Llorona has disovered the seemingly unending joy of the toilet paper dispenser.

Is nothing sacred?

I tell you.. I just don’t know how some companies stay in business.

My floors are covered in tiny white particulate from Llorona’s litter box.  Snow flurries have hit my stairs.  My bedding is more gritty than normal.  Worse, I found cat litter in my hair!  This is ridiculous.  Is this how the litter box mat market it driven?

It promised me super-freshness thanks to baking soda. Ha! The ammonia odor actually wafts downstairs and lingers near my front door. I don’t even remember the name of kitty litter to warn you away from it. It’s in the garbage. I braved intense winds to get a bag of Tidy Cat from Soriana.

Lemme tellya about Tidy Cat. Tidy Cat comes in an ugly, yellow bag and the litter is ugly and grey. The previous litter was a white, with small blue flecks here and here which blended in nicely with the bathroom. I’ve always preferred function over form and experience no shame when I tell you that I love my ugly kitty litter.

Tidy Cat never leaves the area around the litter box because it’s more chunky and doesn’t get trapped between paws or in cat hair. I don’t smell a thing with Tidy Cat. Urine doesn’t really clump with Tidy Cat, so this stuff is just absorbing cat piss while maintaining an unnoticeable odor. That’s impressive. And this urine-absorbing power also lends itself to less frequent litter changes. What’s more, a big bag of Tidy Cat was the same price as a little bag of the nicely packaged litter from Hell.

I know a number of my gentle readers are cat-owners. Are there any bits of wisdom you could share with me?

I didn’t take a nap all week.  And I’ve learned that for around 50 cents, I can get something like 25 fresh tortillas – still warm.  They’re preservative free and turn in to frisbees after a day and a half, but what a deal!

Stuff with Heri is going wonderfully.  He just got a new job a 5 minute walk away, but our schedules clash.  I work at the beginning and end of everyone’s work day.

I’ve been having a tremendous amount of fun geeking around with Asterisk at Home, an open-source PBX distribution.  I’ve always wanted my own endless “press 1 for sales” menu system.  There’s some guy who is writing a module to let people play Zork (does anyone else remember that?) while waiting on hold… or whenever.  Would you rather choose your own adventure while on hold?

Seriously, though, this thing is great.  We’ve now got multiple phone lines for FND, penny a minute long distance, music-on-hold, blinky voice mail lights, and the ability to receive faxes, program wake up calls, dial-in conference calling… I can press # for a company directory and finally, I have the twisted pleasure of dialing 9 to reach an outside line.

The sad thing is that other than a spiffy menu system and recorded information, it’s all kind of working and there’s not much else to do except sit here and listen to the whir of the fan on the computer.  We’re having some minor trouble getting Frank’s phone to connect, but I think that’ll soon be fixed once we adjust a couple of settings on his router.

I pity the poor bastards who pay thousands dollars for a phone system and generally over $100 an hour to have some guy come out to add an extension.  Asterisk@Home comes with web interfaces to do just about everything.   The only cost is a computer to run it own and a phone to connect it to.  Frank and I took the cheap route and are using Gizmo as our VOIP provider and have free phone numbers based in Bellevue/Redmond Washington.  Incoming calls are free and we pay, as I said before, a penny a minute to US land lines.  We chose the Grandstream GXP-2000 phone which is sexy, feature-rich, and costs around $80.

Cheap and robust… just like me.