Cat litter, blog mysteries, and whatever else I think of

I've not dealt with cat litter except for one spell when I was single and tried to bring an outdoor cat into my apartment.  She'd had a taste of freedom before I got her, so she let me know how bored she was by knocking over my two scrawny house plants repeatedly while I was at work.  I took her back to my parents in the country.  Then almost four years ago when I brought two kittens onto the property, I had a litter box in Cliff's shop for awhile when the kittens kept using the oil-dry in the pans under his tractor.

Because Blue was so young and tiny, I have been shutting him in our back porch at night to prevent foxes or coyotes getting him.  During the day, I block the outside door of the porch open and he spends most of his time outside, but he can still come in to eat if he gets hungry.  When he thinks he really wants to be inside, he goes around to the front door and starts trying to climb up the metal screen door, which has no screen (because other cats ruined the screen) but only glass.  He makes such a racket doing this, we can't help but hear it, and let him in.  We will not be letting him in when he's grown, unless I can get by with it in bitter cold weather; a cousin of mine in Iowa told me cats don't shed in winter if they are normally outside cats.  Of course, then there's the problem of fleas:  If I'm going to let him in, am I willing to buy the expensive stuff that repels fleas?

Back to the cat litter:  First of all, I winced at the price of the stuff.  Good grief, the prices are so high!  I finally just gritted my teeth and picked up a large box, as well as a tub for a little box.  Blue had no problem using it from the first, and by the third day, when he was inside with us, he'd even go to the inside door of the porch and meow for me to let him out if he needed to go; I go open the door for him, he runs to the box.  This amazes me.

It surprised us that the scented litter in the box made the back porch smell good, even after days of the cat's deposits therein.  I still don't know for sure how long you are supposed to wait to toss all the little deposits over the fence, and I have even less idea of when I should throw out the whole mess and start over.  It's so costly, I want to get as much use out of it as possible.

Yesterday I fixed Blue up with new litter and a cleaned-up box.  When he came in, he had a genuine litter-box party all by himself.  He must have danced around and played in it for half an hour before he finally deposited the biggest poop I ever saw him make.  Even after that, he'd come in from outside, and party again.  At this point, the new batch has been used enough that the partying has ceased.  If any of you, my readers, have cats in the house... is it normal for them to celebrate fresh litter?

Here's a thing that drives me crazy about my blog:  When I go to other folk's Google blogs, there is a way in the comments for me to reply to anybody else's comment directly.  For years, I've looked for a setting that would allow me to do this, because sometimes people ask me questions about an entry and I can't answer back to their comment.  The other day, while Cliff was inside the John Deere dealer's getting a tractor part, I stayed in the car and played on my phone.  I'd done a blog entry that morning and wanted to see if I had comments; there were a couple; I was amazed to see that on my phone, each comment had a place to reply to it!  I don't see this on my MacBook or the iPad, only on my Samsung phone.  I've tried using other browsers, but nothing lets me see that "reply" option.

So I guess I'll keep my phone handy.  As long as someone's comment only needs a brief reply, I'll answer them with my cell phone.  I hate trying to type on that phone, so there will be no lengthy replies.

Enjoy your day.  Yesterday was great here, not awfully hot, with a nice breeze going that managed to dry four loads of laundry.  Take that, Evergy!  (It used to be Kansas City Power and Light, but they sold to Evergy.)

I'm going to add one of my Sunday Singing videos to this entry, for the person who asked me to share another one on my blog.  Many of my blog readers are not facebook friends, so they don't see my videos unless I place one here.  I usually make these videos around 5 AM on Sunday morning, so I'm in my nightgown and house coat and probably didn't comb my hair.  

I'm just keeping it real, folks.