Cricket was the most affectionate cat i had ever met. She really enjoyed cuddles, being held like a baby, and her most notable trait was licking my face, hand, or fingers non-stop while i held her. I had grown quite fond of cricket due to her cuddly and affectionate nature. However, i knew there were some things about her that may have contributed to her being dumped in the country as a tiny kitten. Cricket was the messiest strangest cat i had ever encountered. Her favorite activity in life was to chase microscopic pieces of litter and try to kill them dead. It looked, for all intensive purposes, as if she was taking a rather athletic bath in the litter box. She would part the litter a bit, then lay down, and start by rolling in the litter. She would stretch out and roll around in a circle as if she was tripping on psychedelic mushrooms. Her head would stay in the litter while her butt rotated around. Then the wild thrashing of the limbs would begin. All arms and legs would be straightened and thrust in a direction, initiating the flinging of the litter phase. Two seconds later the scene would descend into chaos as arms and legs blurred into a flurry of gray and white movement, litter flying in all directions and at impressive distances, as if someone had supplied a lawn sprinkler with a fire hose. When all of the litter was on the walls, ceiling, and floor she would lay in the empty litter pan and stick a paw out, batting at the granules as if unsure how all of them had escaped her grasp. This was her favorite thing to do with litter. Her second favorite activity was to stand in the litter pan and dig furiously as if she was tunneling to china, granules flying backwards from between her legs in high powered gray streams. There were so so many reasons she lived in an old dog crate and was not just loose in my house. The bathroom where she resides is now a continuous disaster zone of litter chaos. The third strange thing she likes to do with her litter is mummify toys. No matter whether it is a ball, feather toy, or miniature mouse, she will take the item and carry it to her water bowl. She will drop it in the water bowl and roll it around with her paw. She will then carry it over to the litter pan and drop it in. She uses her paws to cover it thoroughly in litter, places it on the floor of the crate, absolutely covered in gray granules, and then promptly tips the water dish to empty all the contents onto the litter covered toy and waits. When the granules have softened and become pliable she rolls the toy around, effectively creating paste. Once the toy is thoroughly coated in thick gray paste she sets it on her blanket to dry. She mummifies her toys…every single one of them. After her bacterial infection ive stopped giving her mice because i think the fake fur and cardboard innards hold moisture and bacteria much better than the plastic balls she attempts to mummify and im not trying to do her emergency vet scare twice, emotionally or financially. Finally, i will now detail the messy routine i must watch carefully to interrupt at every mealtime. If i do not hear her finish eating and grab the bowl before she can flip it, Cricket will save some of her food no matter how much or little you give her, flip it onto her blanket, carry the food bowl to the litter pan and dump it in, bury it, then pull all of her blankets into the litter pan and cover her bowl from view with them. She will prefer to place litter on top of the blankets but she has already purposed the litter to cover her poo from earlier. So, she will remove any visible poo she encounters and place it on the crate floor so that she has room to bury her food bowl and blankets. For anyone who is wondering why she is not loose in the house…that is why.
Though i know i dont want her free range in my house, i also realize its not fair to her to keep her somewhere she can never stretch her legs. Cricket needs somewhere to exercise; run, jump, climb, and play. She also needs some place to lounge in sunlight and get some vitamin d. I was up late one night and the answer came to me. I ordered a 4.5 ft by 4.5 ft cat enclosure from china. I already knew the instructions would be exclusively pictures from one angle only with no close-ups, elaboration, or labels. The extent of the verbal instructions would be one sentence per page and it would be very general and unhelpful, for example: “Assemble pieces.” I knew because i had ordered a free-standing pantry cabinet from this company years ago and this was the experience i had with the instructions. I had a similar experience with the greenhouse instructions…which i got from walmart, but they were also shipped from China. As far as i could tell, the current trend in China was a lot of little plastic pieces that were meant to fit together until they clicked, useless tiny mini hammers to push the plastic pieces together, parts labeled in the instruction packet with a letter but the bags they were packaged in having zero identifying letters or numbers to speak of, the reuse of letters so that one part was an upper case D while the next was a lower case d, pieces that were just a little too short, too long, too small, too big, or just clearly untested before bringing the idea to fruition, 3D pictures from one angle only with little to no written corresponding instruction, steps listed backwards, the presence of lots and lots of mini zip ties, and of course leftover pieces that couldnt be used in the project due to something being too small, too short, or too narrow after a good idea was not vetted before manufacturing and details crucial to construction were missed.
You get what you pay for. I ordered it from China because it was going to be about $1000 cheaper than constructing one with heavier duty equipment than zip ties and plastic pieces that i could find from the US. I needed the cheap one. Between the cat and my medical bills, we are still waiting on the last ambulance bill and we’ve spent enough money as it is. So i tried to hype myself up for another terribly frustrating brain puzzle. I was dreading assembly but it had to be done and i was going to be the one to do it.
When the box first arrived i struggled to get it out of the mail tub and drag it the 105 feet to the door. It was 66.14 lbs and the post man had dropped it into the tub. I couldnt get my hands under it to lift it out and holding it by the sides, it was just slipping through my fingers. Eventually, i did the easiest thing i could think to do and turned the tub over on its side, dumping it out. Then i just dragged it along the ground until i got it to the porch and rocked it up the steps and over the threshold into the house.
The first weekend that i had available to assemble the cat run, i had the flu and Cricket appeared to be dying. I was lying in bed thinking, i’ll just get unfeverish. Let the fever break and as soon as it does i’ll go out and start work on the cat run. I kept telling myself its only 9 am, noon, 1 pm, 3 pm…there’s still 2 more hours of daylight. When the fever finally did break it was dark and the cat appeared half dead and i thought, “welp, no sense in a cat run if the cat is dead, i’d better scrap plans to construct something and work on getting the cat alive and such.” The second weekend i had to work on the project i was massively massively depressed. The kind of depression where you lay in bed and stare at the wall from sun up to sun down and pretty much all function is beyond you. The third weekend i had to construct the cat run…my monthly was visiting and i was in the throes of mind numbing endometriosis pain. I had been watching these youtube videos about a guy who suffered a partial spinal cord injury after a 30 ft fall in a construction accident ten years ago and ended up with a rare condition called adhesive arachnoiditis. Its bad news, basically. It translates to constant pain for the rest of ones life. Its also progressive. He went on to get married, adopted her two children alongside his own, and had two more babies with his new wife. He continues to do construction projects by building framework on the floor with power tools and then lifting it into place from his wheelchair, then hoisting himself up a step ladder onto the platform and sitting with his legs on a pillow to use the nail gun to secure the framework into place. He does construction projects, cares for his two toddlers, grocery shops, drives the car, and rocks his children to sleep all while suffering pain that makes his face wrinkle up in a severe wince. I decided if he could do all that with adhesive arachnoiditis i could try to build a cat run with endometriosis. We both have pain relief measures that help some but dont really get the job done. I kept having to stop to cook a full starchy meal and eat it so i could take 8 advil and then once it cut down the endometriosis pain i would find i traded it for nausea and stomach ulcer pain so was it worth it? Yeah, but just barely. Bottom line, i did not feel well, but i was tired of things holding this project up and i wanted it built before the new year (tomorrow).
With this in mind, on Saturday i stopped procrastinating and picked a spot to construct it at 1 pm. The spot was too far away from the house for my comfort but i had to put it far enough away from the dog run that they wouldnt just constantly bark and dig every time Cricket was in it and i had to think about still being able to turn the car around in the field to face the other direction and go down the driveway. So the spot sort of chose itself. It was too far from the house and too close to the woods for my comfort but oh well. Nothing is perfect. She wont be in it unless im outside so i will be there to supervise. I picked a spot that will have minimal sun in the morning and minimal sun in the evening but shade throughout most of the day. This way Cricket will be able to sunbathe but she can get away from the sun if she’s too hot.
I opened the box and found the instructions. I was right. It was just like assembling the pantry had been. Deja vu.
I took all the pieces out of the box and organized them in groups in the driveway so i could see what i was working with.
The first step appeared to be assembling the floor. Once i got the pieces laid out on the ground i grabbed the plastic connectors and followed the images as best i could until i realized a step was skipped or the way a piece was facing was important to other connection pieces further on in the instruction packet and back tracked to fix the orientation of something and redo my work.
I worked from 1 pm to 5 pm on saturday. I would be forced to take a break by the absence of daylight and on sunday i would work from 9 am to 2 pm before the project was completed.
I moved the pieces inside for the night so raccoons couldnt take them. I also moved the car forwards so that if anyone else decided to crash through the gate they didnt immediately hit the car in the driveway. While attempting to move the car i realized the whole windshield was covered in cedar pollen. As i worked, the pieces of the cat run had become covered in pollen as well and while i attempted to water the plants it appeared as if flakes of snow were swirling in the air, illuminated by the head lamp‘s glow as i walked around. But it wasn’t snow. It was orange and it was everywhere.
I woke up at 3 am to take my morning meds. I couldnt get back to sleep, worried about the state of mankind, geopolitical issues, global warming, inflation, all the new rsv cases at work, finances, taxes, insurance, the internet installers, and the daunting task of deciphering the instructions for the cat run project. i decided to just stay up and rock the cat in the rocking chair. I grabbed Cricket and placed her against my chest. I rocked back and forth petting her until she fell asleep. Then i just rocked her and watched tv on my phone with the volume down until the sun came up. Then i got up and made breakfast. It was almost time to start again on the cat run project.
When i finally finished the project i couldnt wait to be done with it. I was going through the motions of filling it with things Cricket would need: blankets, a litter box, a water bowl…. I just wanted to hurry up and make it inhabitable so i could put her in it and say i was done. because i found the plastic hammer absolutely unequivocally useless but i was unclear whether a real hammer would break the plastic pieces, i ended up pushing each piece into place until it clicked with my bare hands. By the time the end was in sight i was so sore from pushing the plastic pieces together that it hurt to move.
The time finally came to get the cat and see if she liked her new present.
Cricket was very timid at first but as time went on she explored everything, climbed the walls, tried the cubbies out, tried the cat hammock out, and of course flicked cat litter everywhere. She chased moths, dragonflies, butterflies, and tumbling leaves. she seemed to be having a good time.
I suspect Cricket likes her new enclosure as she cried and squirmed like a monkey when i tried to take her back in the house for an hour. I rested for an hour and then put her back in the cat run while i jumped on the trampoline beside it and then did the evening chores outside. She appeared to be having a grand time climbing and jumping. She tried the cat hammock out multiple times.
So now we have a dog run, a chicken run, and a cat run. Cricket can go in it whenever im outside and she’ll have a sort of recess where she can be more active than she is in the dog crate in the house.