I had a stroke of brilliance today.
Let me explain. Last week, we suddenly found my 6 year old male orange tabby cat Kieran paralyzed in his hind quarters. NO IDEA what happened. He’s an indoor cat. Jury is still out on the cause. While he is recovering and able to walk pretty well now 5 days on…he’s having a bladder issue. More specifically, if we don’t express it for him, he dribbles all over the place. We confined him to the office, and have tried to clean up the mess…but we’re at work all day….
you get the idea. My office smells a bit…wonky.
Sigh.
I know he can’t help it.
Anyway. Dial back to December and we adopted GINGERBREAD the CRAZY SPICE PUG PUPPY. She is 9 months old. She is still working on house training. We’re making great strides. But when we first moved into this house in March, we were NOT doing well on the house training.
So.
My stroke of brilliance. I was eating my lunch at work, and I suddenly thought, “waitaminute….cat pee glows in black light. Dad owns a black light.” HOT DOG. Texted my dad…borrowed the black light. And tonight, once H was in bed, I pulled out that black light, turned off all the lights in the office (except Dave’s computer, where he was playing a game) ….and found the spots! Then I sprayed Zero Odor on those suckers and wiped them up!
My mom started using Zero Odor years ago, and got me into using it. Works GREAT for removing pet stains. I used it originally on a nasty shouldn’t-have-been-eating-beef-stew-out-of-the-can-in-the-garbage cat vomit spot in the livingroom. It was the only thing that removed that sucker. I was hooked.
So then after cleaning up the office, which now smells 110% BETTER, Dave commented that we should do this sometime in the locations where we suspected Ginger was peeing after we moved. Suspected…but never caught. And the carpet is a bit shaggy, so you can’t really tell if she pee’d unless you catch her.
Off I went…black light in hand. Moved a chair in the suspected spot. Shined the light. Sure enough, she’d been REALLY busy back there. EEEEW. I called Dave. He was grossed enough to get out the big carpet cleaner machine and run it in that area…after I Zero Odor’d it…at 10 pm at night. Yep, 10 pm and we’re cleaning carpets.
You know…that’s an annoying part of pet ownership. But tonight I feel like I won the battle. Maybe not the war…yet. But the battle.
And I feel so smart to remember that pet pee glows!
