14 January 2011
Awesome Things: The SSSCat
Our cats aren’t allowed on the kitchen countertops. This is easy enough to enforce while in the kitchen, but is made more difficult when one wants to, say, use the bathroom, or sit down to eat.
We’re accustomed to immediately removing any and all tempting food items from the kitchen whenever we walk out of it, which is kind of a pain: the occasional bit of meat, obviously, and dairy products. Chips. Olives. The empty cast-iron skillet, coated only with a thin layer of seasoning oil. Loaves of bread cooling from the bread machine. You know, the typical staples of the voracious and wild suburban feline.
(Garth’s most recent coup was managing to drag a piece of fresh bread off the cutting board, which I only discovered while he was in the process of scuttling across the hallway with his newfound treasure, ears pinned back, tearing away desperately at one end of it with his little kitty canines. I feel like I shouldn’t have to guard pieces of bread from the feline masses, but it’s either that or fat cats with smelly farts and no food left for me. Sadly, I refuse to beat them at their own game and develop a taste for raw chicken food mush.)
Which is why, less than 15 minutes after seeing it online, I ordered a $22 can of compressed air equipped with a motion sensor, which is without a doubt one of my most satisfying purchases within recent memory:*
The SSSCat’s durability and longevity remain to be seen — I plan on modifying standard cans of compressed air for refills — but the pure joy of finding a cheapish tool that solves a very specific problem has already made it worthwhile (the Blender Defender being out of my price range). I guess you could call this an ideological recommendation more than anything else.
That said, I’m not ashamed to admit that when we set it up on the butcher block last night, there may have been some minor entrapment involved (in the form of stray lumps of Parmesan).
* I should note that all Awesome Things are posted without any kind of corporate sponsorship or suggestion. Which sounds like an ethical stance, but it’s a pretty easy one to maintain when you don’t get offers for swag in the first place.
My feline training tool of choice is aluminum foil … just remember to fold the sharp edges over so there’s no chance of injury. My cats hate both the reflective quality of it and the crinkly noise it makes when they step on it. Although the sound of a big blast of compressed air would be very satisfying to me, it would probably scare my fraidy cat under the bed for a month.
Tom would never jump on the counter because he’s too lazy. He expects, and receives, people food right off Susan’s plate. G & S are just being predators, in an urban way.