Things You Don’t Know You Need

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

When I did my fundraising in July, one of you sent me a litter robot. (The picture above is AI generated, because the box is under a cabinet in the bathroom and devilish to take a picture of.)

I don’t remember who sent it, so this is my thank you.

At the time I thought it was a strange gift, even knowing I’m cat-infested, and perhaps a little too expensive, so that I was cringing because I do that.

To clarify we used to have two litter robots. They’re very convenient, because they allow us to take vacations or whatever and let our friends cat sit without having to deal with the mess. They’re also very good for someone like me, who is ADD AF and sometimes simply forgets that cat boxes exists, because she’s writing a book. I can just empty them once a week, and we’re fine.

The problem is the litter robot — my husband calls it alternately death star and eye of sauron — on the right got weird, so I ended up having to smack it over and over again. And sometimes, even so, it would not work. Eventually I got tired and got a replacement, which, unfortunately, due to tight finances was a chineseum one. when we acquired the kittens, I got another Chineseum one to supplement.

They are okay, or so I thought till today. However, they need to be emptied twice a week, and for reasons I couldn’t figure out, there was a smell in the cat box bathroom.

Today I finally had the time to put the new litter robot in rotation. That means I took the Chineseum box apart to store, in case I needed it later.

And that’s when I found out it’s been throwing litter and poop into the places under the tub where I had to take it apart with a screwdriver to reach.

This means when I have the money I’ll get a second litter robot to replace the second Chineseum box.

But until then, I really, really, really want to thank the person who sent it, and whose name I unfortunately can’t remember. (I’ll have to search comments to find it.)

Sometimes we don’t know we need gifts, but we do.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

63 thoughts on “Things You Don’t Know You Need”

    1. Thank you. I took apart the other Chinesium on and it will do for another six months, when we should have recovered from wedding expenses (Yes, parents of the groom, but the demand to marry in Portugal is the fault of my family, so…) and be able to replace it.
      I’m so happy my house smells okay. THANK YOU.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Eeep! Yes. I’ll continue with the old fashioned one…

        Although not as bad as the $1,400 office chair that Amazon ads are trying to sell me. It’s just a plain old wheeled desk chair. Fabric cover, steel hardware, etc. Just as good a one runs a tenth that price. (I told $SPOUSE$ that if she wants to spend that much for a new chair for me, it had better have massage, leather cover, and gold thread accent running through it.)

        Liked by 1 person

        1. LOL. Most office furniture chairs are rated for a maximum of 200 pounds. Some good ones go to 250.

          I work out with weights. And I am over 6′. I kill chairs.

          My current employer deploys $1200 ergo-chairs. Nope. Not rated for me. After the third one broke, the “safety” guy and I discussed the concept of a “Bubba Chair”.

          Bless him, he found me a Bubba -Throne-. It’s ergo, huge and comfy, looks good, and rated to 400 pounds.

          Make sure you get a -good- chair if you are going to use it much.

          For the same reasons, never go cheap on a bed.

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            1. I spent $2500US on a Sealy cause it’s what my friends have in their guest room. Made my back hurt so bad I took it back. Paid the $300 return charge and upgraded to the $4000US “better” model. It is better and I occasionally have a good nights sleep, but it still isn’t the one in my friends’ bedroom (over ten years old and I sleep like a baby when I visit). Sometimes it’s not the money, it’s the bed. I hate to spend more money but I’d sure like to get consecutive nights good sleep.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. I got a very, very good extra-firm mattress from Original Mattress Factory.

                And if you want a soft top add on, I highly recommend the MyPillow toppers. Miz Kitty highly approved that one. Ditto their pillows.

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                1. We recently got a mattress from Midwest Mattress. Spent enough to make my Scottish wallet scream*, but it’s a really good mattress, we can replace it if it doesn’t work out, and they do adjustments without a fight, too.

                  * OK, my wallet doesn’t really have Velcro on it. It only metaphorically screams when I open it.

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          2. About 12 years ago, we went with a Select Comfort bed, both mattress and platform on our existing frame. Wonderful. Did have to add some foam to the inner top layer last year as things were wearing, but the store doesn’t carry all the replacement pieces for a mattress that old. (Got two twin bed pieces, and that works fine for a Cal King mattress.)

            I’m too close to 300 pounds, and when I was working at HP/Agilent, I had the monster chair. A couple decades after retirement, I pay for my own chairs, and found that some of the Staples chairs are almost good enough. The current one is 5.5 years old, and the weak point is the lifting cylinder. A couple of hose clamps let me keep it in place, and earlier this year, I swapped the original casters for some urethane ones from Amazon. Cost in 2019 was $170. As memory serves, the one it replaced was 20 years old.

            $SPOUSE is using a regular chair I got from the Flyover Hospice thrift store. It was in great shape, and for $29, I couldn’t pass it up. She likes it. (We try to avoid the Good Will quasi-monopoly. Have had the most luck with purchasing from the Hospice store; a lot come from estate donations, and amongst the china can be some useful items.)

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        2. Hon makes great office chairs: My employer has been a loyal and happy customer of theirs for over 30 years. I bought a less expensive model and have been just as happy.

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        3. Right. This is why I wasn’t buying litter robot. The previous batch we bought used and reconditioned, and it didn’t last long.
          We initially got the first batch of them BECAUSE we were traveling so much. (On average 2 weeks a month,) back when Dan had a traveling job and we often went with him.
          But I was looking for a cheaper option. OTOH this impacts our life every day. I shall save. Maybe use my bday money, if parents send me that. (Some years they do.)

          Liked by 1 person

  3. Something else you didn’t know you needed: terrible jokes. Are you ready for this? Yes, you in the back with your hand up — oh? You say you’re not ready? Well, tough, here comes the joke anyway.

    …

    Patrick MacDougal loved his job… most of the time. He worked at the Bank of Ireland, in the small-business loans department. He enjoyed giving loans to business owners wanting to expand their business: it was low risk for the bank as long as they had a sensible plan, and he got to help people build their dreams and provide for their families.

    What he didn’t like, sometimes, about the job was his boss. Oh, he was a good boss to work for, and he was friendly to just about everyone. The problem was, he was not just Australian, but VERY Australian. So his way of showing friendship was to cheerfully insult people. If you listened to him, he could sound like an awful racist: he’d call French people “frogs”, Germans “krauts”, and Brits “limeys”. But there was no malice in it; he’d cheerfully insult everybody equally, regardless of race or nationality. So Patrick put up with his name being shorted to “Paddy Mac”, and being called “mick” half the time instead of his name. Because his boss really was a nice guy, and did he ever know his stuff when it came to finances. Patrick had sometimes misjudged someone’s business plan, and loaned money to someone who went bankrupt and never repaid the bank’s money. His boss never had: if Patrick’s boss approved a loan, it always was repaid with interest. So even though several customers, misunderstanding his cheerful Aussie insults as being truly insulting, had complained, the bank would never let their best loan officer go.

    So today, Patrick was hoping that he wouldn’t need to call in his boss for this customer meeting. “Bonjour,” the customer had said. “My name is François Dupont and I have a glassblowing shop here in Dublin. I’m getting enough business that I want to add another storefront, and I need a loan to set that up.” He laid out his business plan, and showed Patrick some samples of what he sold: little glass figurines, the kind that tourists snapped up. (Patrick, who had just watched Guardians of the Galaxy a month before, thought that these were exactly the kind of thing that Yondu would like to lay out in a row on his console.) The business plan looked good, and the mall where he wanted to open a new storefront got a lot of tourist traffic so he expected the loan would be repaid. But he had a problem: the loan approval forms wanted to know what kind of product the business was selling, and he had no idea what to call these things. And François Dupont was no help: he knew the French name for them, but didn’t know the correct English word. Patrick winced: he was going to have to call in his boss to get help with this loan application, and he just hoped things would go well.

    “All right, Paddy Mac, what do you need?” his boss asked. Patrick explained that Monsieur Dupont had a good business plan, but that he needed to know what to write down on the loan application forms. What are these things called? His boss looked at the glass figurine in Patrick’s hand, looked at the loan application, thought for a second, and said:

    “It’s a knick-knack, Paddy Mac. Give the Frog a loan.”

    Liked by 1 person

      1. “Continue the operation. You may carp when ready.”

        “Commence primary fishin’!”

        OMMMMMMMINNNNNOUSSSSHUUUUUUUUUMMMMMM!

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    7. Thank you for all the kind replies, everyone. You’re all invited over to the fish fry, since I have enough to feed a couple dozen people now. :-)

      Behind-the-scenes details, in case anyone cares: I had previously heard the version of the joke that has an actual frog walking in to the bank, and thought it would be much better if “frog” was a nickname/epithet rather than a literal description. The rest of the wording, I came up with myself.

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      1. I was gonna say, I thought I might have had a vague memory of you telling the previous version of it around twenty years ago.

        “His old man’s a Rolling Stone.”

        My memory has gone weak on me.

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        1. Ooh! I don’t think I’d heard the “his old man’s a Rolling Stone” line before. Nice; I think I see how I can work that in, making the shaggy dog story even shaggier for even bigger groans when the punchline shows up. (Though I’ll be in danger of having someone remind me why a “punch” line is called that; I’d better make sure I’m out of fist range before delivering the line.)

          Checks Wikipedia…

          Oh, excellent! The real-life Rolling Stones lived in southern France for a while in the early 1970’s. So it’s entirely plausible that M. Dupont could have been conceived during that period. Yep, I can definitely work that line into my version of the story, making it even worse (which is to say, even better). Thanks for the idea!

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      2. I heard that one, too, a long time ago. Miss Paddywack was the loan officer in that one, as I recall. But yours is better.😆

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    9. Add the small detail that he’s good for the loan even without the collateral because Mick Jagger is his dad and you can finish with “his old man’s a Rolling Stone”.

      But only if you want. 😁

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      1. I can’t imagine anybody would need to be told that Mick Jagger is a Rolling Stone. Bill Wyman is the only other living band member from that period and, well, I had to look him up. So it’s reasonable that Paddy might ask, “Who is this Bill Wyman guy anyway?”

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    2. I worried about that for a bit when I got a couple of kittens, but I just made sure it only cycled manually until they were actually big enough to take care of themselves. One of the kittens kept wanting to take a ride in the darned things, so I’d have to scoop her out of the way when I cycled it.

      But I love, love, love my Litter Robot. 4 cats in the house and you’d never know it by the smell.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. yeah. that’s what I do. I turn them off until I can do it manually when they’re under 4 lbs.
        Indy is fascinated by it. He will put his paws on the step and his head in it while it cycles.
        If it doesn’t cycle properly, he presses the cycle button. For a while there he pressed a button at random and emptied it a couple of times by accident. I thought I’d have to teach him to read.

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  5. Joe Biden walked into a doctor’s office. Right away the doc spotted the frog sitting on top of his head, and said “Mister President, with all respect, I think you got the wrong door. The PSYchologist is one door further down the corridor. I’m a PROCTologist.”

    And the frog said “Yeah. *He* sent me *here.*”

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Jill made it official by running the recent Cabinet meeting. Joe sat quietly, doodling with crayons, and was rewarded with two scoops of vanilla.

      I wonder what insanity is going to issue forth from Jill 47…

      And Trump could Sun Tzu much trouble in his enemy’s camp with

      “Well, we had to change all my signage and hats to ’48’ now since Jill made her assumption of ’47’ official. …. Bet Kamala was pissed….”

      Liked by 1 person

    1. My big boy will fit, he just refuses to use it… I think he was too old and set in his ways when I first brought it home so just my little girl uses it.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. We need one with an open top. Otherwise at least 2 of the cats won’t use it. Yes, there is one. But it is not a Litter Robot.

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  11. Only one kitty in the Housthold, so I can get away with cleaning out the litter box every 2 or 3 days. And just manually, although I have a causeway about 1000 feet out that I dump the used clay on one side for water barrier.

    Daily is the word for multi-cat households; and I can see why people would want to automate it.

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    2. We have 5 cats, and 4 boxes. Get dumped/sorted every 3 or 4 days. Every Thursday, garbage day is Friday, then Sunday or Monday. Now if all the cats would actually bury what they leave, I’d be happier. I’ve posted this before:

      “SiftEase Litter Box Cleaner” – Pickup litter box, pour litter into sifter. Scrape bottom of box clean. Pour filtered out clumps back into box. Pour out filtered clumps into garbage bag. Take now clean litter and pour from SiftEase box, back into now cleaner litter box. Not automatic, but much cleaner than scooping.

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  13. I bought three model Three Litter Robots a year ago, added another one when the cats I’d been taking care of as their owner got run over by a minibus passed after three months. Great time and nose saver, empty them twice a week. I bought a spare globe for the times when someones tummy is upset and I don’t have time to clean one.

    I’ve also picked up a gravel sieve that fits in a five gallon bucket, if I need to clean a globe but don’t want to toss the litter yet, went from a pail of litter a week to about three weeks a pail.

    Liked by 1 person

  14. Not sure how Miz Kitty would react to such newfangled stuff. She doesn’t like enclosed litter boxes. She is also an Olympic litter kicker. And she scratches the daylights out of the pan.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. J-cat (Jase) likes to duck in, do his thing, then launch as if his booster stage just ignited. He’s also averse to burying his waste, so you know very quickly if the box needs tending. He’s not as much of an “earth-mover” as Athena was. She scattered litter the way sowers scattered seed.

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    2. “doesn’t like enclosed litter boxes.”

      ………

      I have two cats like that. I have to leave the lids off of kitty litter boxes (the kind that are 22″ tall with a lid, top entry. Otherwise the small dog thinks she hit the lottery, sigh.)

      Liked by 1 person

  15. yeah, mine scratches to cover, and did in the liner in 3 years, but Litter Robot has great support and I ordered a new liner the same time I ordered Sara’s box, and now I just have to find the time to disassemble it and replace the liner… Probably once it cools off enough here in Surprise, over fall break from school. It has as much space for the cat to go in and turn around as one of the ones with a removable cover on the top; my boy likes to stand outside with just his back half in the box… I can’t blame him for not wanting to smell his deposits!

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