I bought 100 more white plastic hangers at Walmart yesterday.  I’d replaced all my different colored hangers in my bedroom closet a couple of weeks ago and it took 100 of them. It looks so much more organized now that they all match.  Yesterday I realized I had another closet with a rack of clothes, and I counted another 92 hangers.   Believe it or not I don’t really have all that many clothes. What does it is the 4 pairs each of the same tan khaki capris, the same olive khaki capris, the same black gabardine slacks, the same buttondown shirt in different colors. Stuff I like and want to have extras of so after I’ve worn it to death I still have a fresh set.  A dozen pairs each jeans and tshirts, when I wear jeans and tshirts maybe twice a year.  Or if I’m camping.  What I have to remember is that 10 and 20 years ago I was physically in the public eye a whole lot more often than I am now, so my clothes have stopped wearing out.  What I have now could last me the rest of my life.  Since I don’t really like to shop, that feels like a real freedom.  Ah, another senseless habit broken.

Am I the only one who prefers to read an article online than to watch a video about it?  And internet radio, I have many friends who do some great work, but I am just not into doing all that much listening, especially when reading is an option.  I like the silence.  I spend so much “work” time every day talking and listening, that I anytime I have the option of silence or hearing a voice, more often than not, I choose silence.

A couple of weeks ago I was purging closet stuff and came across my little address books from the 70’s and 80’s.  It was interesting because I saw names of friends I’d forgotten, and several of them I searched and found on Facebook and we’ve reconnected.  Only one didn’t remember me, and we couldn’t remember any shared adventures other than sitting in his living room with his family one afternoon and long phone calls at night, content unknown.  Neither us of could recall mutual friends and none of the attorneys I worked for sounded familiar to him.  I didn’t recall his work and when he told me, it didn’t sound familiar. We didn’t date.  What I found interesting was that I had copied his name and number from one little address book to another each year as I updated.  My address books then weren’t all full of business and social contacts; they were people I was close to or really resonated with.  I clearly found him interesting enough at the time to want to keep adding him to each new phone book. Yet when we spoke, we both drew a blank.  I could picture what he looked like, but despite seeing my Facebook photos, he could not place me.  When strolling down memory lane didn’t ring a bell for either of us, we talked about what interests us now.  We aren’t really into the same things and weren’t clicking, so we hung up before it got awkward.  Some day 30 years down the road it will hit me where we met and I’ll get a laugh out of it all.

I have a journal I keep and I love having it in a Microsoft Word file, so I can do a word or phrase search to find particular passages when I want to.  Reading the journal is always a stroll down memory lane and an exercise in seeing how my personality has progressed through the years.  I’m pretty mellow now but I used to be very intense. I used to think I had to let everyone know what I knew because then they would be as happy as I am.  It was for their own good, darn it!  Yeah, pretty aggravating, I know.   I also used to put people up on pedestals and berate them for falling.  I do far less of that now.  Below is a passage I found that surprised me with how aggressively I was snapping at my friend. Continue reading →

A friend stopped by this week and watched me work for an hour.  I’m having a little flare up of the old carpal tunnel so I’m wearing the wrist splints that hold them in the correct position to relieve the pressure.  It only flares up maybe once a year when I’ve been overdoing the mousing.  Most of the work with the magazine is not typing, but rather copy and pasting, as is the website work I love to play with.    My visitor knows I work alone, so she asked why I don’t get someone to help me so I could rest my arms while they healed.  The answer is one of the big blessings of my life.  Since I work for myself on my own schedule and mostly from home, when I’m having a flareup, I have the luxury of working an hour here and an hour there throughout the day and evening.  When it bothers me, I stop and go do something else awhile.  There’s plenty to do but it’s all do-able and I kind of love every aspect of my work.  So I find that, as Abraham-Hicks says, if I set my mind to it, I can eat an elephant one bite at a time.

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Natural Carpal Tunnel Relief

Thursday I got my computer is back from Chuck and it’s faster than ever.  It seems that even though I do the ccleaner and defrag after each computer session, AOL has its own hidden temporary folder where 8200 items were hiding. Yay to Chuck for finding them all.   I find that my personal growth work is like that, too.  I can do my best to refine my character and drop unnecessary or unkind behaviors, to define goals and move in a focused way toward them, but during my contemplation time, whatever is unfinished will rise to the surface and offer itself to me. It’s a daily occurrence, sometimes an hourly occurrence.  I remind myself that it may be a hidden file, but it’s also a temporary file.  I’m sure there’s more hiding in there to be worked on, but peering into the abyss is not as dark and foreboding as it used to be.  I even see a light at the end of the tunnel.

“Success! Friend requests will now be sent to 415 friends,” the Facebook message on the screen said. “Once they confirm your friendship, you will be able to see each other’s profiles. These users will receive your friend requests shortly.”    WTF?  I’d been peeking through the names in my email address book to decide which I wanted to connect with on Facebook.  As usual I was also fielding phone calls and taking notes, and I must have done a Select All and Send command.  I hope the 415 people in my address book have a sense of humor. Especially the mortgage lenders and insurance agents, good buddies like that…  If you are one of the 415 wondering why you got a Friend Request from me when I only know you professionally or perhaps not at all, feel free to ignore it, my feelings will not be hurt. On that list is anyone who ever sent me an email asking for information or ad rates or sent me a solicitation or event notice.  AOL used to auto-add new names. Also on that list are some family and friends who call themselves very conservative evangelical Christians who would rather not be reminded of the work I do with Horizons Magazine.
It’s cool, guys, no pressure 🙂 Andrea          RELATED: Why I like Facebook

I wrote in Saturday’s How did I attract yesterday’s comedy of errors? that I’d had a series of events go not as planned, toppling my Friday and Monday schedules.  Instead of me going into my busy Monday first thing this morning, I’d had to reschedule my appointments so I could instead take the magazines to the post office for the monthly mailing the post office couldn’t take Friday.  It kind of irked me since I schedule myself so tightly, but it’s my own fault when things go all domino on me and topple when I don’t factor in room for error.  I’m always mindful that when something goes awry, I am the one who attracted it.  When something goes well, I am the one who attracted it.  I figured I’d just have to attract a good outcome to myself.

So today when I take the job in to the post office, it all goes quickly, and I’m in and out in record time.  As I am getting in my car, someone is driving into the parking lot and waving at me.  It’s a friend I haven’t seen in 25 years.  She recognized me as she was sitting at the light on Hwy 192. We sat and chatted for a half an hour and it was fun to catch up.  As she was leaving, she reminded me of a business transaction we had together in the 80’s.  Since she was now 12 Stepping, she wanted to make amends for having cheated me in the transaction and she wrote me a check for $1,000.  Had I not attracted Friday’s comedy of errors, I would not have been where I was this morning for her to see me as she was driving by.  And she lives in Vero. It all happens for a reason.