One of the worst tasks of being a cat owner is cleaning the litter box. I absolutely hate doing that. About a year ago Julie told me she had ordered a robot litter box. At first I thought she was crazy. A what? I looked on the website and my first impression was that this was never going to work. Our cats are going to run like hell when they see this thing. Another few hundred dollars wasted, and no one else was going to buy this thing from us because they’re not fools, unlike us.

Was I wrong. This thing rocks. How did we ever function without it. The cats go in, a few minutes later it starts cleaning the inside, all the bad bits get deposited in a small bag, and it’s done. At the end of the week you take out the bag, add a scoop of litter, and presto. Clean box. Honestly, if you hate cleaning the litter box as much as I do, get this thing.

Our new cat Ruby (the tabby one) has acclimated very fast. We were initially afraid our older cat wasn’t going to like sharing the house, but things have gone great. Once in a while Samba (the black one) will attack her, but she is very submissive so tussles end really quickly. They seem to tolerated each other really well. We’ve found out Ruby is a really good jumper, and loves to play with toys. She’s also a bit of a beggar, and tends to sneak up on counters at night and knock things over. But all in all, she’s a lovely cat!

Recently our cat that we had for 12 years died after a very short, and very unexpected sickbed. From one day to the next you lose a dear companion. In the few months after, we noticed a difference in behavior from our remaining cat. He became even more introverted, scared, and wouldnt play anymore. In our minds this was because he was a follower, he would always follow our other cat and do what he did.

For the last few weeks we’ve been looking for another cat, and this weekend we found her. We visited a local shelter a few times, and on our last visit we found a very sweet, very calm female cat. We were a bit afraid of the reaction of our other cat, but things went extremely well. It’s now been 4 days and they are already cuddling on the couch. Our cat also has been playing again, chasing toys around the house as he used to. It’s amazing how his personally has switched around again.

We’ve still not named her. We like geeky names, that can still pass as somewhat normal. Our previous cat was called Cisco, and our current cat is Samba. Julie had a cat named Pearl. So..if anyone can think of a cat name that’s both geeky, but still passable for normal, let us know!

(edit: we picked the name Ruby, which is a programming language)

We admit it, we’re geeks. We named our cat Cisco. We got him in 1994, and for 13 years he’s been the light of our life. This cat has an amazing personality and allowed us to stay in his kingdom. On july 7th we had to let him get peace, after a short sickbed. It was one of the hardest things we have done.

We’ll never forget some of his crazier moment. Like the time he managed to wrap a plastic bag around his tail and ran around the house being chased by a bag. Or the time he kept coming home with little dead chicks, and we had to sneak after him to find out someone several blocks over was feeding them to him because they were old and couldn’t separate our cat from theirs. Or when he used to make a god awful noise at night because he wanted to get out, and he would position himself just so all his howls would somehow harmonize and double in volume. Or the way he would curl up between us at night and would glare at us if one of us dared to move. The way we would say “EARTHQUAKE” to each other when he would jump off something upstairs and shake the house. Or the last time we cuddled with him before we had to bring him to the vet for his final trip.

We’ll remember all of it.