Scheduling Things on the Wrong Day

I wonder if this is a sign of getting better or backsliding?

I planned a picnic at Gallup Park for the ADHD group, date: Sunday June 13, time: 11:30 a.m. I made flyers and announced it on the meetup site. Then today, I added it to my calendar. Date: Saturday June 12, time: 11:30 a.m. Caught it right away and fixed it in my calendar.

So, does the fact that I put it in wrong mean I am not on top of things? Or does the fact that I caught it and fixed it mean that I am?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Sign at the Post Office

One of the things I read about and hear from other ADD people is that we often get paralyzed by choice. Or we overthink things. This is hard for me to handle because with a background in philosophy and theology, I take for granted that very few questions ever get settled “once and for all” and that many signs and symbols are “overloaded with meaning”, so I am used to thinking about everything from a dozen different angles.

Which didn’t make this sign any easier for me to understand:

I went to the post office to mail a stack of comic books to a buyer on eBay. My package looked like this:

Is this a “box” or a “letter”? I asked 3 different people and they all said, “it’s fine, put it in the chute”. Makes no sense to me. Let me be more specific – it makes sense that it’s OK to mail the package there, but it doesn’t make sense that it seemed so obvious to them. Am I overthinking it or are they not thinking about it enough?

What I mean is this: I can read the Post Office sign to either mean “we only want boxes in this chute because of the way we handle them behind the scenes, anything without 6 sides and stiff edges in in danger of getting damaged” or “please don’t put your first class mail in this chute”. 

I ended up putting the package in the chute, but I left with another one of those “why is this so obvious to everyone else?” kind of feelings.

“Let’s Go Fly a Kite”

For some reason, getting a kite into the air has been on my mind for the last few weeks. Nostalgia? Too much free time? Avoiding working on my ADHD performance? Who knows?

Anyhow, I went shopping. They are not as easy to find as they used to be. I knew I wouldn’t find the old paper-and-balsa kites, but I didn’t expect them to all be $7.99 character ads. (How did I not expect this…?) 

Anyway, I found two of them on sale for $2.99 and bought them. Michelangelo and Sponge Bob.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kite bit the dust yesterday when my over-ambitious brain told me I could both play fetch with the dog and get a kite into the air at the same time. Don’t try it. It won’t work.

Today, I took the other kite out and launched it. After several cycles of gust-and-calm, I finally got it into the air.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. (I use that word a lot.)

The kite comes with about 3 feet of string. Well, maybe 100 or so, but clearly not enough. And, nobody in town seems to have kite string. K-mart and Toys R’Us sell kits but don’t have string. (What’s that all about?”

So I got the idea that I’d use some of my beading thread to extend it. A spool is good for a few hundred feet and it’s lightweight. What could go wrong?

Here’s a hint: 

 

The kite took off and sailed skyward in all its glory (as they say). I:spooled out the string (wearing leather gloves, I remembered those string burns) and let it climb and climb. And then, the inevitable. A simple turn, a swoop, and it buzzed the treeline. I tugged the string and watched it climb, clearing the treeline.

That worked the first three times. The fourth time was different. The wind shifted and the kite went into a nosedive. I started reeling it in, but it was too high and moving too fast. I wound as much of the thread in as I could and finally had to just close my eyes and snap what was left.

All in all, it was probably up for ten or fifteen minutes. That’s plenty. Besides, if it hadn’t crashed, I’d probably still be standing there, thinking “where else can I find more string?”

I’ll check the tree the next few days to see if it frees itself and I can give it a decent burial.