More cause for fuxing

You may have heard me mention the cats' treat tower in passing.  Here it is fully realized.  The idea is you put treats in the top and the cat is supposed to snag them through openings on the side, suppose being the operative word.  From the get go Simcha figured out that the opening at the top where the treats go in was perfect for putting his whole head into and grabbing mouthfuls of treats at a time.  The other two, even watching him, have not adopted this technique.  They each have their own set of rules they play by.  Gonif puts his paw in and snags one at a time, like you do, and Yankel lays on the floor by the tower and waits for the other two to drop a treat.  After two years he decided he could indeed get his own, but why bother.

I bring this up because Simcha has me trained regards this tower in the most Pavlovian of ways.  Regardless of how filled it is with treats, he bops it, threatening to dump it over.  That is my bell.  I rush to the place I keep the treats and put more treats in the tower before he topples it.  Well apparently I missed the first bell.  He toppled the tower, spilling treats all over the floor, eliciting a string of expletives from me.  He, unlike Gonif, is not bothered by a loud voice; in fact he gets downright defiant.  So I am cussing at the damn cat and cleaning up a different kind of cat mess and he is calmly waiting for more treats.

I mention this as yet another example of how I take anger at one thing, e.g. a puking cat, and blow up all out of proportion to the actual incident.  The anger is frustration at something else, but it comes out as anger towards the cats.  That is to say I haven't learned how to deal with repressed anger at say my parents, and it comes out as inappropriate anger to the cats.  That's my anger issues for you.

So there you go.