routines are when your mind slips into neutral to accomplish the tasks du juor. my relatives worked in a factory, performing the same task over and over and over .. for years. not me. now that I've had to learn all about Alzheimer's disease, the issue of routines has become .. well, interesting. Many scientists seem to think that a key to preventing Alzheimer's is to avoid routines. Heck, even putting your shoes in a different place in the closet can help (makes your brain kick into gear).
aaanyway .. here begins The Day: first thing: turn off the alarm. (wait? did i forget step zero? decide whether I wanna whiz!) second: let the dogs (yes, plural) outside to defecate. next, fetch the newspaper. next, mosey to the refrigerator to grab some liquid with which to take my 2 pills (aspirin, vitamin E). then, My Routine Is Disrupted; you see, today (and Tuesday) are trash days. but since it's Friday, that means it's also Recycle Day. so, i had to add 2 (oops .. 3) additional items to The Routine (1-take out trash; 2-put out recycles; 3-check+clean cat litterboxes).
Miles (born 1997) arrived Wednesday night for a visit
Beta (the wonder dog) probably born about October 2000
trash day means cleaning Samantha's litter box and adding the "artifacts" to the trash collection. Pandora is still spellbound by her LitterMaid, but even that must be checked once a week. I use clumping litter in both, which makes cleanup easier (not to mention that I read somewhere that cats prefer clumping litter). Not sure what poor sap did that survey, but I'm glad it wasn't me.
My snail mail arrives early (sometimes by 9:30) and I like to fetch the incoming mail soon after it arrives (identity theft paranoia?). Staring at the mailbox never struck me as a good use of time, so I prefer a signal. Most days, I will have one piece of outgoing mail, so I feel safe putting it in my unlocked mailbox, raising the flag, and looking outside every hour or so. Such is the case today. I have one of those dorky "PC rearview mirrors" on my monitor, but it's not good enough to see the postal worker parked at the mailbox.
I purposefully kept one PC at home Microsoft-only. I felt it gave me a better appreciation for what 95% of the world has to go through. Patch management, weekly virus updates, cleaning the Registry, defragmentation, disk cleanups, and all the other joys which comes from being both a system administrator and a user.
I started to download the Eudora email client, but didn't. That would be admitting that Microsoft's Outlook Express wasn't The Answer To All My Email Needs. I kinda sorta miss Mozilla's tabbed browser: MS-IE has yet to catch up. Microsoft no longer sees Netscape (or Opera, or other browsers) as competition, so why add features (unless they're trying to sell me an upgrade)? It's part of the yin-yang of software. Eventually most software becomes so overbloated with features that it collapses of its own weight. Trying to predict the interaction of the application's own components (DLLs, etc.) is difficult enough. Then factor interaction with other applications, and it quickly mutates to a Calculus problem.
Yesterday, I installed SharpReader (an RSS Aggregator). I remembered this morning, when various notification windows begin rising and falling near the Windows taskbar clock ("3 new items on foo.bar"). By default, once an hour it checks for new ATOM.XML or RSS.XML (or whatever) files on web sites to which I subscribed. It's not as bad as that Yahoo! bell, so I suspect I'll learn quickly to Deal With It. Well, as long as it doesn't disrupt my routine.
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