So Much For Saying I’ll Never…

Posted on by

I went shopping on Black Friday*. Pet stores are not overwhelmed with shoppers, at least not the ones away from The Mall.

You see, Athena T. Cat broke her litter box and I needed to get another one. No, it is not one of the motorized ones with a gizmo to rake the litter and remove ordure. It is your basic, one piece, lidless box that holds littler, nothing more. She broke it. Or someone else broke it, cracked one end, but since she’s the only one who spends time in and around said box…

All I can say is it must have been a helluva party.

I also got the kind of cat treats that clean her teeth and that are large enough that I don’t lose fingers when she bites for them.

 

*In Germany during Holy Week, you have Green Thursday, Karfreitag, Black Saturday, and Easter. So Black Friday sounds to my ears a bit like a regional term for Good Friday. I’m strange that way.

Advertisement

18 thoughts on “So Much For Saying I’ll Never…”

  1. “Black Friday sounds to my ears a bit like a regional term for Good Friday.” Yep. My kids puzzled over this for a couple of years…”Why isn’t the Friday before Easter called ‘Black Friday’, and this shopping day is?” Of course, it doesn’t help much for this bit of cultural understanding that we’re often overseas where Good Friday is very much a thing, and Black Friday is not.

    • One year I was out of the country for the two weeks before Christmas. It was a delightful break from non-stop “Buy this” advertising. Nature programs, seasonal dramas, televised concerts, the usual cop shows and dramas (ah, boat chases through Hamburg harbor – almost as fun as car chases…).

    • It has the same effect, but Athena has picked up enough English that “dental” is down there with “vet” and “spa”. She’ll hide if you use any of those words.

      • our doggie free feeds. We just keep two full bowls of kibble. One in the living room and one in the master bedroom where one of his dog beds is.

        Nemo doesn’t react to the word dental. Probably because he has to be anesthetized for anyone to clean his teeth. Nemo doesn’t like anyone messing with his teeth or fur. We never say the W (alk) word. Because we’d then have to take him on one on pain of constant meeping. Confession of bad parenthood. We walk him infrequently. He gets let out in our small backyard it’s 15′ by 60′ fenced plus a bit more on the side of the house. He goes out in the backyard several times a day.

  6. Broke the litter box??? How in the… never mind… And you’re a braver soul than I. I made a run to the local store and that was IT!

      • One of the failure modes of plastic is crazing. (When you bend those little square plastic bread bag closers to failure, the white is the microcracks on the surface caused by crazing.) By flexing plastic back and forth, you can create tiny cracks, which will meet and cause a split with enough cycles. Athena most likely put in enough cycles.

        I suppose manufacturing defects, or earthquakes might also be possibilities.

            • Many metals are vulnerable to fatigue, which is similar to crazing but different.

              Insert proposal for twenty pounds of aluminum, precision machined in at least nine different orientations. Plus heat treatment and coating. And hey, we could put MEMs sensors on it for structural health monitoring via remote telemetry.

            • And this is how we end up with an ISO 9000, ASCE-certified, $15,000 litter box and a $1,500 software package to go with it. 🙂

      • I HOPE that the feline network challenge didn’t encourage a “hey, watch this!” response.

  7. Being anywhere near a mall even on the Saturday after Thanksgiving can be a drag. It took me nearly three hours to go the fifty miles necessary to escape from Connecticut, and there was another miserable slowdown near a mall in New York. Traffic east of the Delaware River is bad enough as is.

Comments are closed.