The Running for the Food

Elsa, the Queen of Food, will do anything for a morsel. She twists and turns on the floor, gets her big Disney Eyes going, and basically gets her stripper dance ramped up full on, all for a cat treat or a piece of whatever we are cooking.

And she got big.

Not because of the treats, mind you, but because I didn’t realize she was eating day and night at the left-out food bowl. All my cats before had been controlled grazers, like her brother Socks is, but Elsa apparently had to have food all the time.

We tried a couple of things to separate her food from Socks’ (since his eating was just fine), but she would always eat his food too. So it came upon the day that we stuck his bowl high up on the washing machine where he could jump but she couldn’t, and got her an automated feeder.

At first, I was a little worried that Socks would eat her food too, since it was on the ground. No issue. Since he had access to eating whenever, he could care less when the kibbles clanged into the pan at their arranged feeding time.

But oh, to Elsa, that sound was like liquid catnip calling.

Whatever she was doing, sleeping on the bed, looking out the window, or snuggling in my lap, whenever that clanging occurred, she bolted for her meal.

Until one morning.

My husband was in the bathroom and Elsa was playfully sticking her paws under the door. He bent down and grabbed them gently, and she just plopped to the tile, as if to scoff in disinterest.

Then the clanging was heard. Suddenly Elsa became interested.

She started tugging to be let go, but my husband held on. Elsa meowed, then got irritated and hissed through the door. She was so mad that food was not getting eaten. He finally let her go, and she ran/waddled off to complete her mission.

Have you ever wanted something so bad but an obstacle stood in your way? You saw what needed to be done but there was something holding you back?

I felt that way when I was working on my inventing. I was going to discover The Next Big Thing, and be whisked away from daily work. My obstacle was myself, and the forces of nature. I just couldn’t get anywhere, save for my Teazzed tea straw. Unlike Elsa who whisked away towards her reward, I packed up my notebook and went on to other endeavors: writing books and continuing teaching.

So in a sense I still prevailed. I still won a path that’s good to me, that lets me enjoy my hobbies and helping students. It just took a different route than what I had planned.

But who knows where I would have gotten if I hadn’t been flash-burned?

Stay the course, and if you need to pivot, choose a path that you can be happy with. Elsa gets fillets of food twice a day, but you may have something more extravagant in mind. Keep pursuing, dear readers.