God, that sucked badly. That sucked canal water through a straw. It was one of the suckiest things I've ever had to do.

or what mudpuppie had to do. dur

I thought we were all going to commiserate with mudpuppie on how badly it sucked!

My garage needs cleaning desperately. It is a gnarled mess of bikes and toys, and some furniture I should have gotten rid of a long time ago. My recycle bin is out there but getting to it is a challenge. I make baskets with cans and plastic bottles, then pull up the garage from the outside to drag it out.

You sucked canal water through a straw? That's even worse.

My garage is messy. It has to be empty soon, so I can sell the house. Good: house under contract Bad: cleaning garage in August Worse: Cat Pee!!!

Girl, I see your garage and raise you one (or more! Yes, folks, there could be more!) dead rat. There's definitely one out there in the garage, and the garage must be cleaned, which might even mean encountering live ones, although I think by olfactory evidence alone that they are dead, most dead actually. So yeah, I'm right there with you and you deserve at the least a medal and most probably an immediate promotion in the third hell.

Thanks. I feel better!

My garage is not only a disaster but it's bigger than most houses (>2000 sq ft.). It has at least five roof leaks and we can't afford a roofer so I keep having to move stuff around to avoid the drips. It has 22 twelve pane windows that all need to be stripped and repainted. Inside, we have over a hundred boxes of books stacked in the dry area waiting for bookcases to be built in the house. There's also a (currently) non-running VW bug in the corner waiting for me to fix it.

I don't have a picture of it in its current state but here's a shot before we were stupid lucky enough to buy it.

Now THAT' a big litter box!

I agree. In fact, I bet it sucked as much as (or more than) cleaning cat poop out from under your bed, then pushing the bed back and realizing you've just smeared leftover poop all over the carpet.

(Cat Attract eventually solved Mint's litter box problems! Pet Pantry ordered a bag for me when I asked nicely. I'll miss that store when I move away.)

That sucked very badly.

I spent today hauling very heavy shit to the storage place, and hauling very heavy shit back from the various big-box stores I visited, and hauling very heavy shit to the dumpsters, and hauling very heavy shit up and down the stairs, and OMG it's WAY hotter than SF here, but there was no cat poop involved. (Or cat pee. I actually find cat pee entirely worse than cat poop.)

So I feel that I can properly empathize with your pain, and yet firmly declare that your day sucked worse than mine.

Ouch pup. That did suck. For me too. I'm going to add that to the list of annoyances I drink to this evening.

One time, working for a municipality, I had to spread some manure onto grassy median strips on busy city boulevards. Someone had dumped the load of manure into a gravel bin, but the boss said, hey not my prob, spread the manure anyway. Then the next two days we had to be on our hands and knees picking the gravel out of the manure as the traffic sped by.

That, my friends, is a bummer. Cleaning up after a god damned cat has to approach that level though.

Augh. I'm cleaning out the basement of the other side of the 1905 duplex I live in. It has basically not been cleaned since at LEAST when my parents bought it in the 1980s. Additionally, there is a major moisture problem and the relative humidity in there is over 80%.

I've been using heat lamps to dry the floor. I'm hoping that once it's clean (and tomorrow's predicted thunderstorm is an experiment) I can determine that storm runoff is not as big a cause as I thought it was.

The chimney no longer serves a furnace, so it hasn't been drying out with use. The bottom end of the bricks is soggy and crumbly. This is a common problem to watch for when you install a high-efficiency furnace (vented out the side, no soot, just some hydrocarbons). I put a flue cap on, and hope I've solved that issue.

The dryer vent may not have been used by a couple of the tenants, so that could be another cause. I have to get a proper vent across 12 feet of space to the laundry area.

Then the big one is the washing machine. I know that the drain was backing up and we had it roto-rooted. It may be that the laundry effluent is the major cause. I'm going to have to install a tub with a gravity-fed drain in hopes of solving that part of it all.

The whole thing just stinks of must and mold. Can't wait until I can Shopvac the place and apply some Oxirid.

Stilicho, you're making me kinda hot talking like that. ;)

Pupps, that totally sucked. Sucking even more is that there's the other half waiting - that's the real suckage. I'm trying to think how it could be worse...

Okay, not having done half already would be even worse. mgl's dead rat thing would def make it worse. If it weren't your cat, but just random cat pee and poop ... it would be worse. I don't mind picking up Sky's poopies (and I may be the only person in Greece to do this), but it would be an entirely different matter to walk down the street picking up random poop. S0, to re-cap, on the bright side:

• half done (this is also the unbright side)
• not dead rats
• not random poop

Do you feel better now? No? *goes back to drawing board*

taz, I think that might be a brilliantly all-purpose "It could be worse" list.