Of Crystals and Crickets

The Big Clean from my last post did not get wrapped up quite as tightly and quickly as I had hoped... apparently the scale of a "Big" clean changes considerably when you've increased the size of your home by 300%. My 200SF studio in Cambridge could be big cleaned easily in two days... I guess that means I should have budgeted a whole week for this one? Well, it continued into a second weekend at least, and more on that in a moment.

Naturally, after investing some time and capital into a steam cleaner rental, something had to happen to overturn all the value realized in short order. So it went like this: on September 10, I'm about to step out the door for work. I was several minutes early (which meant I had not shaven or had to pack a lunch) and Fenway intercepts me at the door in grand tripping hazard fashion. Rather than simply waiting for his customary three treats thrown in Olympic curling style across our faux wood floor, he started a meow... long, drawn out, low, and very unhappy-sounding. Definitely not normal. As he kept up the pained meow, I went to check on the litter box (feeling that perhaps he was getting uppity about how often I clean out the box and rather than retaliate with a huge cat poop on the floor as he usually does, he was going to launch a protest march instead). Well, the surprise was that it didn't need to be cleaned out at all, really, and there was one tiny little petrified piddle in the brand spanking new litter I has put in several days before. Ruh roh. Someone's having trouble peeing. Sure enough, when I went back to check on him, he had his belly exposed, his leg drawn up like he was trying an upside-down pee, and crying. Short of pointing at his penis and saying "it's broken, Dad! It's broken!!" I think I had all the information I needed from his end.

I was able to get him an appointment at the vet--his first since moving to Raleigh--that afternoon. The kindly vet and vet assistants left me in the exam room as they took him back to the equipment to, presumably, squeeze his bladder until he peed. Or perhaps there's a secret pee button I don't know about? Do cats have prostates? Anyway, after a fifteen minute wait, the vet came back and told me Fenway had "a lot going on" in his urine... I hope no one ever tells me I have a "lot going on" in any of my bodily fluids, because it just sounds horrible. It turns out that not only does he have a urinary tract infection, but he has bladder crystals (apparently common in boy cats) that may be impeding his flow, or even ready to cinch it off completely. Well, that explains the tiny pee nugget in his box and the pained meow at the door this morning...

So what does this all have to do with the Big Clean? (Fenway is fine now, by the way, after ten days of antibiotics and special crystal-melting kibble.) The morning Fenway stopped me at the door, I'd sniffed a cat-musky scent around the apartment--the same smell most of his old toys have. Eww, I thought, hope that dissipates quickly, especially since I spent ALL LABOR DAY WEEKEND making smells leave my apartment. Well, it turns out that urinary infected boy cats spray their foul and pungent fluids all over the place. And carpets are preferred. Nice, clean, bouncy, accommodating carpets. So, within a week of their first major clean in over a year, my carpets now smell like super-concentrated cat pee. With crystals.

Suffice it to say, the Big Clean took to the outdoors last weekend. My chief outdoor task was to reclaim my patio closet, which had become a zoo habitat enclosure for large insects and spiders (you know, the dark little room where zoo creatures go to be depressed and disappoint wide-eyed children). I'd known since I moved in that a family of camel crickets had squatters rights in the closet--they all but helped me move my bike and spare kitty box in when I arrived. But I have to admit their presence bothered me. And their otherworldliness, as noted in a blog post last year. So part of the Big Clean was to evict the whole damn lot of them and once again feel comfortable that I could flip a circuit breaker in the closet's electrical panel without being beset by two dozen little aliens with huge tail thingies and heads and eyes and mouths and pokey things...

I'll spare you the grim details but will take credit for trying to remove them peacefully at first. They very much loved that closet, with its reliable moisture, darkness, half-open cans of wet paint, and smaller moving things to snack on. So they were resistant, obstinant even. A couple actually stood up to me--if they had convinced even ten others to do so simultaneously, it would have been enough to get me running off the patio flailing my hands like a little girl. But me and the broom got the job done, and until they regroup and mount a counter offensive, my closet is once again part of my human habitat to mistreat and ignore as I see fit.