Product Review: Healthy Pet ™ Cracked Pine Cat Litter

In my effort to reduce my garbage going to the landfill to near zero, I realized that I was going to have to do something about the cat litter waste that was comprising ~90% (and probably 99%, by weight) of my remaining garbage. A friend had found a local company, Green Dog Cleaning Company, with a pick-up service for composting cat litter. And so, the search for and transition to a biodegradable/compostable cat litter began.

Even before I found out about Green Dog Cleaning Company, I had tried to find an acceptable biodegradable cat litter. I never liked clumping litter due to the “tracking” mess (and with two cats, it can get bad if one isn’t sweeping up all the time), and the cats equally disliked pellets – both paper and pine – as demonstrated by their NOT USING the litter box (which then required even more of a clean-up than the clumping litter). Finally, I bought a bag of Healthy Pet ™ Cracked Pine litter. It smells nice, absorbs odor and urine well, and the cats don’t mind the texture. As with non-clumping clay litter, cat pooped gets scooped daily. The Green Dog litter pickup service provides a 2.5 or 5 gallon bucket, lined with a compostable liner, every week. The fee for me is about $5 per week, and it’s worth it to me to not send garbage to the landfill (with mined clay!). If I quit my garbage/recycling service, which I am close to doing, it will pay for itself.

Right now, in the greater Portland Oregon area the only store that I know of that carries the Cracked Pine Cat Litter is Fred Meyer. If there are others, let me know. The lack of availability at more stores and the plastic packaging are my only complaints.

There you have it, two recommendations in one: 1) Healthy Pet Cracked Pine Cat Litter (Healthy Pet also has other varieties, including a clumping litter, but they may be hard to find), and 2) Green Dog Cleaning Company (and they pickup/compost Dog waste as well).

Green Dog Cleaning Company in the News (The Oregonian)

Republican Friends and Alternate Scenarios

Apparently, all my friends and acquaintances in home-related businesses (realtors, inspectors, fix-it guys, etc.) are all Republicans. And now my Republican handy-man is including me on his email list passing along various right-wing rants. I decided some time ago that I wouldn't let this stuff go by me without applying some good old-fashioned critical judgment. So, below is the forwarded email from "JB" and my subsequent response. Please add your own scenario in the comments!

The $50 Lesson

I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up.

She said she wanted to be President of the United States .

Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there.

So I asked her, "If you were President, what would be the first thing you would do?"

She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.."

Her parents beamed.

"Wow...what a worthy goal," I told her.

"But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that.

You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my driveway, and I'll pay you $50.

Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house."

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?"

I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party."

...Her parents still aren't speaking to me.

Cindy’s response --

... Except that the story goes more like this:

There are two kids, a boy and a girl, each wanting to make $50 and give $25 to the homeless. The boy is offered yard work for $50; the little girl goes to ask her Dad: “Dad, I want to help the homeless, but I don’t want to do any hard work. What can I do?”

Fortunately, the girl’s father knows a thing or two about investing. He tells her: “I’ll let you buy a share of the rental units I own. For the $10 in your piggy bank, you’ll have a 2% stake in the ownership for this month. At the end of the month, you’ll get a 500% return on your investment.” At the end of the month, the little girl receives $50. Due to depreciation of the property (on paper only, the value of the property has continually increased), she owes $0 (0%) in taxes. Now that she has her hardly hard-earned $50, she decides the homeless person should get a job and spends the money on herself.

The little boy, however, agreed to do the yardwork. After pulling a couple of weeds, watching some movies on his iPhone, texting his friends and tweeting about how much yardwork sucks, he gets half of the lawn mowed and asks for his $50. Rather than face a lawsuit from the kids litigious parents, the homeowner gives the kid $50. The homeowner sighs and says to himself, “At least the homeless will get $25.”

Of course, the little boy’s income is EARNED income, so he must first pay taxes. Being self-employed income, he pays 12.5% to social security and 3% in medicare – Social Security and Medicare going to pay his Mom who hasn’t been able to work since her medical issues started, mainly due to not having the time to exercise and eat right during the time she was working and so is now on expensive medications. The other 15% goes to the maintenance of “infrastructure” of suburban sprawl (sewers, roads, stop lights, police to monitor stop lights, etc., which he’s not able to use since he’s too young to drive) and the creation of more sprawl -- all of which requires ever increasing amounts of oil, which requires strong military forces (because in the quantities that we need it, and the Middle East having the largest last reserves of Light Sweet Crude, it’s just easier to take it from where there is a bunch of it). So in the end, the little boy bitches about taking home only $35 of his “hard-earned” $50.

Then the little boy becomes enlightened. He gives $25 to the homeless, because they at least are not contributing to the rape and pillage of the planet, and takes his $10 to little girl to invest with her father – and he prays that they never change the tax codes that favor the rich!!