My wife likes having a garden. She’s planted one bed and bought plants for the other. However, we’ve got a problem. Our cat, who’s as much an outside cat as an inside cat, has been using it as her personal lavatory.
My wife needed to go into town and I sent a list of things to get with her. Of course, she came back with entirely different things.
She bought some bamboo poles and bird netting. I told her I didn’t really think this was a great solution, however, you could see the appeal with it involving relatively minimal effort and being a somewhat simple setup. Nonetheless, it involved a great deal more effort than anticipated and a great deal of frustration on her part. She did manage to get the bamboo poles tied together and frustration (generally, she’s got a lot less patience for things not working than I do but she did manage to get it set up in the end). I helped her put the netting on and the cat promptly lifted the netting and went underneath it.
With her solution having stopped short of the intended outcome, it was my turn to step up to the plate. I thought the best approach would be to make a “cage” out of 1x2s and chicken wire. The idea being that it would be lightweight enough to easily lift while being easily sturdy enough to keep the cat out. Before I even really got started, I decided that due to the size of the “cage” I would have to upgrade some pieces to 2x4s to make it structurally sound. Unlike my wife, my frustrations weren’t with the construction itself but rather with the mosquitoes. Subsequently, my fairly recently purchased drill failed to actually get the screws in all the way and pull it tight. Furthermore, upgrading portions of the “cage” to 2x4s meant using longer screws, of which I didn’t have enough. As an added bonus, the 1x2s were just twisted enough that screwing them down flush would also cause them to split.
Ultimately, my solution also fell short, at least for the moment. On the upside, my wife and baby are gone for the weekend, for a bachelorette party of all things (somehow I think a one-year-old in need of diaper changes isn’t the kind of nude that’s usually featured at those).
Perhaps, I’ll have a chance to redeem myself.
