Mind matters

Yesterday I learned two new words from my dear friend Peter Modin!

Marmaladedropper – MAR.muh.layd-draw.pur n.: Something that is extremely shocking or upsetting, particularly a newspaper headline or article.

So shocking it makes you drop your marmalade!

Defenestrate -dee-FEN-uh-strayt, transitive verb: To throw out of a window.

Thanks for those lovely words, Peter!

For the “Bye bye step counter”. We all have step counters here at the office. We’re competing with the other offices in Sweden in number of steps! But today… mine went diving into the toilet, right after I had done nr 1 and not yet flushed. I managed to pick it up, and then throw it away I had to touch it to get it up. It felt warm. Not a pleasant sensation!

Now I have to buy a new one!

Have you had the feeling that your life isn’t at all what it’s supposed to be? That you’re waiting for some life turning event to change it? Or some highly belieavable guide, who knows you and your life situation, to point you along the path you’re really supposed to be walking?

Well, I myself get that a lot. I haven’t resolved if there really is a path that I’m supposed to be walking, but of which I’m currently unhappily un-aware of, or if it’s just my fantasies trying to pull me away from a grey and bleak reality.

Whichever it is, I’ve tried to start a new habit, and that is to notice things going on around me and try to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. This going along the trail of thoughs that starts with the following words:

There Are No Ordinary Moments

I usually try to remember this as TANOM.

Here are some “ordinary” things I’ve observed today:

• A dog that sounded like a duck
• 12 pieces of sushi
• A lady walking by and the cord to her vacuum cleaner came undone and trailed after her
• The first rays of sunlight hitting the top of a tree
• The sound of leafs as my bicycle tires ran over them
• A tree with a leaf skirt
• A friend with her bicycle lock missing
• A man with a table on wheels came unexpectedly whirling from behind a corner

Have you noticed something “ordinary” today?

My colleague, Daniel, just showed me the insides of a product we sell to our customers. The first picture shows how it’s supposed to look. The second one how this particular object looked!

Notice the little yellow bulb that is supposed to be there?

Well, in the broken one it just isn’t there. And it left a dark brown smudge on the power socket next to it when it left! The magic blue smoke had left the building…

Okay! So I’m several days into one, actually two, 30-day trials!

30-day trial: No sugar
The first one is to lay off sugar for 30 days. Two weeks ago I discovered that big chunks of the days I was feeling irritated and annoyed/angry. When I introspected about why I was feeling this way I realised I had been eating large quantities of sugar in the form of candy, chocolate, cookies and other sugary stuff every day!

I’ve previously discovered that if I keep a large daily intake of sugar, I become irritated and annoyed/angry. So I decided to take a break from sugar (white refined sugar that is) all together.

I started this trial on 8:th of october and it will end on tuesday 6:th of november.

I feel a lot better generally when I lay off the sugar! Instead for candy and stuff, I’ve been eating chips and cheese balls. The best part is that I only have to eat small amounts of them before I’m fed up. Some days the sugar craving is real bad, but I just have to remember how I usually feel after eating lots of sugar to stave it off.

After these 30-days I’m going to try to limit my intake of sugar to one day each week. That’ll be my C-day! Candy-day! Yay!

30-day trial: Going to bed at 10 pm
This one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Finally I’m doing it! I’m going to bed at 10 pm. That means that the lights are out and I’m safely tucked in and ready for some sleep at that time.

I started the trial on monday 15:th of october and will finish it on tuesday 13:th of november.

The first thing I noticed when I started with this was that people in my building didn’t go to sleep that early. And since my appartment has real thin walls (and ceiling and floor) I could hear almost everything that happened around me.

The worst part was that the girl in the appartment below me had a really bad cold! She and her boyfriend would get to bed around 22.20, when I almost had fallen asleep, and she would start coughing real bad! Her boyfriend, who has a really deep voice, immediately tried to console her, with his really deep voice, and they did this every night! Combine this with the fact that I like to go to sleep lying on my stomach with one ear to my madrass, which lies directly on the floor, and that their appartment functioned like a gigantic resonance chamber, and you have a great recipe for disaster!

This gave me a lot of chagrin the first days, until I resolved it by using the stereo and head phones to block out the noise

I’ve managed to go to sleep every night around 10 pm 0for the past week! One time only did I go to sleep later, at 10.02 pm!

I’m not sure if it has any effect on me, except that 8 am isn’t any longer that early in the morning. But I’m sure it will give me some more food for though concerning my sleeping patterns and sleeping habits!