A few Measly Steps a Day

Re: FB scam. Not sure what to do either. I did a lot of research after I suspected an Indiegogo 'campaign' had no intentions of delivering the goods I appealed to a lot of places. Indiegogo and Kickstarter have supposed 'anti-fraud' units doing all they can to ferret out fraud, & uphold Truth, Justice & The American Way. Ha, that's so funny.

If there's a FB fraud & deception department, of course there is—I'd send them a note with the particulars, and then "unfriend" that account. As you said, you haven't been in touch for 20 years.

I'm home with a runny nose and just feeling run down. Took the home COVID-test, came back Negative.

Missing a memorial at a fancy restaurant because I'm staying put!

Using the time to waste whole days! What fun. r

Continuing a clearing out of broken behaviors. One is I get stuck defending ideas, imagination, and action when someone starts moping about the decline of something or the sad state of things. It's a full on waste of my time and attention and energy and creativity.

Had a deep dive into this with my mens group last night and feeling ready to walkaway. These are great chances to

• step back and breathe
• let others keep talking and keep silent
• change the subject
• ask: What do you want me to make of that bit of analysis/news? Followed with: let me think about it.
• Remember my heroes and peeroes who share my take on things.

There lives an industry for dealing with negative people. How sad. r

Thank goodness for positive people.
I have three difficult steps:
Call the court and get out of jury duty. (I signed in online and told them I couldn't serve. They said fine. Then I got a nastygram informing me that I hadn't shown up for JD.
Make an appt for a new primary care doctor.
Do a hatchet job to the weeds in my yard. (That's actually about five steps to do all the weeding, and probably includes calling a gardener.)
Meanwhile, I keep writing. I think it's going well, but I always have self doubts. With good reason or not? Don't know.
We had a plant sale at our church. Last year I took my friend's plants because she couldn't take care of them in assisted living. Very long story short, they were a huge success. And I have one succulent arrangement to give back to her. She was happy, and I felt good to be a part of her success.
That's it for me.
Good wishes.

What's your angle for avoiding Jury Duty? I think they might rebrand it as Jury Party, and have classes to take part in while waiting around. Most times i go if I can but only for civil cases. I can't see being part of the prison industrial complex.

Very sad day. Someone I very rarely play bridge with but think is a terrific person told me her husband died about 3 months ago. And I got a text from a high school classmate telling me my last closest friend from my class died this morning.

More or less "cancelled" plans for tonight, lit a candle, and stared out into the darkness. r

I'm over seventy, and I can just say I can't do it because of a medical condition. I actually liked being on a jury. It's easy work, and I think people who are reasonably intelligent should be the ones on juries. At night, I sleep for one to two hours at a stretch. Often I spend two to four hours reading in the middle of the night because I can't get back to sleep. For this reason, I avoid anything that involved being somewhere early in the morning. If I have a bad night, I shouldn't be driving, and getting to the court on public transportation is tricky. I'd probably take Uber if I had to show up. $$$ The last time I had to show up, I slept through voire dire.
I called the court, and the clerk told me to write a letter or an email saying that I was over 70 and couldn't serve because of a medical condition. I tried the email, and their website wouldn't allow me to be excused. I wrote a letter and sent it snail mail. A second clerk told me the same thing. I'll wait and see what happens. The clerks said I'd get confirmation. Since the website wouldn't let me get excused, I wonder. And I don't expect a snail mail response anytime soon. Will you visit me in jail? I'll probably have to show up some time and tell them in person that I can't serve.

I'm sorry about the death of your friends. It's hard losing people you care about. I'll say a prayer for them and for you.

Good wishes.

Yeah, you got your reasons and I think the "court" will give you pass, but oddly, you might have to appear in person.

My friend's service is this Friday @ 9:00 am PDT. I'll sit quiet in her memory and bid her farewell and a good voyage in the next realms. She did a lot of good and we had a terrific rapport.

A living friend is working on producing some type of event on grief. I'm too committed to other things to do more than attend a few of their planning meetings. I had to drop back as soon I thought I might diplomatically.

Just completed (I hope) some paperwork on an Exxon explosion & fire from 1993! Its for my dead father, we might get something out of the class action, but he'll get none of it.

Capitalist justice at its finest. r

Your friend sounds like a wonderful person. I'm sorry for your loss.

I never thought of myself as a scanner, but now I sit surrounded by half-finished projects, and I have no idea how I'll finish them. And some of these projects involve other people, so they can't just be pushed away for a couple of years; they have to be completed.

Three art projects. One just needs to be mounted. the other two need gluing, sewing and and hanging. Face it, the one with the sewing should be put away for two or three years. People are coming to my house. I want to spackle, texturize and paint two half walls. This project has been sitting unfinished for months. My novel and my novel is ongoing, and my garden is ongoing, but I'd like to clean up the brush piles and the really ugly parts. Then there's the jury duty. I want to keep an eye out for some indication that my letter got there and that I really am excused. Yes, I might have to show up in person. I can handle it if it's only one day. I need to find the name of my new doctor and make an appointment. I plan to change insurance and go back to my old doctor, but I can't do that until October. Meanwhile, with COVID and other issues, I feel I should do an initial exam with the new one just in case. It just feels wrong to ignore him and then ask for a doctor favor.
At church, I just got asked to serve as almost-a-deacon-but-not-really. Remember that class I took a month ago where I had two workbooks with a total of twelve to sixteen weeks of assignments, and an in-person class of be sensitive, don't drop the bread; don't spill the wine? Well, I"m was the only one dumb enough, I mean who cared enough to do the assignments, and our priest, who is legitimately swamped to the gills, really needs the help. We do have a deacon who will share the responsibility with me, but she's eighty years old with her own problems. Fortunately, she's an overachiever even at eighty years old. The job involves caring for people who are sick or have other problems. And our congregation is mostly elderly folks. (but it's a small church, thankfully) Kate and I don't have to do all the visits, meal delivery and trips to the hospital, etc.; we just have to make sure that someone does it.
If you haven't figured it out, I'm lazy. I'm used to a more vegetative life style. I'm also really good at forgetting things. Oy, vey!
Okay, done ranting. Wish me luck.

Hello Steppers,

Seth Godin would likely call what you suffer from as The Dip. May be time for triage.
Seth:

Quote:

Stick with the Dips that are likely to pan out, and quit the Cul-de-Sacs to focus your resources. There’s not a lot to say about the Cul-de-Sac except to realize that it exists and to embrace the fact that when you find one, you need to get off it, fast. That’s because a dead end is keeping you from doing something else. The opportunity cost of investing your life in something that’s not going to get better is just too high. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

Dips suck sewage water, for sure. Triage means you have to abandon some maybes. But, triage out the right stuff and you feel it. Anne Truitt:

Quote:

The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s inner development is a feeling of having laid down a burden and picked up a more natural responsibility. — Anne Truitt (Daybook: The Journal of an Artist)

Related topic: The Hard Thing Rule by Angela Duckworth
I keep cycling back through my dips. I have a 8 x 8 grid project I abandoned. Outlines for books to write that I let languish.

Part of it keys to whether someone else cares and will hold me to accounts. I try to avoid that.

Or, say I finish something and it gets attacked or, worse, ignored, by those I thought to be my audience?

The funny thing, though, is that even not finished it's still 100% my own. I can't say, about my grid, that it's only 37% mine. Who claims the other 63%? Well, they better hop to it!

Revu2

Dallying before getting to the day's tasks, which are:

• Rough In a guide for a project
• create agenda format and add some items
• look up first-person accounts of dealing with feeling annoyed (lots of 2nd person, apparently the people who write these advice tips have no experience with it)
• business call this afternoon
• pick up food run right after
• bridge! from 6 to 11

I think Buddhism and Stoicism are bonkers with their let go of the outcome maxims. This translates into cede the outcome to people who care about the outcome! Give away ones agency and persistence!

Alright, I have to go sit under a tree. R

Re your comment about Buddhism and Stoicism - I like the Serenity Prayer. God grant me serenity to accept what I cannot change, courage to change what I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
The serenity part is easy for me. The courage and the wisdom - that's where I need help.
I'm suddenly finding myself doing things and meeting people. Social anxiety is kicking in. I need to be busy and I need to interact with people. I know that. It keeps me from being depressed. Oh well. My jury duty snafu seems to fixed. I got a letter saying I was excused. Right now, I'm gardening more and writing less. My book club is reading "Through Unfamiliar Waters" for our next meeting. I read it and got bored.
Good wishes.

Just had a flash insight: what if I treated communication like I do trading? When trading nothing's a sure bet, so I parcel my bet sizes and if of a sudden I'm quickly "over rewarded" according to what I expected, I thank the market and exit.

The reverse, I'm holding a losing trade, I have to convince myself that I'm missed judged and limit my self criticism AND leave.

Just so with my expectations of people. I suspect "wise friends" who counsel don't get invested in what other people do aren't really trying to make something happen and, literally, and blowing hot air at me.

So, when things seem to be going to expectations, put some of that good feeling into "cash" and carry on with the rest. When going poorly, maybe go into "all cash" and walkaway emotionally.

Something to play around with. R.

Hello Steppers, I'm reading Joanne Harris's Chocalat right now, and for diversion search out her writing process. She's written 25 books in a pile of genres, plus opera librettos and plays. And she's in a band! She says:

“I always have several projects on the go, that is normal for me, and they are often quite different which means I can jump from one thing to another,” she says. “I will write in spurts and then let it rest for a few weeks or months and during that time I will work on something else. It also means that when I do need to stop or need to do some research I’m not in the position of not working on something – that can make you quite nervous, that I might not have another idea, so this way, I make sure that never happens.” Yorkshire Post

She write in spurts and lets things rest. Not at all like John Steinbeck who kept at one novel till he finished it. In her advice to other writers she knows one size doesn't fit all: “I think people have such different processes – some writers like to work on an overarching outline, others, like me, work more organically. I always think that if you end up with the book you wanted to write then whatever your approach is, it’s right for you.”

When you have something to get done, whatever approach that gets you through is your right approach. Permission accepted.
Revu2

Hi, R.

Might be sick, might not be sick. Ran a temperature for about an hour and then it dropped to normal. ????? I think I'm healthy, but I'm laying low.

Had a small little game goal today: renew my Tello pay-as-you-go before tomorrow to add 100 minutes. The last time I'd run several months and then forgot and then reset back to only a 100. I was up to the 600s I think. This is per month and because I use the "free" google voice for outgoing calls 100 minutes is plenty. I like the challenge of it.

Ms. D ~ Get better, lay low, recover.

Spent most of the afternoon getting my math around Adjusted Winner procedures for fair division. Might be handy in my current project. Mind is wiped but I did find a simpler formula than the common one that's in the book and videos. Ironically enough, it's on the website of the book's authors. Guess the figured something out themselves.

R.

Went well. I think they learned a few things and I did as well. Really intense, I guess because today I am tired.

Focused on next week and getting inspired for how to get this done. A feeling I didn't fully have when we started off on Tuesday.

Tomorrow, a train and 2 buses to go 10 miles with hopes of a ride back to where we're getting free catered meals 3 x a week. Today was fun as they had run out of takeout containers and we have a couple we keep in our trunk. My partner missed her improv "yes and" moment and questioned me about them being in the car when I said we had some. Oh well, you can lead people to an improv moment but you can't make them think.

R

I'm not sure what your improv moment was, but I had an improv weekend years ago, and it was great fun.
I'm not sure if I was sick or not, but I stayed low for a few days anyway. COVID test negative. I'm having a lot of lazies lately. I found out that I do have an excuse for it. My lung capacity is a bit over half what it should be.

Meanwhile, I have a lot of "should do" things to do. I'll write a list here and see if it helps.

Change sheets.

email to Lois

hedge clippers

email sookum Joe's friendship centre

find out how to spell sookum Joe

edit Will search for info on Johanna

That's it for me for now.

Good stuff for you.

An improv moment is when you get to perform "yes and" in real life. We walk up the steps of this cool home-made-gallery to get free "plates" they are sponsoring from terrific chefs. On Wed. they were out of takeout containers.

Me: Oh, we have some.
Her: We have take out container with us? In the trunk?
[thus, a missed improv moment—the presupposition is that I know there are some in the trunk that she doesn't know about, apparently, though they've been there for months.]

Alternative take:
Me: Oh, we have some.
Her: Yes, please go get them. Don't get my grandmother's Corning; don't want to risk tripping and dropping them."

May you get traction on your list.

R

Sounds yummy. I hope you were able to take the goodies home. I'm not sure what to say about the Corning ware. It seems that the risk of dropping it is slim. "Don't have a nice trip." seems to cover it.

First three items on my list completed. Yay! Onward!

As of two minutes ago, I completed everything on my to-do list. Yay! I contacted the Sookum Jim Friendship Centre; I'm scared that they won't answer me, or even worse, that they'll answer me and say that what I wrote is all wrong and disrespectful. (Biting nails.) But wouldn't it be cool if it worked?

Hi Ms. D, yeah, S. Joe's can go any of several ways. You did what you needed to do, and now it's their turn.

About a year ago I realized Dee Hock, the genius behind negotiating the VISA credit card system, was in his 90s. If was to have a conversation with him I'd better get on the handle.

I love his work, so I re-read his book and got both of his books of aphorisms and skimmed those. I looked at interviews and reviewed the binder I got from taking a workshop based on his thoughts about organizations. I read everything on his blog.

When I felt ready I found his email and invited him to answer a few questions via email in 3 rounds.

He responded! Yes.

So I sent my first questions, which he didn't really answer. I adjusted my questions and sent a new message, and he dodged again essentially the same way he's dismissed my first questions.

I'd suggested 3 rounds, but I called it after my disappointing first 2.

I tried and have no regrets.

So, do what you must.

Revu2

Interesting! Disappointing that Dee Hock gave you a pat answer. Still, given that he/she is a marketing genius . . .

An internet friend typed that she'd take a look at my work that has to do with a First Nations healer. Yay! And she has a friend who worked with First Nations in the Yukon. Double Yay!!

HI Ms. D, my failed outreach to Mr Hock felt annoying for a a couple of days and then I turned to other matters. So it goes.

At a tween space—a bit of time before my last session with my client. Do I keep working or accept a few days away for it? Turns out, I've cashed out those days. Happened to come across The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder and as I'd thought of it a few days ago I took it out of one of those little free libraries. Spent to day racing through it (I'd read it maybe 35 years ago). Turns our Mr Kidder and the hero of the book, Tom West, attended the same school I did, Amherst College.

Tomorrow is promised to be a terrific day, weatherwise, so I'm taking the ferry to Bainbridge Island to walk about, visit the museum, & get some ice cream. Those are my goals.

If I wake up eager to dash off some notes for work, I guess I'll have let my dash off some notes.

All will be revealed in time, R.

I visited Bainbridge Island many many many years ago. I hope you had a great time there.
Meanwhile, life in California goes on. Seems as if everyone I visit is old and sick these days. Fortunately, they're all interesting people. Meanwhile, everything else is just plugging along. My plum trees are producing tiny but tasty plums. The crows are loving them, and there are plenty of plums for me and for the birds, but unfortunately, the crows tend to drop them all over the place and leave a mess. I was hoping, once they'd stripped the tree, they'd come back and eat what's on the ground, but so far no luck on that.

Today, I went visiting sick people. Put in almost a full day of work. That's a big deal for me. Yay, me.

Hello World! My biorhythms are in decline. Good time for it as my work intensity is low right now. Will build: one client added an intense bit of work on some legal stuff we need to complete, and I have a new client requiring lots of help. Plus my condo leadership duties have picked up pace because things I needed to do I've deferred until now so I could focus on paid work.

So, instead of hard work during the work-week and party-rest over the weekend, I'm braiding them together. So, for example, between appointments at 10 and 1, I'll eat breakfast and take a nap or do some small but needed task (I have a drain that needs clearing).

And so on like that throughout the day. My personal growth focus is on details, as in fewer typos and inaccuracies in my email messages. Begins with a search for blogs that chat about this, then maybe a podcast and I can learn while whiling away the minutes.

R.