Anna’s Blog

Our litter box is sitting next to the toilet propped up on 3 phone books. One more, and we’ll be at the same height as the toilet. So far, the cats seem to be adapting just fine.
At first when I moved the box into the bathroom, Lugnut looked at me odd like, “where did you put it?”, but he soon figured out where it was.

I do have to say it is a little strange when you are using the facilities and you can look over to see your fury friend doing the same.

The Deadline
Months ago I started reading this novel about project management. I just now finished it. It follows an IT project manager through several projects and experiments that you wouldn’t have the time or resources to do in real life.

While some of the story is not very realistic, it does contain some useful project management advice.

Here are some of my big take-aways:

• Get the right people, match them to the right jobs, and keep them motivated
• By the time the battle begins, the manager’s work is already done
• There is no such thing as a short-term productivity fix
• Manage projects by managing their risks
• Projects cannot realistically hope to accommodate more than one method improvement over their duration.
• High-performing projects spend less time debugging and more time in design
• People under pressure don’t think any faster
• Early over staffing tends to force projects into shortcutting key design activities.
• A project needs to have both goals and estimates. They should be different

I love our cats, but I hate dealing with cat litter.
Currently we have 2 cat boxes. One in a master bathroom closet (upstairs) and one in our laundry room (downstairs). We did this because we’ve heard that in 2-story homes it is best to have a litter box on each floor so that it is convenient for the cats. If it not convenient, you run the risk of the cats not using a cat box at all and going wherever they feel like.

Anyway, I hate having a cat box in our laundry room. I wouldn’t mind it except that our laundry room is tiny. It is really only big enough for the washer and dryer. The cat box is always in the way. Since the laundry room is off our kitchen, the cats naturally drag cat litter into the kitchen. I have to sweep every day to keep up with them. I’d love to move the cat box out of the laundry room, but there really isn’t another place for it on the first floor.

This has led me to one alternative, which if it works would be amazing!
I’m going to try to toilet-train the cats.
I know this seems crazy, but I’ve been doing some research.
There are several website how-to’s and products which have been successful for others.

• Litter Kwitter Cat Toilet Training System (Product)
• CitiKitty (Product)
• How to Toilet-Train Your Cat (DIY)

The products claim that this is possible in about 8 weeks.
We are going to start without the kits though, and we’ll see how it goes. It sounds like things could go really well or really poorly depending on the personalities and temperaments of your cats. Depending on how things go, we may break down and buy one of the kits or we might have to stop altogether.

We start week 1 with moving the cat box next to the toilet. I did this on Sunday, and so far so good. Both cats have been using it fine.

Week by week, we will prop up the cat box until it is at the same level as the toilet. Then comes the hard part. We need to purchased the right-size bowl to sit in the top of the toilet. We’ll fill it with litter and then slowly decrease the amount of litter. Then, once they have learned to go in the bowl, we start adding water to the bowl. Once they are used to that, then we can remove the bowl altogether and viola — toilet-trained cats!

Wish us luck…I think we are going to need it!

On Monday, I saw the X-Files movie. I was super excited about it.

The movie was okay, but it wasn’t really what I was hoping it would be.
I wanted to see Mulder and Scully in their former glory. I wanted to see the great chemistry that they shared throughout the TV series. I wanted to see Mulder’s dry humor. And of course, a good story along the way helps.

Instead, I saw Mulder and Scully make out.
I truly believe that it was a mistake to allow these characters to get together. I realize that towards the end of the series, this was happening (or did happen, I don’t remember), however the chemistry is just not the same.
Also, the writing didn’t seem as good as it could have been. At the beginning of the movie, we see how Mulder and Scully are living separate lives. One of the subplots throughout the movie consists of Scully whining, “Mulder, this is not my life anymore”. While I understand what they are trying to do with this, they gave it way too much time that they could have been spending on other things. I found myself getting frustrated. I just wanted the characters to get over themselves and solve the case like they used to.

Perhaps my expectations were way off for this movie. Did anybody else see it?

1. While she is a project leader for a high-profile project, go behind her back and assign a different project to her only front-end developer. It’s best done if you don’t have the authority to assign projects to a release. Also, don’t tell her about it. Hopefully the project is under a deadline. With any luck, you will impact her time line by stealing her resource.
2. If you are working on the project, try to ignore your projects and work on “fun” stuff instead. In fact, let’s try to work on as many projects as possible. This way we don’t actually get anything done.