I decided to do a few posts about some of the random things in my house, or that I use, that I just love. This was the first thing that came to mind. I think that’s a pretty sad statement on my life.

*Disclaimer: This is my own opinion. There is an affiliate link below to Amazon, but this is by far the most favorite cat accessory in my house. One of our best purchases this year (top 3), hands down.

If you are a cat owner, unless you own outdoor cats, you have to deal with litter. I’ll be perfectly honest, I hate cat litter. I’ve never been good at keeping the littler box as clean as it should be either. Before my cat Sam died this spring, I had him pretty well trained to do most of his business outside. He was an indoor/outdoor cat, so it worked fairly well. I kept the litter box in a closet with sliding door. When I was going to be gone long periods of time, I’d open the door for him. But as a general rule, it stayed closed and he’d let me know if he wanted to go outside. Before that, I tried the potty training method. He did somewhat okay with the first couple of levels, but since it was the only bathroom in the house, it really wasn’t a good solution for me. I think if I had started him on it as a kitten, he would have figured it out pretty well. I have also tried a cheaper version of some of the automatic cleaning litter boxes, but it never really worked that great.

Once we got new cats after Sam’s passing, I had to start all over with the litter. We had decided that since the cats we got were somewhat young, we wanted them to be indoor only cats. That shot my plan of rarely dealing with the litter box. Soon after we got them, I came across this litter box on Amazon.com. It’s called the Omega Paw Roll’n Clean Litter Box (affiliate link). The concept is fairly simple. You roll the box up over on it’s top. There is a tray inside that traps the clumps and a filter that allows the unclumped litter to flow back into the base.

Before this starts sounding too much like an advertisement (it’s not at all, but I really do love this litter box), I’ll move along to the point. If you own a cat, you will seriously love this litter box. There is no scooping (unless you let it go to long and it gets stuck to the bottom). It’s really just a matter of less than 30 seconds to roll it, tilt it back to even the clean litter out, and pull the drawer out to throw away the clumps. Even my friend Sally, who has 5 cats, and is the super litter box cleaning expert, loved this box. We bought her one after her surgury so she didn’t have to spend so much time scooping litter during recovery. I wasn’t sure she’d like it because she’s skeptical of non-traditional littler boxes, but she was definitely sold on it.

At any rate, if you hate litter, I’d definitely try it out.

Here are some videos below showing how it works.

As mentioned in my previous post about spiral cut hot dogs, I recently held  a 1950s themed cookout as my birthday party. First off, yes, I still have birthday parties, despite turning 34 this year (2012). It’s a tradition. I think only once have I forgone having a birthday party of some sort. The reason for this is that it’s in the summer and growing up as a kid, it was a nice mid-way point between getting out of school and going back to school for me to see my friends, and everyone just to get together. As for adulthood, well, everyone likes parties in the summer and I frequently default to some sort of cookout or BBQ. Now that all that is out of the way, let’s get to the specifics of how we pulled this off.

The Idea

It’s seems that retro or throwback stuff is kind of popular right now. I think I’ve always liked old stuff regardless, but all the same, I have this Coca-Cola shirt that is faded to look much older than it is. As I was thinking about what to do this year for a party, I had decided I wanted to do something slightly different than the standard BBQ at my house; something a bit more creative. During all my thinking, I was changing out of my PJs and into street clothes. I grab my Coca-Cola shirt to wear and it just kind of came to me. I was going to do an old-school birthday party cookout.

The Details

Here is a list of things I eventually settled on that I wanted to do for this party:

• Cookout
• Glass bottled Coke
• Photo Strips (like in those Photo Booths)
• Milkshake Bar
• Drive-In Movie
• 1950s Music

The Food

The food was the easy part. Cookout food hasn’t changed too much since the 1950s, so we threw on some hamburgers and hot dogs.

We did put the spiral cut on the hot dogs, which may or may not be a new thing, I have no idea. It was just cool and everyone seemed to

like eating them. I did find some diner style ketchup and mustard bottles that looked like the ones here (minus the mayo).

I found glass bottle Coke at Costco. It’s actually Mexican Coke (make with real sugar versus canned Coke now with corn syrup), however I have seen US Coke for sell in smaller glass bottles. I like Mexican Coke better, so we went that route. I’m not sure if you can get it everywhere, but in California, it’s pretty popular. If you’ve not had the real sugar stuff recently (all Coke used to be made this way), I’d run out and find some if you enjoy Coke as much as I do.

For the rest of the food, we just did traditional sides: Potato Salad, Pasta Salad, Baked Beans, Chips, etc….

We also had plenty of desserts in the form of banana pudding, strawberry cake, and red, white and blue strawberries. Here is a recipe to make those. Those weren’t exactly 1950s, but my birthday is near the 4th of July, so it seemed fitting enough.

Milkshake Bar

This was relatively easy to set up as well. We bought a few containers of vanilla ice cream and jugs of milk, as well as chocolate syrup, malt mix, caramel syrup, strawberry syrup, bananas and strawberries. I wanted to find some old fashioned milkshake glasses but ran out of time and had to settle on plastic cups. We used our blender and two others and set it up on the bar in our kitchen, with the toppings nearby. We obviously left the milk and ice cream in the fridge and freezer.

Music

We hooked in the speakers to my computer and streamed Pandora’s 1950s Rock-n-Roll station. The music seemed to be a hit.

Photo Strips

This went over really well too. There is an app for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices called PocketBooth. It has 4 pictures of someone a few seconds apart like in a photobooth. They then give you 4 different filters you can apply to it. We used the black and white one. The app worked great. It think it was $0.99 for iPhone/iPad and $1.99 for Android. I bought it for my phone as well as our iPad.  The photo to the right is my husband, but that was a test photo and we weren’t using the black and white filter there, however, I highly recommend the app. You can also have it actually mail the photo strips to you or someone else for an added in-app cost.

Drive-In Movie*

Okay, it really wasn’t a “drive-in” movie. It was more like a “sit-in” movie, but it was outdoors. This is something that may be a bit harder to pull off for everyone. I am fortunate that I live where I work. That means I had access to our spare projector. I was also able to hang the projector screen on a wall outside by our patio. If you have a big enough TV, I imagine you could set it up outside and pull off something similar without having to have a projector or screen. For our movie, we choose Beach Blanket Bingo, a Frankie and Annette movie. I made my projector screen last summer with white black out cloth fabric. I put some grommets in it (metal holes for hanging) to hang it on the wall and secured it down with string attached to the bottom grommets and stakes in the ground. We hooked up my computer to the projector and the computer sound into the speakers we used for the music during the evening. Everyone pulled their chairs around, covered up with blankets (it’s rather cold in Monterey during the summer), and sat back for the movie. If we hadn’t had so much food already, popcorn would have been a nice treat for that. We had to wait until dark at about 8:30pm or so, but all in all, it worked out well.