and yet , in place of this life of asceticism , the outlander had seemingly retreated to the attic of the house and metamorphosed into a kind of household peta squirrelly and eccentric old creature who excreted in litter boxes that had to be cleaned out thrice each day and who seemed to possess , besides his warped sense of humor , a staggering repertoire of peculiar , yet compulsive habits that seemed to manifest themselves at inconvenient times ( for example , when he happily presented the visiting o-bousan-34 with a scale model of the temple that he had constructed from dead skin residue that hed painstakingly scraped from the bottom of his feet everyday for the preceding 5 years .