Life on the Road

I’m all about good deals these days.  Ms. Frugal Shopper, that’s me.

But I’ve often noted that there are certain things that are just not a “good deal” to get, even if they are less expensive. 

Common examples are certain store brand and generic grocery items. 

Don’t get me wrong:  I love the Costco and BJ’s warehouse store brands - everything we’ve tried of theirs is great.  Trail mix made with real M&M’s Brand chocolates, marshmallows that everyone likes better than Jet Puffed, and on and on…

But Safeway brand graham crackers?  Yuck.  Generic ice cream?  Just not even in the same league…

Even those, however, pale in comparison to the two disasters we had recently with “bargain” pet products.

The first disaster was dry cat food.

Look, we have SIX cats.  They eat only kibble.  And they like it.  Period.

Typically we do get kitten chow for the babies, and a decent brand of food for the old ladies, since we realize that good nutrition is important for all of them, too.

One week, though, the budget was especially tight.  Wolf was driving the U-Haul truck back across the entire country from Arizona with all our earthly possessions - and using about twice as much gas as we’d budgeted for.  I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get him home, and then I discovered that the cats were completely out of food (and the person in charge of that situation hadn’t told me).

So I took what little cash was in my wallet, trekked over to the Family Dollar, and picked up a bag of the most generic cat food known to man.

I didn’t get the impression that they were eagerly gobbling it up, but it really wasn’t high on my list of concerns right then.

It was probably a couple of weeks later when I started worrying about Loki.  She wasn’t adjusting well to having the kittens around, and it seemed like she was avoiding the food, water, and perhaps even litter box, because she didn’t want to be there and have one of them jump on her tail.  She was getting thinner, and then she started sneezing…

I took her to the vet, who gave her subcutaneous fluids and drew blood to run a battery of tests.

The results were comforting on one front, and alarming on another.  “Is she better or worse than when you brought her in?” they asked first.  Not all the way “well” certainly, but definately improved from that low point.  That confirmed what the vet thought from the results - it was an allergic reaction to something, and she would get over it if the offensive substance was gone.

By then we had created a separate “old cat room” for the two senior ladies, with a magnet-locked cat door that only they can use.  They have a private litter box, fresh water, and - yes - premium “Senior Formula” cat food. 

“The offensive substance,” indeed.

I couldn’t move quickly enough to throw away the remaining generic food from the other food dish, and replace it with the good stuff.

It took several weeks for Loki to get back to herself, and we also found ourselves nursing two of our four kittens through the same awful sneezing, vomiting illness.

I almost killed half of our cats, just to save a buck…

The second generic debacle, as unlikely as it sounds, involved cat litter.

We use scoopable cat litter.  And with six cats, we use a lot of it!

It’s not cheap, although I do what I can with buying it at the warehouse store, buying the giant bucket size, and watching for sales.

One day we thought we’d check out the local feed store, and discovered an amazing thing - a 50 lb. sack of generic scoopable cat litter, for about the price I usually pay for the 20 lb. buckets!  WOW!

As such things happen, it worked into the litter box rotation gradually.  There was no “magic moment” to look back on and pinpoint.

About this time, we took all four of the kittens (who were six months old at this point) to the vet to get spayed/neutered.

Then we started noticing that someone was peeing… all over the place - but in weird places.  We had had some problems previously with one of the girls acting out by peeing, but (a) the vet had speculated that getting her fixed would, well, fix her, and (b) these incidents didn’t fit her pattern.

I was horrified when I found the culprit.  Charles, our darling and only boy kitty, strolled into the bathroom and squatted on the bath mat right in front of me!  Not marking or spraying, just peeing!

Discipline didn’t help.  We called the vet, but they didn’t have any helpful advice.  I was seriously agonizing over whether he would have to become an outdoor cat - which is not something I even believe in.

I fell back on some of the advice we’d gotten for our troublesome girl, and decided we should try a different litter.  Nick changed out one of the boxes for a fresh batch of (freshly purchased) our old “regular” scoopable littler in a big bucket.

*POOF*  No more pee anywhere else…

All that extra laundry, and stress, and grossness - trying to save a buck on cat litter.

The moral of the story is clear:  You have to know when to save that last penny, and know when to say when!