I think Penny's almost got the hang of toilet training. I was getting frustrated but then I had an epiphany. Let me start a few weeks ago. I got started back into training her again because I ran across some websites that dealt with toilet training and had some new ideas that were essentially post criticism of what most of the books say. I thought, "Great, some new insights." The first thing they say is to use a pan or a bowl that fits into the toilet. This I did but I had to improvise on how to keep it from falling in to the toilet because it was only just wide enough to hang on the lip of the bowl. What I did: Strips of cardboard that overhang the toilet bowl between the bowl and toilet, held in place by the sheer weight of the toilet seat. Worked like a charm and the bowl hasn't fallen in the toilet at all. Then they say that, if the cat sits in the bowl instead of on the toilet seat, then you have to train them to put their feet up on the seat. Penny does not respond to this at all. You try to move her feet and she whines and jumps down. It is crucial to make her sit on the seat because the next thing you do is reduce the amount of litter in the bowl/pan until there's nothing left and (and this is where they differ from the books) eventually replace it with water before finally removing the bowl. You can't have the cat sitting in her own excrement at this stage and then tracking it all over the house. First time I did reduce the amount of litter she did just that. It was inevitable. And you also can't have the cat always expecting to have the bowl be there and then get confused when it's not there. So, anyway, I would subsequently try to be there when she used the bathroom so I could train her not to sit in the bowl, but I have failed every time this week even though I've been home. And any attempt at showing her how to sit on the toilet when she doesn't have to go has been a miserable failure. But then something occurred to me. It can't be pleasant for the cat to basically pee on herself and she's a lot more intelligent than I give her credit for. After all, every time she pees outside of the litter box she attempts to find some place where she can conceal it (a rug, the bath mat, anything that resembles dirt or the ground). She's astute and observant and almost ritualistic sometimes. She can figure it out on her own. She has to figure it out on her own to really do it right, incorporate it into her routine, so to speak. So I cleaned up the mess and then just continued to use less litter but not so much less that it made a mess whenever she went. After a few days, I'm not seeing foot prints in the litter after she's gone so I'm thinking, she must have figured out how to squat on the seat on her own. I didn't need to show her after all.
Now, hopefully this'll keep up. I keep watching these videos on youtube and seeing cats doing their duty in the bowl but then I see one or two where the cat slips and almost falls in (Watch
this one to the end). Penny is inherently clumsy in her middle age. Hopefully, it won't ever happen to her to the extent where she gets too terrified of the toilet to go back and starts to revert to more dirt-resembling places to relieve herself.
Anyway, how does this relate to my life at the moment? It's a lesson that can be applied elsewhere for certain. My general frustration is that I can't make things happen the way I want them to (even though we've been over this before it still lingers). With Technicolor, I hassled them a good bit before I just let it go and finally they called me. I can only assume that the rest of my endeavors may play out like this. As long as I'm doing my part in looking for opportunities and applying, I can't do much else. I need to let things unfold, as agonizing as that can be.
Only things is I find myself asking the question, "how much time do I devote to any given endeavor before moving on?" That's where I currently am. You can give so much energy but not see any results and then sit and wonder if it's time to move on, move on and then get a call from a job and have to either turn them down or give them the run around before taking the job. Ultimately, though regardless of what happens and when it happens, it's probably going to make sense which job to take, money being the big issue.
Anyway, in other random news, I got my hair buzzed really close. Decided to embrace the receding hairline and bald spot instead of persistently getting a haircut that just doesn't look good. Since there's no one around and the cat isn't so skilled at photography, this is the only time I will take a photo of myself in the bathroom mirror and post it online.
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