I don’t usually swear in my blog, but we really had a Sh*t Show in our house last Saturday, so it’s difficult to avoid. It starts and ends with sh*t. See, we have a litter box in our basement. We used to have two litter boxes in the upstairs bathroom, but the bathroom is small and it was creating a mess. So, I had the bright idea to move one down to the unfinished part of the basement. The problem is, we have never had a litter box that the dogs had access to (dogs have never been allowed by the bedrooms, so we have kept them there)…and that access seemed like a bad idea. I’d get rid of one box, but I guess we have to have two because we have two cats, and one cat can dominate the box causing the other cat to choose a different location to do its business…so if there is no second box, that could be bad. Anyway, I put up a baby gate with a swinging door to keep the dogs out. I made sure the cats could fit between the bars, even the rounder cat. Although, they both just jump over it. It was perfect, dogs out, cats in. Until Travis accidentally left the gate open. That’s when Roscoe, our chocolate lab, thought we would partake of the cat crap buffet. And he partook with gusto. Blackie, our little terrier, must be smarter than Roscoe. She took a pass. 

Our morning progressed normally for a while. I was doing laundry when Roscoe seemed to earnestly want to go into the garage. That was unusual, but Travis was out there, so maybe he wanted to join him. I let him out and resumed my laundry. After a minute I heard a stream of random swears coming from the garage. I opened the door, and there was a trail of watery poo droplets leading to the motherload of diarrhea on the garage floor. After the initial shock, we strategized a clean up process, because this was like a mountain of melting soft serve ice cream. After we managed it with some cardboard, swearing, and some yelling of, “it’s dripping, it’s dripping,” we turned to Roscoe and praised him. After all, that could have been IN the house. Of course, we didn’t know what caused the intestinal distress yet. 

So, we went in to wash up (felt like I needed a bleach shower) and Travis discovered dog vomit on the landing of the stairs to the basement. And not a small amount. It included Roscoe’s breakfast and a fair amount of cat litter. Now we knew what we were up against. I cleaned that up and we started letting Roscoe outside every 10 minutes. That apparently wasn’t often enough because we found another mountain of vomit in the living room. UGH!! This one was LOADED with cat litter…and I can only assume other items found in the litter. The vomiting continued all day, some inside, some outside. We lost two dog beds in the process due to saturation…and the fact that I just couldn’t face cleaning any more. By Sunday morning, things seemed to settle down. I hopped up on the kitchen counter to change the clock that is above the cabinets, at that point everything was fine. When I finished with the clock, I jumped down from the counter and landed an inch from a mountain of dog crap. Seriously, Travis was standing a couple feet away making pancakes and he saw nothing. I yelled, “Seriously Roscoe!!!” As I walked to the front door to let him out. Right as I reached for the door, my foot landed in another pile. That warm sickening squish nearly pushed me over the edge. So, my socks joined my growing pile of victims of the great litter buffet of 2019 (towels, blankets, dog beds, socks). I let my trucker mouth run free as I hopped to the bathroom to wash my feet, leaving the dogs outside to fend for themselves. Roscoe spent much of Sunday in the front yard. 

Fortunately, this seems to have passed (quite literally). I put an inside base for the invisible fence by the downstairs litter box (should have done that before). And we still have the gate. Why not have double defenses. Oh, and we found the bells for the front door, so maybe Roscoe can let us know when he needs to go out. He has no trouble barking to get in, but apparently it’s just easier to unload in the house than to bark to get out. May you have a clean week everyone.