jimsjournal
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jimsjournal |
Adjusting to a new year -- 01/03/11 |
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I am somewhat befuddled. Yes, I know, it always takes a bit to adjust to a new year... people can go halfway through January writing the past year rather than the current year on checks and other documents. Actually, that's not really a problem for me. This website is the main place where I use dates. I probably write fewer than half a dozen checks a year. Nancy handles the day-to-day financial accounting here and she doesn't write all that many checks -- she pays most bills online. (We used to take turns with the household finances, passing the job back-and-forth every couple of years -- but then came modern electronic banking and once Nancy had her laptop all set up with spreadsheets and such and had accounts connected to her email address, it was easier for her to keep doing it.) My problem is keeping track of anything at all related to the current date and day of the week -- my internal scheduling is all confused. This is the last day of an extended vacation -- a week and a half off -- which is enough to leave a bit of mental confusion. But on top of that, being sick last week threw me off even more. I think I am pretty much over the cold, but still have a very persistent cough and not much voice... I sound like I just finished gargling with old razor blades. Despite the unusual severity of last week's cold, it is not unusual for my voice to flirt with laryngitis following a cold; it's just a question of duration. I'm guessing that my gravel voice will be with me all the rest of this week. Anyway, my befuddlement isn't that I don't know that today is the 3rd of January of the year 2011... it is that it doesn't feel like 3 January 2011. It doesn't feel like anything. I seem to have lost my calendrical alignment and do not have any internal feeling of day of the week, etc. However, tomorrow I will be back at work... and I have a very full schedule of tasks ahead of me for the next three months or so... the kind of tight scheduling on some weeks that may quickly have me wishing for the luxury of not needing to know what day it is. Well, I do know what time it is. It is time for me to FTP this to a VerveHosting server and then get in a quick walk around the neighborhood. I need to get back into shape -- and this illness kept me from getting a jump start during the last week of 2010 -- but I did get in a one mile walk around the neighorhood on New Year's Day and again on Sunday and now I need to do it again today. Yeah, I probably should have gone for this walk earlier, when I could have done it in bright sunshine. However, I saw my pulmonologist today and he gave me a prescription to help clear away my respiratory congestion and that medicine had me feeling a bit queasy and I've been waiting for that feeling to go away. I don't know if the queasiness was due to the medication or to reading the warning sheet about side effects that came with it. (Isn't it amazing how the same medication can produce opposite effects. This is supposed to help clear my congestion and one of the side effects is that it can cause congestion.) I also picked up a new pair of running shoes today at Camire's in Wakefield... but it will probably be a week or so before I try to start adding in some running (okay, jogging) in with the walking. Hmmm, I can remember the first time I had to do a decade switch. It was when I had to start writing 1950 instead of 1949 on school papers. That really seemed like something awesome. Of course I was only in first grade at the time, so I couldn't have had to write 1949 too many times before it became time to change, but I do remember it seemed like a big deal to me at the time. I guess the fact that two numbers changed instead of just one seemed to be important to me. Of course we probably had to write our names and the date on every single scrap of paper we used just to give us practice on writing stuff like that. And, more recently, the change from 1999 to 2000 was a big one -- every digit changing -- and moving into dates that sounded as if they were straight from a science fiction story. (The weekly radio science fiction anthology show Two Thousand Plus first went on the air in March of 1950, presenting stories that took place in the future, in the years from 2000 plus.) A brief introduction.... (edited to update it from 2006) A brief introduction for anyone who wanders in here from the Holidailies site -- I'm a middle-aged (*cough* okay,
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