Question for the hive mind...

Okay. Here's the deal.

I have a friend who used to have a cat (probably brain damaged, as in, probably suffering from head trauma) who peed everywhere. That led to another cat adopting the behavior, too. They both died, and a while later, she got two new cats, and one is peeing in inappropriate places.

I own a house, now. I don't want a peeing cat in an apartment, either, but - I definitely don't want a peeing cat in my house. (Um. I hope no one goes too literal on me - obviously, I want my cats peeing - in the litter box!)

Here's what I've found on the 'net. Most peeing is due to either marking behavior (get your Tom fixed before he's a Tom), or unhappiness or poor health.

Could my friend's new peeing cat just be unhappy? Yeah... yeah, she could.

And I've personally never had a peeing cat, except Skitty, when she had a head tumor. She peed in her bed and against the walls. She couldn't make it to the litter box, I think.)

Does anyone know if there's anything I have to do (other than get happy cats and keep 'em healthy) to avoid having them possibly scent the old urine scents, and thinking "this is where cats pee"?

See, I'm a softie, and I'm horrified by the thought of having a peeing cat who I can't bear to get rid of (since it's hard to get a cat adopted with a known peeing problem - so I could be condemning a pet to an early death if I go to a shelter), and yet ends up doing costly damage to the floors to the point that I hate my kitty.

Does anyone have any information for me? Especially of the "Oh, I had an old cat that did some inappropriate peeing, but the next cat was just fine. They're not like dogs who feel they *must* mark where other dogs marked," variety? Or, of the "Yes, I had a peeing cat, but I did X, Y, and Z to clean up the scents and that fixed the problem" variety?

I can stop any time I want to....

So, I bought a Freshman Physics book. And I started working problems. And I was appalled.

I didn't have a scientific calculator! Well, there are Android apps for that - so, that's fixed.

Then I found how hard it is to sketch vector diagrams on lined paper. Wait - how did I not have large quantities of graph paper around? (Any old D&D enthusiast could ask the same question. I still have my polyhedral dice, though!) And I couldn't lay my hands on my scale! (Um - those triangle-cylindrical rulers that let you measure to different scales.) That's not *critical* - but a scale can really help one make a more accurate sketch. Technically, you could use a ruler, "this line is kinda like 3 times that one" but a scale just makes that easier.)

There - I now have them, and some extra mechanical pencils to boot.

But I did not get triangles, a compass, etc.. Yet. (Yes, yes, I also haven't had time to paint it or build it to scale....)

I'm done with vectors - trig is easy, after all.

(Ouch. I may have made some enemies with that - remember, I majored in math!)

I even figured out my problem on the one question that had the rounding error - one answer came out to something like 7.83 and the other came out to 7.858 - so, yes, rounding to 2 significant figures would introduce a difference in the answers of .1, which makes perfect sense - the actual difference was less than .03, so both answers were correct, within the margin of error.

Time to "move on". (Hah! Get it? Because the next section is *motion*! I'm *moving on*... okay, I guess I'm taking high school nerd too far now, aren't I?)

Seriously, this is good and therapeutic... I wish I'd taken physics after I started acing math classes, because I just barely remember it, and it was never quite as interesting as it seems to be when I'm following the math in my head.