All In the Timing

Any time one moves into a new place, that person has to figure out quite a few things about the new place of living. Since I finished up my masters at school many years ago, I've been living in Royal Oak with my parents. In some capacity or another then, excluding time at school, I lived in the same house in Royal Oak for about 26 years. Because I spent so much time there, I pretty much had the system masterfully figured out. I remain intimately familiar with every creak, draft, hitch, and ding in that house. I took many things for granted about that home, and now I'm realizing even more things that require further education and training now that I no longer live there - things that I didn't even realize were important to me. Life is like one big learning experiment. Over the past week, I've realized that I really need to improve my timing.

What timing, you ask? Toilet timing.

Over the past several years, I've developed a very odd but perfectly understandable (to me) habit of trying to have the toilet complete its flushing process at the exact moment that I complete taking my leak. This requires me to carefully reach down and hit the flush lever when I still have about 5% of my internal liquids remaining. This may not immediately make any sense to you, but it's really all about efficiency and adding another sense of accomplishment to my day. When I complete this feat, it is strangely gratifying and makes me feel pretty good about myself just by performing a ridiculously common act. It's like when I was younger and would spend minutes on minutes with a stop watch trying to get the stop watch to stop at exactly "X.00" and training myself to make it happen as consistently as possible. Every once in awhile when I'm waiting in line or something, I'll whip out a time keeping device to see if I still got it. I do.

Now, though, I have to learn three new toilets and their respective timings, and this has thrown my success rate into chaos. Typically, I'm finding the flush completing before I'm completed, requiring an additional, very environmentally unfriendly flush, or following the whole "if it's yellow, let it mellow" approach. Both of these are terrible options, and years of training under one timing system is making it much harder to adjust than I originally anticipated. I'm still working on it (multiple times a day), but I have not yet found the optimal solution. These are the things you learn when you move somewhere new.

So, does anyone else do this or anything similar - or are you still waiting to discover the joys of bathroom efficiency? This is a no-judgment zone, unless you say something really crazy and then I and everyone I know will judge you harshly when I tell them what you do. That's a good way to encourage involvement, isn't it?