Why do events that you want to deal with immediately always seem to happen on a Friday? You can't do anything about them until Monday.  I suspect that it is really selective memory and the Zeigarnik Effect which proposes that one remembers uncompleted tasks longer and more vividly than completed ones.  But I don't feel very shrinky just now and I want to know what the heck is happening.

In the last post I stated that I didn't believe that paw prints on sealer was the whole story.  At this point, it appears that I was right, but I don't know exactly how right.  My attorney called me on Friday to set up an appointment to review some major paperwork for the sale of the house and to get some signatures.  "Oh?  Why?"  It now seems that the buyers want to purchase the house and take possession as soon as possible. 

"Oh my goodness, gracious me.  Whatever shall I do with all my belongings so quickly?"  (Yes, that is a paraphrase of what I actually said.)  I'll simply say that I've brought out Emergency Plans B and C for consideration.  If this happens as quickly as it seems it might, it will reduce my options to quick sales, storage for lots of "stuff" that I have no immediate use for (along with things that I may only possibly have a use for,) donations to charity, and trying to determine where The Boys and I will temporarily reside.  One alternative to rid myself of the furniture and other items that I know I won't use is to have "Uncle Epo," (or a similar auction house person,) cart off the larger things to sell at "no reserve" and send me a check.

There has been a bit of difficulty deciding whether I am ecstatically happy, traumatically confused, or living quite close to panic.  Over the weekend, it has felt like all three at the same time, with occasional moments of disorientation, inability to rationally concentrate or plan, and losing at solitaire when the plans don't look reasonable.

Weekend discoveries include finding that trucks may be rented from almost any of the local storage places for $50 per half-day, that storage space is ridiculously expensive but available (I suspect a direct correlation, there,) that I have very limited help in accomplishing this mission unless I rent several very large persons, that "stuff" I value highly is not necessarily of the same value to others (even family antiques,) probably not even worth the price to store, and that I realized how many cancellations of service, changes of address, and notifications will need to be made.

Oh well.  There's no pleasing me, is there?  Yeah, there's a psychological lesson here.  The pace and intensity of change, even if it is desired and beneficial change, produces approximately the same level of stress as does change in an undesirable direction.  I still believe I am lucky in this situation.  Unfortunately there are two kinds

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2007, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

"Life is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness." - Leon Trotsky

"I think I had a great idea once, but I forgot it.  Maybe I have it backed up on disk somewhere." - Doc

I preconsciously knew everything was going too well in the sale of this house.  I wanted to believe differently, so I momentarily lost contact with my usual cynical, grumpy worldview.  This transaction is a one-in-a-"insert a large number here" bit of serendipity that will turn into a win-win situation if we can hold our respective attorneys at bay.  To give a very simplified version of the tale, so far, it started when a clean well water feed pipe to an upstairs bathroom burst and the leakage caused significant cosmetic damage to carpeting, wallboard, paint, and the like. ~ Skip four paragraphs. ~ The general contractor who appraised what it would cost for him to repair the damage asked if I was interested in selling the house.  To his son.  I was and I am.  We talked, arrived at an "as is" price, other terms agreeable to both, and then involved my attorney.  He stated that it was the strangest sale he had ever handled but that it was legal and should work.

A four generation group of family members took a tour of the house - Two grandmothers, the contractor and his wife, the son and his wife, and three children.  The grannies were nodding, the son (a carpenter himself) was grinning, and the kids were playing with The Boys and asking why I had a tiny motorcycle in the living room.  (No, I didn't have a good answer for that.  My son had left it there.)  

A tentative time schedule was worked out.  I was willing to grant the contractor, his son, and/or any of their insured work crews access to the house to make repairs and improvements before it was officially appraised and sold.  This was agreed to so that the house would be more appealing and would appraise for a higher price, in turn increasing the likelihood that a better and lower rate mortgage could be obtained by the buyer.  It also worked to my advantage in giving me more time to deal with my "stuff," one way or another, and in not having to make repairs and improvements to the house which I could not afford and could not be certain would appeal to a prospective buyer.

After meeting with the contractor and my attorney, and finding that the deal was workable, I went into de-clutter, sell, give away, donate, and "I'll figure it out" mode.  I was convinced that this transaction, for once in my life, was going to work out relatively easily.  Silly me.  We had left out an important variable.  The buyer's attorney.  I had received paperwork which looked quite official and complete from my attorney last Friday.  I would have signed them on the spot.  I received a call from my attorney yesterday afternoon.  He said he had heard from the buyer's attorney and that there was a problem that would have to be worked out before the process could continue.  Reverting to my normal suspiciousness, I believe that this is a red-herring and that there are other, yet to be discovered ramifications, about which now I can only speculate.  I honestly hate to tell you how ridiculous the "problem" is.  The buyer's attorney is concerned that when the wood flooring is installed, the cats might walk on it before the sealer has dried.  Arrrggghh!!!

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2007, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

"For every human problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - Frank Lloyd Wright

Spaces Live Team; you guys have "improved" my space again without warning me in advance!  It isn't nice to do that to old people.  Changing their environmental maze upsets them.  They have a difficult time getting used to innovation and change, especially without an instruction book to ignore.  It took me over a year to figure out how to set a combination digital/analog watch, but that's another story.  Besides, the instructions were on an inch and a half wide, two foot long strip of paper and printed in a #2 type size.  I digress.  Old people do that, too. 

I doubt that the "Jay" who commented on my site's dreary appearance and on my "dreadful frog picture," (actually an Australian Cane Toad, the toxic Bufo Marinus) is the same person I spoke to at Microsoft, but if so, just never mind  about this post.  I love Spaces Live just as it is and would never criticize it.

A relatively recent appearance of Leonard was in the Sydney Morning Herald of 02-25-07.  The tree limbs on my background look more sinister.  Seeing them reappear was actually a relief, after the top of my space quit looking like a chocolate sundae.  With so much change occurring elsewhere in my life at present, this was a little too much to tolerate without a response.  It is also specially damaging to my psyche to have had this sort of experience on a Friday! 

One of my alleged superiors used to do stuff like this - pass out bad news or tell me he wanted to meet with me early on Monday morning, but not say why or about what.  He would do that on Friday afternoons, just as I was leaving work.  I think it was a combination of delusions of superiority and his belief that knowledge (however limited) was power.  He likely had little idea what he was going to say or how he planned to present it, but wanted to deliver it in the most "I know something (bad) that you don't know" way possible such that his underlings would suffer for an entire weekend.  This technique was especially effective over long, holiday weekends or scheduled vacations.  Why am I feeling like Dilbert now?  I suppose that's the way it goes with whiners' rants.

To make myself feel a little more competent and in control, I'll pass along a tip I found elsewhere (a TechNet forum, I think) about one process that can stall out your computer if you have the Spaces Live Toolbar installed.  If you look in your Task Manager and find the task "Search_Glow" running, shutting it off is the easiest way to set things aright.  There are several ways of accomplishing this, but the easiest and least risky is to simply disable the Live Toolbar temporarily.  Right click on any empty space in the toolbar area and a list of toolbars installed on your computer will appear.  Simply uncheck "Windows Live Toolbar" and Search_Glow ends.  You can then repeat the process and re-check Windows Live Toolbar to regain its functionality.

I apologize for my incoherence.  I'm not even up to writing a haiku at the moment.  That might require functional cognitive activity.

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2007, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

"Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it." - Source Unknown

I should probably have learned by now not to write haiku at all, let alone while I'm sleepy.  I haven't.

Change

Sodoku is solved

All degrees of freedom used

No room left for change

His Mistake

Did He screw it up?

Were we meant to live so long

With memories intact?

Techno-Oops

Of us, all is known

Oops, we lost your SSN

But caught you speeding

Writing

Do not write haiku

Very early in the morn

They make you seem nuts

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2007, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

"I can write poetry pretty-very easily.  However, I think poetry is boring and I never read it." - e8792m on youthink.com forum.

It seems that the more I work at getting rid of "stuff," the more "stuff" I find to get rid of.  I know it is going away.  I take garbage and recycling to the curb and it goes away.  People have taken some stuff to their homes already.  Perhaps I had it so neatly arranged that less stuff now takes up more space?  That is quite doubtful.  I know I move it around to place things in piles (or rooms) to be sold, to be donated, to be given to family or friends, to be stored, etc.  Maybe it just looks like I have more stuff?  Maybe it looks worse because I haven't seen so much of the stuff for so many years and am actually surprised at how much has been accumulated?  That's a definite possibility.  When I get things sorted into various piles it really does take up more space, even though it is better organized and there is less of it.  I think I'll stick with that one.  It casts me in a better light and makes me feel more hopeful. 

I have to have a believable story because Firstborn is coming over later this morning to assist me in knowing what belongs in what pile.  I'm sure we will disagree.  I'm just as sure that she will be right.  Oh, the trauma of it all!

Much is discarded

 Box of Gone slightly larger

Life is lighter now

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2007, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

"There are many things we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up." - Oscar Wilde

I'm not quite certain that "Another Reality" is the appropriate title for this, but I become unstuck in time and space as I sort and pitch the accumulated detritus acquired while living in this house.  It is my current reality.  Billy Pilgrim would understand.  As I clean up the piles of papers, old bills, magazines from 2002, greeting cards, membership cards and licenses, photographs, and all the other possessions accumulated over 15 or more years living here, I get some pretty strong mood shifts.  However "worthless" the vast majority of this clutter is, each bit seems to be somehow attached to a memory.  Some of the memories are happily recalled, many are fairly neutral, and some are just plain horrible. 

I wonder what possessed me to save a collection of newspaper cartoons, even though they were funny at the time.  Some 25 year old paperbacks have actual bookworm holes in them and I get a chuckle that at least they were of some use all these years.  Some of the discoveries are bitter-sweet like the bills from Christmas of 1998 when Annie was charging presents and decorations over the phone faster than I could return them to the stores from whence they came.  That year the foyer was literally so full of unreturned packages that one could hardly get from the front door into the rest of the house.  I understand most of her reasons and feelings behind the desire to give gifts and celebrate the season.  It still amazes me, however, that she was able to charge over $16,000 worth of Christmas-related merchandise on the $8,000 limit credit card that I briefly loaned her "to order a few small things."

There were remembered but unexpected surprises.  The $4,000 billing statement from the hospital ER for officially stating that my wife was dead.  I knew that before she left the house.  I refused to pay it.  Then there were also the cardiac needles, the unused ampoule of epinephrine, the disposable electrodes, the used latex gloves and such left by the EMT's, and the other debris that I picked up from the floor when I arrived home from the ER later.  Why would any sane person keep that sort of thing?  First, I don't believe that I was entirely sane at the time.  Second, it just felt wrong to simply throw it away.  So a few bits of it went into my ephemeral, yet very real "box of gone."  Memories, and objects related to them, from a past that one never completely abandons.  Sometimes I am prepared for them and consciously get them out to contemplate from a cardboard box or from their compartments in my memory.  At other times, they are not so neatly contained, sneak up from behind, and bite.  Hard.

This whole process is taking much longer to accomplish than it should, but I am beginning to see much larger patches of floor where stacks of paper, boxes, special issues of Time, books, and the like had once resided.  I think I am better able now to envision, on these clean spots of floor, a glimpse into my future.  Like the projection involved in trying to determine what a Rorschach ink blot "is," I am free to remember a much different future than where my previous thoughts about it had led me.  Besides, I took an actuarial test of "how long will you live?"  I answered truthfully.  It seemed to state that I'll live to be 84 or 85.  That's plenty of time to cause more trouble and enjoy life.

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2007, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut

Ok now this is cool you gotta try it.

Bring up notepad on your computer and type:

Bush hid the facts

now save the document to your desktop as 911truth.txt

Close the document and then reopen it from your desktop.

What do you see?

This Windows Easter Egg brought to you by www.911truth.org

I tried this, then wrote something totally different and could pull

it up, just as it was created~very interesting . . . .did it three times and came out the

same.  Hmm.

Peace, Doc

Initially I began writing haiku to help distill intrusive morbid ruminations into minimal, actionable sized bytes such that they didn't overwhelm me.  Now that I have published many of them, I find that they have another very positive aspect that I did not initially anticipate.

Haiku advantage

Nobody knows if I'm wrong

Poems too cryptic

Short attention span

Not a problem with haiku

Self-esteem retained

Peace, Doc

Copyright © 2007, Thomas A. Blood, Ph.D.

"Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will." - John Kenneth Galbraith