Hopefully tomorrow will bring more sunshine, a better smelling apartment, and an almost-new cat. Sometime Friday (that's tomorrow, for those of us holed up in dormitories drinking/studying ourselves to death) W and I will make the loooooong trek to Gresham, OR to trade Dmitri for Vita.

Dmitri is the kitten-ish creature that we got in October. He is very pretty, considerably ill-tempered, declawed, and thoroughly anti-litterbox. Vita is about 4 years old, somewhat plain bordering on unattractive, fairly ill-tempered, clawed, and also iffy on the litterbox. So it's unclear what we stand to gain.

The reasons for the trade are as follows:

1. Dmitri isn't very nice.
This flies in the face of my cat-dream, in which I imagined (based on my previous lovely experiences with KittyGirl and Oscar) that I would have a quiet, unassuming, gentle cat who would sit on my lap sometimes, maybe sleep on the foot of the bed, and generally seem to enjoy (if only in a vague way) human company. Dmitri is not that cat. Dmitri more closely resembles a ferral squirrel. The kind that some irritating vegetarian nature-freak has fed. Nowadays Dmitri hangs around the parkinglot, showing up at our door only to eat and shit on the floor. Which brings me to my second point.

2. Dmitri Doesn't Like The Box.
His feelings on the subject of kitty litter go far beyond the general apathy shared by most cats. Dmitri actively hates his litterbox. He will do absolutely anything to avoid having to use it. And before any of you decides to lecture me on the necessity of cleaning the litterbox, let me make this clear: I DO THAT. Actually, W does it. But that's not the point. The point is that this is Dmitri's hangup, and it is not our fault.

3. We paid $90 to have the carpet professionally cleaned today.
This was more in response to a specific episode of Dmitri's bizarre "I've eaten something that I scraped off the parkinglot" diahrrea than his general incontinence. It was so disgusting, I could hardly believe it. And it left our previously brown carpet...a different shade of brown. In patches. All over. I had to bathe him after we discovred him lying in my favorite chair, coated in his own feces. I know that he must have been feeling pretty sick because he didn't hiss at me. I wanted to drown him. This is not a feeling that I've ever had about a cat (or any animal) before. Anyway, the carpet is clean again and I'll be damned if I let that little bastard wreak further havok. At least with Vita there's a chance that she'll use the box.

4. We're moving soon...
...and Dmitir is an almost entirely outside cat. This means that if he is kept in the house for more than a GODDAMN SECOND he howls and scratches people. Does he like to wander, you ask? Does he have a kitty girlfriend that he's dying to see? No. No. Dmitri pitches an enormous tantrum to get out--and then he lies down underneath my car. At any time of day, you'll find Dmitri hanging about somewhere in the parkinglot of our apartment complex. This is fine by me (if only he'd restrict all of his bowl movements to outside my living space). But the next apartment that we find will most likely be in an actual building, and thus Dmitri won't be able to just walk outside whenever he pleases. In that situation, I doubt that we could all live together without bloodshed.

5. Vita is much nicer.
W's mom's cat is, by all accounts, a fairly pleasant creature. She's even come to sit on my lap a few times. And what's more, everyone agrees that she was even nicer before W's mom got her horrible little yappy dogs. So perhaps Vita will benefit from the abundant only-cat love that will be lavished on her in our home. If she hurts my rats, though, she's gone. And I mean gone. As in, "has anyone seen Vita? She hasn't been home in a while." As in, da kitty sleeps wit da fishes. Inexplicable kindness/blindness to rats and other prey animals is Dmitri's one selling point.

6. A little torture.
Dmitri is terrified of W's mom's little yappy dogs. I'm sure he'll get over it. And I also feel that he deserves to be harried a little, for all the times that he was mean to me for no goddamn reason. Dmitri had every opportunity to be good, and he chose the side of darkness. Now he must reap what he has sown.

All in all, W and I are not happy with Dmitri and don't feel that he would be happy with us in whatever new apartment we get. Vita would probably be happier with more individual attention, and Dmitri would probably like to have his own yard to hang around in, yappy dogs or no. So hopefully this situation will be an improvement on the current state of things. We'll see. If it doesn't work out, then we'll trade back and try something else. Like drowning.