According to my email records, I ordered our NVR Miss litterbox only a month or two before I started blogging again at the end of 2014, such that I have never offered properly public recognition to this life-changing piece of cat-kit. Please allow me to rectify this now.

Our dear little Ada has always been a high peeër, preferring to relieve herself against a vertical surface rather than directly onto her litter. She felt happiest with a fully lidded litterbox, which let her fly her flag as high as she liked, but this meant that a little bit of pee would seep out of the seam between lid and pan every time she visited. As much as we would try to delay the inevitable by layering paper towels under the box, we’d still need to roll up our sleeves and clothespin our noses and clean up the acrid pool underneath the box fairly regularly. It was awful.

Eventually it occurred to me that a better way might exist. A bit of research led me to the NVR Miss, simply a molded plastic litter pan with very high walls and a U-shaped entry notch on one side. Despite its open-roofed plan, Ada took to it immediately, even though it took her a bit to figure out how it worked. (For a while she’d just back in over the notch, keeping her front paws outside while she did her thing. But hey, it still worked.)

I don’t agree with the product website’s boasting that the NVR Miss always keeps litter inside the box; in our house a scree of kicked-up and tracked-out litter always fans out from the box’s entrance, such that we pair the box with a little rug that we can shake out from time to time. However, we prefer living with this sort of mess entirely more than the previous one. As such, I recommend the NVR Miss strongly to any companion of a cat with elevated tastes in litterbox use.

A bit of tangential followup: according to my logs, one of this blog’s most common search-engine hits is my story of Ada’s worrying lethargy after a stressful vet visit. People find it through search terms like cat exhale sharply and cat acting strange after vet, and seeing these always makes my heart break and swell at the same time. I shared the post in the spirit of helping others, but I know that every search-phrase was typed by someone sick with worry, and I feel it every time.

I returned to the post more recently to add an executive summary for troubled cat-companions to the top, since the original post was more a personal story than a practical-advice article. I hope that it has helped people.