Smelly cat, smelly cat ...

Kittens are such wonderful creatures. They purr, they pounce, they jump and tumble and snorgle and run around your ankles like an obstacle course.

And if you feed them cheese, they break some sort of record for the Worst Smell Ever, soiling their litterbox in the early hours of the morning so that when you get up to go to the bathroom, you walk into a cloud of stench so strong and pungent your eyes water and your stomach lurches up your throat and you find yourself scuttling backwards, desperately clawing at anything within reach behind you to get away.

And the smell lingers, and clings, so that - bladder firmly told to shut the fuck up - even when you run back to your non-stinky bedroom and hide under the covers, you can still smell it, like it's been rubbed along your upper lip.

Sigh.

It took me approximately ten mintues to open the litter box, secure the sides of the liner (thank gods I use liners!) and tie it off, heave it out of the box and into the trash can, tie that bag off, and toss the atrocity outside to be properly stashed in the can ten yards away in the morning. It usually only takes me a minute or so to do all that, but I had to hold my breath and squint my eyes, and when I needed to breathe I had to lurch away to the bathroom, close the door, exhale explosively, and take another big, deep breath of not-so-nasty air. When a smell is so bad it almost triggers vomitting several times in that ten minute period, one gets a little panicky. Panic is simply not good for holding a proper air supply in one's lungs, so I was scrambling to the bathroom every five seconds or so for a fresh breath.

This was at 2:00 in the morning.

After emptying the litter box and putting in a fresh liner and litter, I grabbed the can of Oust Air Freshener Spray and sprayed the hell out of the kitchen, dining room, bathroom and living room, having to go back and re-spray some places that just wouldn't give up the ghost. Then I had to grab the wind-tunnel-like floor fan and turn it on in the kitchen (pointing away from the bedroom, thank you very much) and let it run for a good fifteen minutes. This scared the hell out of the kittens, who hid at the far end of the room the whole time.

And even that was not enough. Hours later when I dragged myself exhausted from bed (that lingering smell kept creeping back into my nose and making me panicky and twitchy so that I couldn't sleep for a while) there were still a few pockets of smell lingering in odd corners here and there, despite having opened all the windows I could to air the place out. Only, now those stench-pockets were perfumed. I'm not sure which was worse: the original smell or the Oust-perfumed version of it.

I have never in my life smelled anything so bad. Remember that unfortunate co-worker I blogged about a year or two ago? She's still here, she still stinks (worse now than ever) and I would rather do a face-plant into one of the folds between her fat rolls on a hot day and sniiiiffffffff than smell cheese-tainted cat-shit ever again.

Yeah, it was that bad.

Once the trauma wears off, I will probably be morbidly impressed that a stench so amazingly awful could come from somthing so very small and unassuming. Or maybe that's just shock talking.


Note: THAT, Mom, is why I texted you at o'dark thirty to say I wouldn't be walking this morning ...