January 25, 2003

I may not have taken a shower or brushed my teeth today, but I did find time to balance my checkbook, reorganize 18 cubic feet of storage space in two different rooms, rescue a collapsing cabinet, fill 3 boxes for the garage sale, scrub out the recycling bins, add access vents to the skirt covering my living room storage & finish them w/ blanket binding, mulch the muddy expanse where my deck used to be, download the forms I needed to fill out, find a source for an inexpensive and truly awesome German Shepherd needlepoint kit, research my next lawn mower and beat off twice! Ha! Top that!

All this on a cold and rainy day with the temptation of not one but two Omen movies which just arrived from Netflix. A weaker person might have succumbed to the siren song of couch and remote.

Not to say I'm not weak; I am. It's just that for the last several days, I've had this lingering stomach ache. Usually that means I'm freaked out about some as-yet-unidentified stressor, so I figured paring down & cleaning my house to the degree that I don't have to walk through it sideways would soothe and clarify my subconscious enough to help me cough up whatever's inducing the tummyaches.

And I'm having the action movie dreams again, those restless life-and-death treacherous espionage thriller dreams that are fascinating enough to make me sleep forever and leave me waking totally agitated and exhausted.

I think of myself as levelheaded enough to deal with stress more or less up front, so I find it woefully annoying that I have to put up with a week or two of stomach aches and restless dreams before I can ever figure out what's driving me to distraction.

My problem is that I never learn from my mistakes. A long time ago, I should have started recording the outcome of the digestive/dream trauma cycle. If I'd tracked the last decade--or even the last couple years, I'd be able to fashion myself a little boardgame spinner of possibilities so I wouldn't be completely at a loss.

Ah, well. Should coulda woulda.

Lately, I've taken up the habit of counting my blessings. Actually counting them, 1, 2, 3, usually as I walk the dogs. It started on Thanksgiving. I was driving to Houston to visit my folks. My family has never done anything as corny as going around the table and announcing what they're thankful for. But my car stereo had been stolen the week before, and without anything to sing along to (the dogs, if no one else, seem to enjoy my singing), I started ticking off, aloud, what I was thankful for, searching my brain for as many things as possible, stretching it out as long as I could. Thanksgiving came and went, but the exercise stuck.

Besides, I love counting. I know that sounds simple, but I really do. I count everything. It calms me. I recommend it (counting generally, and your blessings specifically).

Start with people (current & past) and pets and places and skills and move out from there. Even on a particularly grim day, you can be thankful that avocados are on sale for 2/$1 and that there's not a rabid raccoon chasing you and that you've seen the sun set across the desert and that even if the rats do outsmart the traps, at least they stay in the kitchen.

1.12.03