Where I Start Cleaning My Desk

There have been times in my life when I felt sort of rudderless, that one day followed the next and the only thing to mark time passing were holidays that popped up and surprised me because I was totally unprepared for them. It always feels to me as if I am living in a fog during those periods of time. I get up, I go to work, I come home, I watch television or I read, go to bed and do the same thing the next day. Looking at my life in those terms I would say it was totally boring. I can’t blame anybody but myself.

So, I just need to get out of this rut. For me I know the best way to do that is to make way, clear the way, clean up my area. I actually started doing that the other day when I threw away some really old and expired toiletry items that had been taking up space on the bathroom counter. It’s not totally cleaned up, but it sure looks a bit better. There’s more room for the cats to sit.

It was a start.

Next is my desk. In front of me the clutter has to be 6 or 7 layers deep. As the cats leap from scanner to printer to my desk and back again I fear each time they will skid and the entire thing will go swooshing off onto the floor taking my cup of coffee with it. Bad dream.

I know it really won’t take much. All it took in the bathroom was throwing away a few things. All it’s going to take here is the same thing.

Okay, I can play “I spy” as I sit here. I spy a lottery ticket. Let’s have a look at the date: eeee December 19, 2007. I believe I didn’t win. I can throw that away. The winning numbers were: 8, 18, 27, 41, 44 and the mega number was 18.

Next: 2 pieces of paper dealing with me faxing a test fax to our new fax machine. I still don’t have it working perfectly, but I can throw those away. By the way, it’s http://www.faxzero.com/ if you want to send a fax for free to somebody. You can do two a day. The first one usually doesn’t work, the second one does, so figure on one free fax a day.

A recipe for Rocky Road Brownies from my co-worker that is absolutely fabulous:

Rocky Road Brownies

1 – 12 oz pkg semi sweet chocolate morsels
1 ¼ cups sugar
4 eggs
¾ cup
plus 2 TBS flour
½ tsp salt
1 ½ tsp vanilla
1 ½ cups chopped walnuts (I used 1 ¾)
3 cups miniature marshmallows (Says 2 ½ but 1 cup on top covers more)
2 sticks butter

Large microwave safe bowl. Put butter and 1 cup of chocolate chips. Melt.

Add sugar and stir and let it cool. Add vanilla and beaten eggs and stir together. Sift
in flour and salt and mix together. Add ½ cup of chocolate chips, 1 cup of chopped walnuts and two cups marshmallows. Mix together

Put into a greased and floured 13 x 9 inch pan. Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit
for 22 minutes (less than 25 min). Take out and sprinkle the remaining chips and nuts and one cup of marshmallows over the top. Press gently into the brownies. Put back into the oven for an additional 5 minutes. Cool.

So, that written here for posterity I can put the recipe away. I’d already lost it once, so now my behind is covered in case I lose it again.

Enough cleaning up. I need to get ready to go to work. More later on.

A Nice Day Off

I'm flailing around this morning trying to come up with 3 articles for next month's newsletter at Talking to Spirit. And, I'm not getting very far, so I figured I'd pop in here for a couple of minutes to yak.

I've got the day off. Heaven. Don't really have any super-duper plans of things to do, though we might visit the Oakland Museum. I've never been there, DeeDude is a member and has 3 guest passes, so that might be interesting. Or, it occurred to me that maybe I could talk him into going to San Jose to the Winchester Mystery House. All the years we've been here I haven't been there either. Or, we'd sort of made tentative plans to visit a new Indian restaurant near where I work and at the same time visiting the new Trader Joes that's just opened up. So, it's all up in the air....in the meantime I'm diving back into the article writing with the hopes that I can come up with something a little interesting.

Oh sit and shit. What? Sit and shit. As opposed to standing on the toilet seat? Am I channeling? I don't know are you? Okay, what's wrong? Why does anything have to be wrong? When I start saying things like that I know something is wrong. Things like what? You know: sit and shit. Nobody ever says anything like that. Well, somebody did and that somebody is you. What am I talking to myself now? You were in the article you were writing. Oh, right. It wasn't coming off very well. Maybe I should take a break. Maybe you should regroup. How is taking a break any different from regrouping? Taking a break is taking a break. It's doing something else. It's relaxing. It's thinking about something else. Regrouping is thinking about what you want to be doing in a different manner. Oh. Well, that sounds logical.

Personally, I think I need to stand up and stretch. Later.

Scotoma

Here’s the word for the day. It is scotoma. Sounds like something you want to put ointment on, doesn’t it? I first heard it years ago and was fascinated by it. What it means is that you have become blind to something that is sitting right in front of you.

To illustrate how it works is for you to imagine that you just broke a lamp in your living room. It’s still functional, but something on that wonderful, decorative, very expensive and very old lamp has broken off. You can see the jagged edges where the piece is broken off. It’s very upsetting to you. It is also very obvious to you. Every time you see it you cringe because your wonderful lamp is not wonderful anymore. It’s busted.

Day Two: You walk into your living room and your eyes are drawn to the poor, broken lamp immediately. You don’t see anything else first in that room except your broken lamp.

Day Three: You walk into your living room and your eyes slide past the lamp and then ratchet back onto it. You think, “I’m going to have to fix that before Aunt Martha gets here for Thanksgiving, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Day Four: You walk into your living room, your eyes slide past the lamp and once again move back to the lamp. You think, “Shit, I forgot to get the glue. I need to fix that lamp.”

Day Five: You walk into your living room and have totally forgotten about the lamp. You move to the sofa, watch some television and eventually, as the day winds to a close and it gets dark in the room you reach up to turn on the lamp. You don’t even notice that it is broken.

Day Sixty-three: Aunt Martha comes to dinner. The very first thing she sees upon entering your living room is the lamp. She exclaims. You’ve forgotten all about the lamp being broken.

That’s a scotoma. You became blind to that which was right in front of you.