Dear Ferret Folks- What. Was. I. Thinking. I am 45 years old, that's halfway to 90. I'm just old enough to be reasonably confident of my judgment. I know that 10 years from now I will be a sharper knife in the great silverware drawer of life, and that 10 years beyond that I shall be sharper still. But right now? I have this (smug delusional) idea that I have at least laid a lot of the heavy stones that make up the foundation of genuine wisdom. So why, oh why, did I think that I could leave the half-empty bag of feline pine litter on the FLOOR after I cleaned the cage's litter pan this evening? On the floor. Opened. Unattended. Slumped wearily against the wall, the top gaping wide like the pitch-black entrance to a County Fair's "Haunted House Gondola Ride." Just hold on tight to your pastel puff of spun sugar on its paper cone, and climb aboard for the riiiide of your life...All the open top needed was a flashing string of colored lights to draw more attention to itself. There is a whole class of things that the Police call "attractive nuisances." Poorly fenced in farm animals. Abandoned buildings. Retired refrigerators left on the back porch without the doors being strapped firmly shut. This entire class of things are extremely dangerous, and suck the foolish or the unimaginitive in to their dooms. Attractive nusiance, indeed. You'd think that these things would simply be viewed as Spencer's (actually not Darwin's) "Survival of the Fittest." Climb into the field with the bull to go cow tipping? You get the genetic thumping you deserve. Especially when you try milking him first. I only exempt children from most Natural Selection in action. Adults? Pee in the gene pool at your own risk. Todd and Caff-Pow heard the irresistible siren song of the open bag of feline pine and found themselves completely powerless to turn away. Not that I think they resisted. I think that they were ENTIRELY willing to make the godawful mess that they made by knocking the glossy paper bag over on its side and digging. I don't think that they resisted any harder than Bernie Madoff resisted the urge to craft his wicked Ponzi scheme. Actually, I don't have much trouble imagining him digging in pet litter, used or otherwise if he thought that an ancient widower on a pension might have dropped a dime into it, but I digress. I have been told that I am somewhat critical by nature. No. I am simply a consultant. I should pass out business cards to that effect. Fortunately the 13.2 pound bag (I don't care what that is in kilometers or nanograms, I don't do metric--it rots your brain and makes you think that the Kennedys are watching you) was already half empty when this outrage occurred. Half full, half empty, whatever. You wanna get all existential about it, go do it somewhere else. *Quietly*. It was half empty for the purpose of this rant. Anyhoo...Where was I? Oh, yeah. The boys knocked the glossy, heavy paper bag on its side, and emptied most of the contents onto the hard wood floor beneath the computer table. A goodly amount of the litter fell into the little spaces between the wires and cables resting on the floor so clean up was *not,* as they say on TV, "a breeze." It was a labor intensive horror that was achieved with me bent almost double, trying to chase every little litterbit with a dustpan and whisk broom. It was sort of like planting and harvesting rice in flooded paddies without a water buffalo for company. In a word, it really sucked. Just thought you should know, Alexandra in MA [Posted in FML 6658]