Animals

I picked a great week to stop using paper towels.

Tuesday morning, I woke up and went to the kitchen to feed the animals, who were meow-and-bark-nagging me the second my eyelids cracked open. After I took care of that, I realized I had an extra few minutes from being awakened early, so I started fixing my breakfast and lunch to take to work. I was merrily chopping along, laughing at how easy it was to forego the use of paper towels, when I realized I had to use the bathroom. But, since I was midway through getting my food ready and packed, I didn't want to stop while I was being so productive. So, I just held it. And held it. And held it, through crushing garlic for salad dressing and peeling cucumbers and bagging oatmeal. Finally I got everything in the lunchbox, so I uncrossed my legs and dashed to the bathroom, where a few feet away, I discovered my cat had barfed. A lot. And recently. I had planted my entire left foot right in the warm puddle and damn near brained myself slipping. Gross, but no time to dwell -- I hopped into the bathroom ready to burst, with my foot dripping effluvia and half-digested Royal Canin Urinary SO cat food the whole way. I stuck my foot in the tub and rinsed it off, and all at once pulled my foot out from under the tap, yanked down my pajama shorts, and leapt to sit on the toilet just barely in time. We're talking milliseconds to spare here.

And then I had to clean up the cat puke with a rag. Here is my dilemma with cleaning gross stuff with rags -- you have to then wash the rag. I don't want to do that in the sink -- there are often chunks and stuff, and if I'm disposing of gross chunky things, it's usually in the toilet, know what I mean? But I don't want to be rinsing things off in the toilet bowl, either. So I wound up knocking the big chunks off in the toilet and then rinsing the rest off in the sink. It was more work than just wadding up a bunch of paper towels and tossing it in the trash, plus I had to physically deal more with the barf itself.

See, y'all, there's a lot of thinking here. Not my strong suit. And ultimately it's why I eschewed cloth diapers in favor of disposables. I just didn't think I could handle the work. In the grand scheme of things it's not a ton of extra work -- when you break it down it's a literal minute more. But that's a minute I could be spending not holding a rag full of cat yack.