The sidequests for this week were to remove one thing from my space that is sabotaging my best life, to learn a card or magic trick, and to drink my favorite beverage.

Well! Is is cheating if I count something that I did last week for that first card? Probably, but the effects of the choice have been so great and I only tossed the items related to it in question this week. I’ll count it!

I changed back to pine pellet litter for the cats, which meant doing a new litter box set up entirely and having to throw away the old ones.

About 5’ish years ago I had changed to pine pellet litter and generally liked it, but had an issue with one of the cats always pooping right outside the litter box. It wasn’t hard to clean up, because the litter box was situated on a hard floor, so it was easy to pick up and wipe down and sanitize the area each time, but it was mildly annoying. “Maybe they don’t like that litter you use,” my dad insisted.

So I figured, okay, fine. I’ll try regular litter again, we’ll see how this works out.

I dislike the smell of regular cat litter, especially the more used it gets. I also have cats with very fluffy paws, so it tracks everywhere. I had to vacuum daily, only to see litter tracked across the floors several hours later. I would wake up to grit in my bed. Not only that, but one of the other cats disliked the feel of it getting wet close to her paws, so she started pissing over the side of the litter box, which was a whole new issue.

And whoever was pooping right outside the litter box was still doing it.

I didn’t immediately change back to wood litter, instead trying to stick out using the regular litter, especially because buying new litter boxes and setting everything up is a little bit of a time/financial investment. But finally last week I’d had enough, and switched back. The smell is a lot nicer, for one. Sometimes the wood litter gets tracked around the house, but there’s fewer pieces of it. So I only had to sweep during my weekly clean instead of vacuuming daily.

And someone is still pooping outside of the litter box, but I can wipe that down pretty easily.

I love it so much more. The setup is pretty decent too. I found a reddit post where someone had recommended years ago buying a restaurant drain bin with a bin that fits under it and gives a few inches of space leeway so you can push the dissolved wood litter through, and using a litterbox liner in the bottom bin to collect that.

So maybe it’s cheating because I did it before I pulled the card officially, but this really helps me with my best life.

Drinking a favorite beverage was a bit harder to decide. I really like a lot of things? So what do I declare my favorite? The blueberry Red Bull? The Dr. Pepper? The bottle of water? It seemed that I should treat myself to something special, but I realized that quite belatedly into the week, and instead of dropping by a local boba tea store, I ended up napping my last free day away.

But, I do have boba tea mix and tapioca pearls at home, so it’s simple enough to make.

I use the DeDe instant mixes for boba, and I kind of ignore the directions and use milk instead of water. The only downside is, it’s been so long since I made boba that I think my tapioca is expired. Alas! The tea itself was pretty good though.

And then there was learning a card or magic trick. This is hard in a completely different way in that tricks of these sort require dexterity and sleight of hand, which I lack. Still, there are apparently some card tricks that are more logic than sleight of hand, and a few of them can be found in this video.

The next question is will I actually retain this and ever use it?

The answer is no.

But! I did kind of learn about it.

….

I know, I cheat my way through a lot of these. Bwahahaha.