I’ve decided to make an effort to blog more about weird irrelevancies in an effort to uncover Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces lurking in my cupboard.

Awhile back I was trying to solve the riddle of the cat and the large plants. How does one keep your cat from widening the circle of what counts as a litter box? I’d been told about seashells and little cactuses, but for reasons now lost in time, perhaps the immediacy of it, I had decided on chicken wire. While not all that aesthetic, it is certainly effective.

I bought chicken wire and a tin snips to sculpt and shape. I made several cut-to-fit domes to surround the plant bases and this worked. Geodesic militarism dissuades more than the gentlest of pawing and harms neither cat nor plant.

Lately I’ve been undoing this solution as I gradually find room outside for the plants and I may do something different this fall when they come back in, perhaps even a mix of cacti and seashells. It’s hard to say what I’ll do as we’ll have a new house in another city before I have to make those decisions.

The best part of my temporary solution has been the purchase of the tin snips. I have trimmed the roses with it, modified a new lid for one of the fish tanks, and I continue to find myriad uses for this brute and excessive scissors. So in a Walden-esque move of magnifying the mundane I would like to use my blog on this fine day to sing a song of tin snips; may your toolbox nary be without one.