Some of you may remember my post a while back about Raven, our getting-elderly-pee machine.

The issue wasn't that Raven was going outside the litter box purposefully, the issue was it seemed to be such a struggle to get into the box, she'd hang half her ass off the side (because she'd only go as far as RIGHT at the front) and then pee. Without squatting. So of course, there she'd be IN the litter box, peeing...out of it.

We've mostly solved that issue with a random find at a local pet store. This experiement has been running since a few days after asking advice and I gotta say, it's been pretty kick ass.

This dog litter box.





Yes. Dog. I am so far behind the 'pet times,' I guess. I hadn't a clue that they were making dog litter boxes. The one we have as pictured above is roughly as deep on the back and sides as the largest cat litter box, but without the huge wall of plastic at the front for Raven to jump over.

In fact, I'm not sure if you can tell by the picture, but there's a little plastic piece that fits over the opening that can be removed too--forming a lip that's nearly flush with the floor. Maybe no higher than an inch or two. Essentially, any cat with joint problems or too old to jungle-gym all over the place just to go poop can waltz right in and go.

With the old litter box, I was cleaning up her pee on the mat (a little blue mat that picks up some of the litter from their paws) four or five times a day. Now, with the newer, lower doggy litter box I might catch her having an accident once a week. With the added bonus of the puppy training pads around the front, I have even less clean up than before.

This dog litter box was a large--apparently you can order much, much larger ones. This will set you back $30 dollars, but, for Shawn and I, that really wasn't much to ensure our ol' kitty comfort and ease. Flora took to it in seconds too. So that's one worry out of the way.

It's heavy duty plastic and really durable so far, even with all the scratching and clawing. It's surprisingly light and easy to pick up when empty and clean. I really, really, really recommend this instead of the usual cat litter boxes if you have room for it and don't mind the fact there's no cover for it.

In other pet news: Some of you may recall that I was trying to move Nugget from a mostly seed and some pellet diet, to an complete pellet diet. We figured out what was wrong with the first set of pellets: they came in three colors, two shapes. Red, green as little beads and yellow/beige as banana shaped as well as smelling like fruit. He would eat all the red and green and leave the banana. So when he ran out of the little round red and green pellets he'd behave as if he were starving to death, tweeting and chirping and chirping and tweeeeeeting--leaving the 'naner shaped ones. So we didn't get it at first, as his food bowl would still be pretty full.

Eventually, we caught on and changed him over to Zupreem pellets. These pellets are round only with pieces of real dried fruit mixed in. He eats all of them without issue and we haven't fed him any seeds at all for over a week and a half. I'm very relieved we figured things out, as we realized that seed diets were simply awful for birdies.

And that's it on the pet front!

For the tl;dr crowd: Cat's peeing less due to a doggy litter pan and the bird's now eating an all pellet & fruit diet. Mel's a crazy animal lady. Blahblahblah.

P.S RANDOMRANDOMRANDOM: MY CAMERA WASN'T DELIVERED FRIDAY SO IT MIGHT COME TODAY AND I'M STILL EXCITED OH LAWD.