Mind Clutter.

In the last couple of years, I've watched as my computer time has been cut to nearly nothing. It wasn't that I was purposely trying to scale back. I have just found myself accessing the internet from my phone more often than not, but even with it, I'm not online much. Add the fact that I dropped my phone, and the face has this huge spiderweb crack all over the face, and I'm on it even less than I had been. 

One problem is that the desktop is in the study, which is filled with boxes of paperwork that I still need to finish sorting, and it tends to be pretty dusty in there. Add the fact that the window air conditioner is in there and runs for a good part of the year, (especially when we have had fires in the area and can't have the windows open for fresh air), doesn't help at all. The cold not only flares my asthma up but makes me ache all over. Fibromyalgia and cold don't play well together.

And while I do have my little netbook that Hubster got me for our anniversary a couple of years ago, I find myself not using it for weeks at a time. I'm not exactly sure why. It isn't nearly as comfortable to type on or on my aging eyes as the desktop is, so I find myself avoiding it. That definitely plays a role in it, but I think part of it was that I was wanting to keep from dealing with things online, as well. 

Needless to say, the number of emails I have amassed now numbers in the thousands. I have deleted hundreds of them already, but I do need to pare down even further. In the meantime, I have started to deal with some of that stuff that is in the back of my mind on a continual basis. The master list, so to speak. In other words, mind clutter.

Because it's been so long since I logged into my yahoo account, I can no longer access it. Funny thing is that I was still getting emails from the groups I belonged to when I was using it. So I unsubscribed from the group through email and will consider the entire account a thing of the past. I closed down a group I used to manage on another email and unsubscribed from the other groups I belonged to. It sounds silly to say, but it was a bittersweet thing to get rid of it. I'd had the user name for well over a decade, but I realized I just wasn't using it, and it was a thing of the past. So rather than hanging onto it for old times' sake, I chalked it up to moving on with my life and left it behind me with a smile. 

In the spirit of moving on, I also cleared out many of the blogs I was following. Unfortunately, so many of them went by the wayside a year, or 2, or even 3 years ago. I went through the list and checked whether or not the blog was still active. I unfollowed
the blogs that hadn't had a post in the last 12 months. I didn't unfollow all of them. There are a couple special ones that I left on my blog roll. I am hoping the people will eventually show up and miraculously start to blog again. I really miss them. All told, I deleted almost 50% of the blogs I'd been following. It saddened me to see so many of them give up the ghost, but it did feel good to clear them out.

While it might not seem like much, making the extra room in my head helps. I can't think straight when every nook and cranny in my brain is full of mind clutter.

 Cleaning up one mind closet at a time.

Colorado Dreamin'.

So I've been having some really odd dreams lately. Even odder is that I'm actually remembering some of them longer than the first 5 minutes I'm awake. I've heard that dreams are our brains' way of working out problems while we're sleeping, but I just can't see how some of them are working anything out at all. They're just, well, silly.


The other night in Dreamland....

Jacob, the Marine who lost his legs in Afghanistan 18 months ago or so, sought me out to go to the thrift store. Mind you, I've never met him in real life, as we know his wife, not him, so I was quite flattered that he wanted to spend any time with me. 

Instead of going to the typical thrift stores, we went to this big building with lots of corridors and rooms that didn't seem claustrophobic but airy. He was looking for something to surprise his wife, Ella, but he wasn't sure what it was. Finally, we came to the corner of the room, and there was a big dollhouse on the table. Because he and Ella are expecting a little girl in a few months, he was very interested. And as soon as he saw a little plastic Nativity scene that was in the shape of a ball that all the little characters fit in neatly. Sort of like one of those puzzle balls where you put the star block in the star-shaped hole. 

They wanted $40 for it, but he realized he'd left his money somewhere else, so he asked me to stay and watch to make sure nobody else bought it. While I was waiting, I noticed some sort of a lottery or bingo or something going on where they were giving little gifts away. As I watched the participants, I was acutely aware of the fact that I didn't want any of them to get Jacob's dollhouse, all the time sizing up the gifts that they were starting to fight over and trying to determine, if it was even worth getting a late start into the game.

It wasn't. So I decided to walk around and see some of the other rooms I hadn't seen yet. (So much for watching the dollhouse!) I came across a vendor who was set up in the stairwell landing. The shop owner was being told by the owner of the building he was no longer allowed to sell his wares, which greatly distressed me, because I found something I wanted. They were white flannel pajamas with all of the NFL team helmets on them along with a list of each player on the teams for the 2013 season. I knew that Hopper would love them, so I talked him into selling me the set I was already holding onto when he was told to pack things up. 

I wrote out a check, since he'd had to pack away his credit card machine. As I reached for the receipt, he held up my bra with a smirk on his face! (It was the same one I'd seen in the wash earlier in the day when I was washing laundry in real life. I remember thinking at the time that I really needed a new bra. It no longer really fits right after I've lost weight. Plus I had to remove the underwires after they snapped in half. So it really is a mess!) 

I was about ready to die of embarrassment when he started swinging it around! I told him he needed to give it back. Now! And he responded, "It's not doing you any good anyway. I mean, look at your physique!" Unfortunately, that physique looked the same in the dream as it does in the real world, so I was pretty much mortified at my lumpiness when I woke up. 

Obviously, it's time to get a new bra. I've lost just under 30 pounds since August, and while that's nothing compared to what I need to lose, it's a start. And losing that much weight really does change how a bra fits, so I'm thinking I need to stop dreaming about it and actually go shopping and do something about it.

Still, I wonder, if Jacob got the dollhouse and what Ella thought of it.

They really DO exist!

In spite of the fact that I am feeling better than I have in well over a week, I'm getting a bit tired of the nightly visits from the Phlegm Phaeries. And while I have not personally seen them during their visits, I can attest to the fact that they do exist.

From what I've ascertained, they have magical bags of phlegm that they carry around-much like Santa's magic bag of toys. No matter how much phlegm they loosen from its insides and pass around, the bag never seems to lose any of it's ooey gooey grossness. And one thing's for sure, those Phlegm Phaeries are generous to a fault! They just give, and give, and give. 

I'm pretty sure mine is a Phlegm Phaerie in Training, though. In her exuberance to impress the Phlegm Pharaoh with her skills, she's accidentally gone overboard and given me more than she was supposed to. I'm hoping he notices soon and gives her the proverbial boot.

You know. 

Before I give her the phinger.