The Water Bowl

I feel bad for Christian. Every time he finds a new hidey-hole (and hidey holes are important to a cat's sense of safety and well-being) Shadow comes along and evicts him, moving in herself (and abandoning her old hidey-hole (his old hidey-hole) to do so). His most recent find was his cat carrier, which lives nestled in a corner between two bookcases, behind the third book case that's been in the middle of the floor since the roof began to leak last month, and beside the box of papers that I don't know what to do with, but can't throw out because they're valuable somehow. But the point is that he found a place to sit quietly, which was protected but enabled him to see out, and once again Shadow ousted him. As I said, I feel bad, and I don't know what to do.

So about twenty minutes ago, when Christian discovered that his carrier was unoccupied, he went over to it and crept inside. He was mostly in - only his tail was poking out - when Shadow discovered him and headed over there herself. I stepped out of the kitchen to observe, and as I did, my foot caught something. The location of the object, and its weight, and the sound it made when my foot hit it all meant that I knew what it was before I looked down - it was the cats' water bowl - the one by the kitchen.

I have caught and spilled this water bowl before - it's really not in the best of locations, from the not-catching-it-with-your-foot perspective. The cats have upset it, too, when racing around and horseplaying. There was even the memorable time when they knocked into it, sloshing some water out, and then I did the same when stooping to clean up what they had spilled, sloshing yet more water onto the wooden floor. But we have never yet managed to empty the entire bowl onto the floor, until I tonight.

And this is no small bowl, either, because I am paranoid about the cats running out of water. I picture the power going out, and with it the air conditioning, and my poor cats, tongues hanging out, finally collapsing of dehydration because I didn't leave enough water. This is a bowl designed for dogs, which holds a liter of water when full, as it approximately was twenty minutes ago until I caught it with my foot.

(If that bowl proves to be insufficient, there is another, equally large bowl of water over by their water fountain, which itself holds over a liter of water when full, but more on the fountain in another post.)

So, there I was, with a liter of water on my floor, which is rented and wooden, and no doubt greedily drinking in all of that water because it's also unfinished. Or maybe it has lost its finish through years of deferred maintenance, not to say neglect, on the part of my landlord. More on that in another post, too. Either way, it's not protected from water. And apart from the water that was soaking into the Stop & Shop ad ("do you know an employee who deserves an A+?") and that which had soaked my jeans up to the knee, all of that water was on the floor.

No big deal, but all I can think of while stripping my bathroom of its towel and cleaning up the mess was "ooh, what a great blog post." And, "how do I wrap this post up?"