I hate cats now.

I used to like cats a lot. I had a cat for the majority of my life and I have the fondest memories of a sweet ball of fluff sitting and purring on my lap while I watched TV when I was a kid. I always had nice cats and if I hadn't married into a family of allergy-prone members, I might have one now.

You see, my neighbors have cats. Two cats. Outdoor cats. As you might know cats are not respecters of property lines. They are next to impossible to train and there lies our problem:

Our neighbors two cats think our whole property is one big pooping ground.

As of yesterday I counted five separate "litter box" areas on our property. You might ask, "How do you KNOW it is your neighbor's cats who poop in the yard?" My answer is: There wasn't any cat poop on our property the first year we owned the house before the neighbors moved in with their outside cats. Add to that fact that each day when I would come home from work their cats were perched in our yard...in the flower beds. Also, I regularly see the cats in my backyard when I get up in the morning.

This isn't new news folks. When our neighbors first moved in the following spring we started to notice the cat urine and fecal smell near our front door. We found their cats were pooping in our flower box next to the front door. Then the cats started pooping near there, under the front window in the flower bed below. When we first discovered the problem, I cleaned out the flower box and I kid you not, I had an entire bag of cat poop. Those cats had been at it for a while.

So, I bought some special ground cover that is non-toxic, but it supposed to be of a consistency that the cats don't like. That worked for about a month. Then we started to find more places of cat poop. So we kept cleaning it out. You're actually supposed to remove the dirt in the area they cat pooped in before you put repellent down. Like, how am I going to do that? And where do I put the cat poop dirt? Some other place on our property? The garbage? COME ON.

Finally we had enough, I was pregnant and I couldn't clean it up, or even get near the flower beds to pull weeds because cat poop carries a VERY TOXIC virus that can easily kill or deform your baby in utero. You can't even breathe the vapors from cat poop- so we basically had to let large portions of the yard go, because Alan worked major overtime and I was pregnant. We don't have the money to hire gardeners.

So then some nice neighbor reported us to the city for a "ordinance violation" for noxious weed growth on our property. That was nice. I was so mad that I went outside and used the weed eater to take out the offending weeds when I was one week away from my due date. I made a HUGE amount of noise in my front yard so all my helpful neighbors could see how easy it was to work on the yard when I was as big as a whale. Funny, not one neighbor offered to help me. Again, it was a fabulous experience. But I digress...back to the poop saga.

Right after our baby was born, the cat poop got to a crazy proportion. It was in five different areas. It smelled to high heaven. I am sure that not even God likes that smell. So we took the baby up to the neighbor's house and had a short chat with them about the poop problem. They were great about it. They added a litter box in their garage (they didn't have one before) and also bought us some cat repellent for our property. So, we cleaned up the poop and added the repellent. We thought it was working until a few days ago when we found the masses of poop once more.

When I was working in my vegetable garden I could smell it everywhere. When I am at my front door, I can smell it. When I am in my front yard I can smell it.

I have had enough. No one's right to own and keep a pet should cause another person to spend this much money and time cleaning up THEIR PET'S POOP. What really eats me up is that I can't get pregnant again with this issue going on. Everytime I am in the garden at all, I can smell the poop and I know I am stirring up the dust when I pull weeds, rake leaves and plant new plants. I am breathing that dust, and sisters, it is BAD. You can see the poop dust, it's crazy. I am not making this up.

So I bought a kitty poop scoop and I put all the latest poop in a brown paper bag and I am going to give it to my neighbors today and tell them they have to start coming down and cleaning out my garden beds each week, buy us new dirt for the garden and THEY CAN PAY FOR THE CAT REPELLENT from now on.

I have had enough. Perhaps a few trips down to our house to clean up vast amounts of cat poop in 100 degree weather will be enough to convince them they don't need outdoor cats.

I just read that you're not advised to eat vegetables grown in a garden with cat poop.

Nice. Very nice. I HATE CATS.