The First Chore ... of the Rest of My Life

One of the first things I discovered after I arrived last night is that Momo is missing. Again. Neither Mom nor Dad can remember when they saw him last, but I suspect it was Wednesday morning since Mom gave him his thyroid medication then. I called him several times last night and also this morning but got no response. The last time this happened he was gone for about a week.

I also noticed that Shiro was missing his collar. They couldn't remember when that had happened either. But it must have been a while because he has put on a bunch of weight, which is likely due to his having unfettered access to the multi-cat feeder.

And the Cat Genie wasn't working. It was beeping and the red light was flashing. I tried the easy fix of turning the power off then back on again; no luck. I checked the water, it was sort of on, so I opened it wider; still no luck. I made it a priority to get it working this morning. I cleaned the water sensor off and reinserted it; SUCCESS! It was running! Then I looked in the hopper and found this:


GROSS! I figured some of the carpet pieces plugged it up. So while the Cat Genie worked at scooping through the litter, I took a trowel and removed most of the material in the upper portions of the hopper ... and found Shiro's missing collar! It was the culprit!

Shiro's collar minus infrared tag

I washed it up, including a soak in the sani-solution, and began testing the tags. The infrared tag for the WonderBowl no longer works, the RFID tag for the Wireless Whiskers multi-cat feeder still works well. It was a good thing I decided to order extra tags for both!

I also started on the mail piled on the breakfast counter. Sorting and labeling was the easy part, getting Mom to actually do things was nearly impossible. When I handed her a pile to do something, she would reread the mail I had just read! I eventually got her to begin sorting through her papers. I will continue along this line for another couple of days. Wish me luck!