Making Lists and seeing the Bright Side

A few weeks ago Mark, over at the Bike Shed, wrote a blog post about list making.  It struck a chord with F because she used to be an obsessive list-maker, but she had worked out long ago that her list-making marked periods of stress in her life.  Armed with that piece of introspection whenever she finds herself making lists again she examines what the underlying stress is and puts dealing with that at the top of the list - so to speak.

There have been a few stressors in our household over the last 20 months but nothing like some people have had to deal with.  We've got it in perspective and F has resisted the urge to write any lists.  Quite frankly we've got it good.  Even that tax thing wasn't about the amount of tax or any difficulty in funding it, just the banking mechanism and the unnecessary pressure created by the lazy damned accountant (who had no doubt enjoyed his summer holidays without any guilty conscience).    (It is a feature of F's employment contract that she has to use the accountant they appoint.....otherwise he would have been on the scrapheap in late May when his promised 'first week of May' reply was three weeks overdue.)

And as for banking mechanism, it is not really all that long ago that an international transfer of funds required a trip to a piece of banking real estate, so even the fact we now have the service on internet banking is a sweetness.

We have a good home in a nice place, full employment (I'm now formally accepted as a member of staff and have my own desk), good income, regular meals, enjoy spectacular good health, and have a high standard of living if access to the internet counts for anything.  I'm most contented with it.  F on the other hand is human.  Humans are social creatures, and they miss the other humans they are linked to if they are forced to be apart for great lengths of time.  Humans need social interaction, cultural stability and reliable cultural cues, and regular interaction be it workplace, sports team, choir or other places they gather to 'chew the fat'.  They go a bit like a plant in the dark if they are left on their own - pale and spindly.

Social interactions have been a bit thin on the ground for humans in recent months - especially the displaced ones.  Spare a thought for the displaced and refugees around the world.

List making - yesterday didn't actually generate any bad language, any angry reactions, or bouts of furious activity.  It was more of a sad resignation, a deflated balloon, and that in itself was scary if you have lived with F as long as I have.  It's not normal.  Today I talked her into writing a list - stuff you are going to do 'today' - just today.  I sat by the whiteboard until she had done it.  Remember to ring your brother, that always put you in good mood. Do those emails to F2 and your friend in France - you will have to compose some bright positive stuff.  Clean the balcony, it's a real mess out here.  Oh and you might want to spend some time making a few decent meals so that you eat properly during the week.

And my blog post.

Apart from kernel heap corruption restart, the computer is a different machine today; operating at speeds like it was new. F apparently deleted thousands of MB of error logs and things like that which the disk clean-up program said were unnecessary.  If they are unnecessary, why does it store them?