I have something of an adorable problem on my hands.
Like millions of Americans, I have a cat. Like most of those cats, he's a sweet, fluffy creature, who spends most of the day and night napping in soft places around our home, grooming himself or watching the birds out the window. But every night, just before the break of dawn, his tiny crepuscular biological clock rouses him and sends him bounding around the apartment, intentionally batting items from heights in an attempt to rouse me from my slumber.
It is this tendency that has made staying hydrated at night a struggle.
I do my best to drink the recommended amount of water every day, and that includes gulping down H2O any time I rouse in the night, in order to avoid that horrible dry-mouth dehydrated feeling when I wake up. Rather than sojourn to the kitchen tap every time I get up, I prefer to keep a vessel of water by the bed on the nightstand.
You can probably see where this is going.
It only took a single instance years ago of being woken at 5 a.m. to the clattersplash of a plastic cup bouncing off the ground and spilling water all over the ground to realize that the old system was exceedingly vulnerable to feline fiendishness. The years since have been a low-grade struggle to find a water bottle or other vessel capable of keeping enough water for me throughout the night, but also resistant to those sorts of shenanigans that keep cats front and center on everyone's social media feeds.
And then...I discovered the Klean Kanteen TKWide with Twist Cap.
Unlike cups and glasses, obviously, it seals up tight, so even a drop to the floor —intentional or otherwise — won't send liquid everywhere. Unlike many Yetis and Nalgenes and other bottles where a twist-off lid is the only way to get water out, you won't find yourself struggling to summon the strength from glycine- and gamma-aminobutyric-acid-paralyzed muscles to open something you twisted shut when awake and fully powered. And unlike traditional water bottles with mouth pieces that are designed to use oral vacuum power to force water out —in other words, ones you suck on to drink — the TKWide's Twist Cap mouthpiece tucks away quickly, preventing cats from rubbing their faces and/or butts against it in the night.
It's not perfect, of course — nothing is. The sturdy steel straw inside the bottle that ensures you're pulling water from the bottom has an unfortunate habit of holding onto water for a couple seconds as you remove the cap, until you turn it sideways and disrupt the micro-vacuum holding the liquid in place and send a few drops of water flying onto your feet. (I've learned to dismantle it above the sink.)
Still, if you have a cat who's curious, precocious and likes to knock things over — in other words, if you have a cat — I highly recommend you pick one up. In a world filled with little things to make you worry, it scratches one little worry off your list — and sometimes, that's all a good product needs to do.
