With five cats in the J Crew, this place gets haired up very easily so I kinda have to clean every day whether I want to or not, just to stay ahead of the furry apocalypse. In the process of cleaning the Bachelorette Pad yesterday (it’s a large wire crate with padding and cat beds on top, and a high-sided litter box inside. We refer to it as the Bachelorette Pad because the girls like to hang out there), I discovered to my dismay that one of the more … skilled felines has managed to pee over the 14 inch high edge of the litter box, spattering the bars of the crate and the floor and wall behind it).

As this is not the first time said skilled feline has managed this, I decided to take action. With a certain amount of effort I folded up the crate and dragged it outside to hose it down along with the crate tray, then located a piece of plexiglass that we’ll drill holes into and wire onto the back wall as a pee shield.

Then it was time to tackle the pee. To my increasing dismay, I discovered that the pee had run along the back of the cage and wicked into the base of a small wooden bookcase next to the Pad. This is one of two used bookcases that Ramón had picked up when he was in college, and I had always meant to refinish them when I had the chance. It seems that Fate intends that time to be now, so I unloaded the bookcase in order to move it into the garage, hit the affected area with Nature’s Miracle, then strip and refinish it.

(The floor? Eh, we want to replace the Pergo in there with hardwood anyway, so I’ll just Nature’s Miracle the crap out of it.)

In the process of moving the books, however, I found — well, I can’t really call it hidden treasure since it was out in clear view. Forgotten treasure, perhaps, in the form of a bunch of crime writer reference books (from back when I thought I would take a crack at writing mysteries and cop thrillers), plus a tome that is going to come in handy right now, Everyday Life in Regency and Victorian England. I bought this back in 2009 when I was working on Most Malicious Murder, and it was incredibly helpful in supplying accurate background details for Eddy and Charles’s adventure in 1850. Now that I need to do research on 1894 for Shadow of the Swan, this book is once again going to come in handy.

The moral of this story is, if you’re a writer you can Marie Kondo the rest of your house to your heart’s content, but don’t touch your library because you never know when a specific reference books is going to come in handy.