Tag Archives: water bowl

As The Bowl Turns

These are the days of our cats.

Chris has taken to lying down at the water bowl to drink.

For some reason, while he drinks, he also turns the mat that the bowl is on counterclockwise. It starts out looking like this.

The photo above was taken at 12:04 p.m. on January 7. The one below was taken at 1:59 p.m. on January 8.

The next photo was taken at 10:25 a.m. on January 9.

It did not quite make a full rotation but if I had come back at 12:04, I probably would have seen that Chris is rotating his bowl in precise 48 hour cycles. Now I don’t need a clock. I can just look at the position of his water bowl.

Chris’s New Bad Behaviors

16 Replies

As most of you know, we keep the cats out of our bedroom at night because Chris is far too annoying. Lately, Floki has been crying outside of our bedroom door every morning starting at around 4:15. Chris decided that what Floki was doing was not annoying us enough, so he took over. Now, every morning starting at 4 a.m. Chris is out there scratching on the door. He is relentless, too. Sunday morning I thought I could wait him out. I thought he would give up after fifteen minutes. Instead, fourty-five minutes later, I was the one who gave up.

I gave them all wet food and went back to bed. My wife asked, “Did you give them dry food, too?”

“No,” I said. “If I put dry food down, Chris won’t eat the wet food.”

“Maybe not,” she said, “but he will surely be back scratching on the door in five minutes.”

I don’t know how many minutes passed, but he was scratching on the door a short time later so I had to get up and put dry food in his bowls.

That day I went to Target and bought a child gate and put it so Chris could not get down the hallway to our bedroom door. It worked but I returned it today because my wife often gets up in the middle of the night and I feared she would trip over it in the dark.

The other bad thing he has started doing is dragging his water bowl across the floor, spilling its contents along the way.

The bowl belongs against the wall, left of the coo coo clock cables.

This one is a head scratcher. I had a tall bowl there before but he started tipping it over. Now that I have a shorter bowl, dragging it across the floor is his alternative. He has done this several times now, including ten minutes ago, which reminded me to write about it.

I am at a loss for what to do about both of these new issues.

Now it’s the Water Bowl

14 Replies

It’s not bad enough that Chris has to tip over his food bowls because he is too lazy to stand up and eat, now he started tipping over his water bowl.

The cats have three water bowls. The one that is used most often is a raised water bowl that is in the living room. There is also a bowl in the cat’s room and another bowl in our bedroom. Those are not raised bowls. Friday I noticed water in the living room next to the bowl. It was not tipped over but there was a significant amount of water on the floor. The next day Rose told me that Chris had tipped the water bowl over twice.

I decided to put the tall bowl in the cat’s room and put the regular bowl in the living room. I thought this might solve the problem. Not long after I did that, I saw Chris walk over to the water bowl, lie down, and start drinking while lying down.

A little while later I saw what he did with the raised bowl in the cat’s room.

The raised bowl is now out of service.

Neater Scooper and Feeder

12 Replies

My wife likes to shop. I’m sure those are five words that have never been said in that order before. But she does like to shop, both in-store and online, and it is often other people that she likes to shop for. Not only that, she likes to spread the joy of shopping to other people in much the same way a pot dealer promotes the joy of cannabis.

I resist shopping. Rose is always trying to get me to buy clothes or shoes or whatever but I resist being drawn to the dark side. With no other recourse, she sometimes buys me stuff . . . for my own good.

Recently a box arrived in the mail. It was from a company called Neater Pet Brands.
In the box was a Neater Scooper and a Neater Feeder for cats. Since I do almost all of the poop scooping and I feed the cats as well as maintain their water bowls, Rose thought these products would make my life easier.

I linked to the company’s website but I am fairly certain she bought them from a third party because she said that the feeder was free with the purchase of the scooper and bags. I don’t know what she paid (probably separate shipping and handling) but I doubt anything was free.

The scooper has a bag that attaches to it and a one-way opening to allow the waste to drop into the bag.

I found it to be too bulky for my taste and I kept dumping too much litter into the bag. I’m sure with practice I would get used to how it works but even if I was comfortable with it I still felt like the effort to put the bag on and then take it off again was more trouble than it was worth. I have no problem with holding a scoop in one hand and a bag in the other so I think this is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

We ended up throwing the scooper and the bags in the trash but then I pulled them out and I plan on asking my neighbor if she wants them when I see her.

The other thing that came, the feeder, is more useful.

We already have an elevated feeder so I decided to use this one for water since it catches and contains any water that spills over the edge. Some of our cats, like Floki, lick the edge of the water bowl causing water to spill over the edge and get on the floor, which means we have to put a paper towel under the bowl.

I think it is designed to have food on one side and water on the other but I like to keep the water away from the food, at least somewhat. I do this because I used to have one or two cats that would put food in the water bowl but I also read that cats don’t like drinking water that is close to food. I have not found that to be an issue but maybe it matters even a little bit to them.

All in all, I think the feeder is good but the scooper is not so good. What do you think? Would you like to try the scooper?

Bad Cat Chris

The Baddest Cat You'll Ever Love