elainegrey

I appear to have lost my wallet, primarily a loss of my driver's license, the wallet itself, $15, and my health care card. I am pretty sure there were other cards in there too, but my debit card was in my hands to buy gas when i last saw my wallet, and i still have that. My credit card and a stack of all my store cards/library cards and my card for the flex spending are all in a ziplock back where i stashed them before going to Ohio in December. What else would i have taken with me to Ohio? Debit card, Driver's license, medical insurance card.... Maybe the paper Better World Club card?

I've made an appointment at the DMV to get a duplicate card. I hope that i will not have a hassle when renting a car with the temporary. I wonder about flying. I suppose i have my passport.

I am rather delighted at the small scope of my loss. I know the papers about "contact in case of an emergency" were inside, so if it's found someone can contact those numbers.

Yoiks! It was a Levenger wallet, so i went there to look for a replacement. This REI replacement looks less painful http://www.rei.com/product/805255/rei-aubrey-wallet-womens and then i can wait for a Levenger Wallet that seems just right to show up on eBay.

I got my crankies out last night.

This morning i was tempted to go find a U-pick place, inspired by seeing U-pick chestnuts in the hills nearby. The chestnuts "will start falling in earnest" in early November and open next weekend. What to do this weekend? I could drive 70 minutes to apple picking down near Watsonville.

Or i could drive ten minutes and go to the farmers market in Sunnyvale.

(In the end, i did neither.)

Christine and i have chatted over tea this morning and made decisions: we're looking at new rings in observance of our twentieth anniversary, and we allocated time for back east and anniversary vacations. We're going to transition to an new internet provider, and we think we will be able to significantly increase our bandwidth while keeping the price of services about the same.

...

I just found the Meeting notebook i've not been able to find for months. I think i'm now down to one lost thing, the correspondence box i left on the flight from Atlanta to San Francisco in March. Although, if i can't find the check stubs from earlier this year, i will have misplaced something new. ETA: Ha! Found it!

Yowsa.

I can see my workday is going to shift dramatically from now on. Not sure how i want to handle this. I'm now doing a daily "stand up" at 8:30. The previous stand-up was at 9:45. There are questions around commuting and such that will challenge me. (How important to be face to face with the one person with whom i can likely be face to face ?) Skype is our friend.

I plowed pretty deeply all day, too. There is something useful in the focus the commitments gave me, although i'll admit to blowing off one meeting and not attending to email. I can't read my energy: compared to last week, there was barely any demand on my interaction energy. On the other hand, i certainly had some intensity.

I feel a little burnt out this evening and i worry about not having energy to live the rest of my life. I suppose it's a matter of discipline, developing a baseline and building endurance.

I've no idea what happens if i get depressed.

--==∞==--

Yahoo quickly refunded this year's hosting and domain name charges and suggest that some criminal was trying to verify whether they had a "good" credit card number. I've just skimmed through the months of charges after that. A couple Amazon charges in May just over $100 ... and a quick cross check indicates one of those orders was for a La Cie firewire drive. The other may be Christine's order.

I'm find the whole thing terribly odd. But at least it was settled without a huge headache.

--==∞==--

Currently living with steroid ointments for a variety of different skin issues. Then there were yesterday's injuries. I sliced the tip of my left hand thumb on the brand new mandoline + salad spinner device producing a prodigious amount of blood. In an unrelated event i caught my "index" toe nail on something, and it's now a nice blue. My left little finger that i fell on Easter Sunday still aches a little, but it's easily ignored.

This is reminiscent of loosing things, in that it makes me wonder whether i'm doing it to myself.

(And by the way, i forget if i noted that right after replacing the lost mother's day yarn i found it. I've replaced the letter case but no return from the airline, yet.)

Christine's recovery is what i'm to be focusing on, and i know it's probably weighing on me more than i admit to myself. So, i suppose i'm "stressed" and additionally clumsy because of it.... ? Meh.

--==∞==--

That all said, i feel good -- just a little overextended with a conference starting tomorrow, new work patterns, a sense of enthousiasmos (gave ministry on Sunday, still thinking about scrum and Quaker process). Reading the entry from last March when trying to track down the strange website purchase made me aware just how dark a muddle i was in last year. I wonder at the Prozac: my six months is approaching its end.

On carrying insurance: When i was talking to an agent with our insurance company about coverage between the totaled car, Helen, and getting the Accent, Hélèn, she pointed out that we were carrying the minimum required by our state for compensating other drivers if we were at fault. We're raising it, at her advice, and because i recognized that if the driver who caused the accident we were in had the minimum $5k property liability, our totaled car wasn't fully covered by it.

Since then, though, i've been looking at the very expensive autos on Bay Area highways with aversion. I don't want to be in an accident where i am at fault, but being distracted happens. Having a moment of distraction at the same time another driver does something unpredictable is possible. If that means i rear end someone's super luxury vehicle -- well, i begin to resent that that person's choice to drive a luxury vehicle means i'm stuck paying for a luxury bumper instead of a regular old bumper (like there are any real bumpers these days).

I wish -- but not so much that i'm going to do anything but write out the wish -- that there were liability limits. I wish that if one buys a luxury vehicle one would be told that if one is in an accident where the other driver is at fault the max payout that driver will pay would cover a new not-luxury car, and that if one wants the whole car's value covered, one should insure the difference between non-luxury and luxury. I suppose that's comprehensive collision and even i carry it: my insurance company totaled our car and paid out to us without consulting with the person at fault's insurance. Presumably they're dragging that out and someday we'll see our deductible back.

Right now i am very fond of econo box Hélèn.

--==∞==--

I'm trying to find a meditative way to frame my lost things. I'm holding the rune Pertho in the adobe home that is at the entrance to the western garden of my meditation mandala. I'm find myself sitting in the "deep" part of the room, away from the large opening out to the grassy, loamy field where the horses are, away from the large table around which community gathers, but back against the solid adobe wall, with niches for holding things. I don't have much stored in this room, just some gifts of energy spheres that didn't make much sense to me when i received them a decade ago, and still don't.

I'm not sure why lost things agitate me so. While i think the sense of Lost Thing as compared to random misplaced things has to do with my personal creative connection to the Thing (poetry, art lost in the mail, journals forgotten and accidentally left behind), the agitation isn't over misplaced Self, but (ah-ha) the sense of failure to be responsible.

I'd been holding out for myself the opening that Lost Things create, trying to talk myself into a frame of new opportunity, but i'm not addressing the Failure To Have My Act Together with that frame.

Agitation around Lost Things is a facet of perfectionism.

Not sure how to frame from here. (Apologies to Asatru and other adherents of the Northern Way. My frames are not Nordic Way frames, but the symbols of that Way are very powerful for me.) Pertho, sometimes imagined by rune workers as a dice cup, invokes for me the same sense of fault/no-fault that i was reflecting on as i wrote about insurance. If i am distracted from the road, say puzzled by a billboard and looking at it one more time, and that distraction leads me to rear end someone changing lanes ahead of me, i am at fault, but not a failure. So many times i experience a second glance at a odd bumpersticker, billboard, driver -- a distraction -- and i do NOT have an accident. Similarly, i carry many things with me, day in and day out and frequently
do not loose them. The probabilities are non-zero, and the frequency is high, so i do loose things, forget things, etc. It's a fault, not a failure. Does that framing help me?

--==∞==--

Health inventory: ( Read more... )

Yay, i found the retractable micro USB cable! Oh, and the photos! (Although it a mystery why i didn't find them earlier.)

I am not yet giving up on the remaining two lost items of the list of four things yesterday. That's the bluetooth headset and the crochet kit, although i spent $20 Monday night just replacing the crochet kit bag and the thread/yarn cutter. Replacing the yarn for Mom[1] will be on my schedule for when i get back, and then the blue tooth headset when i get back from the second trip.

In vicious circle news, my dyshidrotic eczema is flaring along with my mouth. I've spent much time this morning mulling over the familiar deep tracks around these atopic and extreme sensitivity reactions i have. Inventories form in my mind: these irritations have clear triggers (stupidly taking a bite of a hot slice of pizza, biting my lip in my sleep), these irritations don't. My pattern searching mind believes there's a lesson in here, that some intelligence is communicating something with flash cards etched on my skin. Don't eat ... what? Don't wear .... what? Don't ... what? Surely there's some pattern, surely there's some meaning: the belief is what motivates a half an hour of ruminating over lists of triggers and stresses. ("Oh, this is because i'm getting on a plane!")

But what if there is no meaning, the cause is some set of genes i inherited from my mother, who looked at her eczema on her hands and read the message that my father was a horrible person? What if the triggers are like playing a slot machine?

I have taken the time to learn my depression, have dialogue with the parts of my self, to find wisdom in the slowness and darkness, and that is helping me appreciate when i am vital and bright. But what if trying to read my eczema, psoriasis, cankers is like trying to talk to a slot machine and divine meaning from the display?

Can i ask myself to just let go of interpretation and meaning, appreciate when the discomfort is gone, take care when the discomforts are present?


[1] What else was in the crochet bag? My first sock and the third sock -- with reinforced toe! -- and the sock yarn and the blue yarn and the template for a cup cosy.... I'm not sure what hooks were in there.

I came home early, exhausted. I rode my bike on the trainer outside for a little bit, then napped. Napping is not a particularly easy thing for me, but i needed it. After dinner and a TV show, i tried to prepare my desk for the work day, but was in bed by 9. I didn't get up early today, either.

As an index of mental health, i could consider my lost item list. It now includes: [1] my black mesh crochet bag with a skein of really nice wool bamboo blend yarn for a mother's day gift (last seen 29 Jan), [2] bluetooth headset (last seen 3Feb), [3] retractable micro USB cord (last seen 7 Feb).

I think it would be cool to create a data mining tool for semi-structured data. Once upon a time there was a tool called Zoe that actually made an effort to datamine your email for you. I don't think i'm likely to do it myself, though. And i can imagine the challenges.

On the other hand, one of the interesting developments in the identity space is the idea of personal data banks. The proponents are imagining a regulatory space that requires businesses and services that collect data about you to make that data available to you in a machine readable format over a secure method. Your personal data bank, then could collect your data in one place, controlled by you. If you wanted to keep it secret, you could do that. The bank metaphor points at "keeping it in your mattress." But if you chose to "loan" your data, you could do that.

A corporate impetus is that the telephone companies are forbidden to datamine your telephone transactions. If, however, they were able to give you your phone transactions and then you were able to choose to share back, the phone companies would be able to enter the similar economic spaces as Facebook and Google.

I can imagine making a choice to share a great deal of my data with Kayak. (I've grown to trust them more with my travel data than TripIt and find them more useful than Dopplr.) Kayak could mine, say, the aggregation of my communication records, my address book, perhaps even data collection that shows interests (Amazon purchases, search histories).

An automated data mining system might start with the address book, looking at where my contacts reside. It might augment that with phone records to identify places i make phone calls. If the bank was smart enough, it might be able to take other communication records (email, chat logs) cross that with the address book, and geo-locate other places i communicate with often and provide that to Kayak. Kayak then could notify me when there are good travel deals to places i communicate with frequently. That could be useful.

Let's say, then, that Kayak starts working with conferences and shows. My Amazon interests would show an interest in crochet; google searches might show an interest in Agile development practices. Kayak might be able to alert me that in the Orlando metro area (where i have extended family) there's an Agile conference and a yarn show, and here are the good travel deals for the time period around the show. Kayak would know what my travel preferences for flights would be, and wouldn't show me flights, say, that left the west coast after noon (although might provide me with information that i could see other deals at some link).

The point is that Google and Facebook have this sort of information to mine already. The Personal Data Bank folks are advocating putting it in individuals' hands and allow us to change the mining from "stalking" to both a place where the individual has control and where the data can be more valuable to the companies.