litter box rather than in it. Sigh.

Well, I know all about a cat being such an enthusiastic and productive pisser that also thought that just the two front paws standing in litter constituted “in the litterbox.” Also there was some confusion in his mind over whether hanging one’s kitty butt over the edge was “close enough for jazz” or not.

If you’d like to read more about how I dealt with this indelicate and undelicious problem, read on.

More Than You Wanted To Know?

Stuey’s aim was rather impressionistic, especially with what we shall euphemistically call “onesies.” His aim got progressively worse last year. I never could get him to go in the center – he was always a side corner man, hence the problem with his aim. I went through several different brands of boxes before I found one that was high on all four sides that he could still step over, and discarded the “odor containment” hood it came with. There was one really great triangular one with extremely high sides and a step-through and other cool lifty-sifty features, but… yep, he’d stand just inside the step-through and let fly with a contented kitty sigh. The lifty-sifty feature couldn’t cope with the volume, either.

I think I bought 3 new boxes over the course of about 3 years.

Really, he sounds almost decrepit – he wasn’t at all. Just inaccurate when things were desperate.

With “twosies” he was better, but not if the box had a cover (he had a slight problem with claustrophobia, so I learned that hooded litter-boxes were distinct non-starters).

Just before he was diagnosed with feline diabetes, the problem reached epic and Biblical-flood proportions (that would be about the time Timmy and Mom came to visit, poor things). To minimize the mess, I eventually put the litterbox in a wide, flat plastic tray that I bought at Home Despot (it’s sold as a washing machine liner – you put large home appliances in it that are likely to leak or overflow). It was easier to clean and deodorize… well, “mop” and “destinkify” are more descriptive. Deodorizing the house, however, required pulling out the carpet in the cat room and painting Kilz all over the subfloor – 3 coats’ worth.

Yes, Timmy, that was why it was still smelly even when I’d just cleaned the litter area. Sorry, sorry, very sorry indeed. The house smells real good now, though. 😉

After a while, I got really, really tired of the almost daily chore of mopping up “onesies” in the plastic tray, and found a solution that made it a snap – I bought a package of extra large plastic-lined puppy-training pads and would put one under the litterbox in the big tray.

When I noticed a “miss” I’d dispose of the pad, which had an absorbent layer that usually caught it all. This kept the bottom of the litter box cleaner and everything was MUCH nicer for all of us. It reduced the amount of litter tracked around, too.

Unfortunately, the whole rig had to be put in the front hallway once I started the cat-room floor project, because that was the only place with a durable, washable floor. So for the rest of that time, we only had the most understanding of guests over. Fortunately, the puppy pads made a quick and discreet cleanup possible.

It seems Herculean in retrospect. But it was actually easy. And that is all and more than you ever wanted to know about dealing with this problem.