…beats a good day at the office. I discovered yesterday that it’s true. We woke up with good intentions to get through more of the storage space and do more boat cleaning and organizing. But Jack noticed a small wet spot on the upholstery and said, “What’s that?” I bent down to sniff and discovered that the cat had peed on the settee. She never does that.
I sniffed and wiped but before long I realized that the pee had gone down into the foam and all along the seams of the covers, so I had to deconstruct the cushions, take each component out on deck and wash it, then treat it with the enzymatic pet odor eliminator we were glad we kept with us just in case. I told Jack with a sigh that this would be my week, and it’s not far from the truth. Imagine how long it takes for a big chunk of foam rubber to dry in the Florida humidity.
All day I went out on the trampolines and picked up each piece and sniffed every square inch, retreating anything that still had a lingering odor. I’m sure our dock neighbors were amused, but even as I was doing it, I kept thinking, “I’m on a boat!”
We don’t know why Izzy did it. We suspect that she may have tried to go to her litter box, but the door may have been closed. We have it located where you have to go through the guest head to get to it, and if someone is in the head with the door closed, she may have been thwarted and had to go elsewhere. We’re going to work on that.
We didn’t get to the storage space at all, but we emptied out the space under the kitchen sink, cleaned and inventoried and reorganized everything there. I can report that we will never need to buy dish detergent, all-purpose cleaner or soft-scrub ever again.
I also washed under the sink in the guest head, and that seems to have taken care of the boat funk we smelled every time we opened the door to access the toilet paper.
Day by day, little by little, we are making Escape Velocity our home.
Did Izzy go to the bathroom outside when you lived in Pittsburgh? Never thought of changing cat behavior – a bed of grass/sod that you plant and keep on the deck might work. I guess cat litter out in the humidity is not the answer. Maybe she was just marking her territory!