Endured

I’m sick today (picked up a bug somewhere), so I only just now went out to check for storm damage. Photo shows worst (but still not bad) damage. There were two other places where fence boards were pushed in—always in threes, which is kind of weird. My tomatoes seem to have mostly survived. I only saw one tiny branch totally wrecked, plus a bigger one that was bent—too soon to tell if that’ll kill the branch. No tomatoes were knocked off, but some baby capsicum seem to have been ripped off their plant. All up, not too bad. 😊 #firstbigstormof2018 #auckland #newzeland

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jan 5, 2018 at 11:27pm PST

Auckland emerged from the storm in one piece, and so did we. However, by the time the storm passed, I was already getting sick. Saturday evening I finally wandered out to look at the damage (photo above), but that was hard work. Now, I’m recovering, too. With a bonus epiphany.

The caption on the photo pretty much explains what I saw, but I was in no condition to do anything about it. We fixed the damage yesterday.

Meanwhile, on Sunday I felt awful. I don’t think I got out of my chair all day. However, I suddenly felt fine later that evening—the first time all year. Actually, it was the first time since late last year that I felt totally fine (we’ve previously established that I make that sort of New Year joke, but this has been my only opportunity this year; I wasn’t going to miss it).

I woke up during the night feeling yucky, so I took a couple paracetamol. When I got up a couple hours later, I felt okay again. I was fine until afternoon, when I felt yucky again, and popped a couple paracetamol again. Yesterday and today I’ve felt basically okay.

This has meant I just didn’t feel up to doing all the physical work I’d planned for my office project, so, as I said in my previous post, I did what I could. That meant sitting quietly on the floor sorting through all the unfiled receipts and statements I’d had boxed up, sometimes for years. Progress was slow, but steady.

In the process I came up with a solution. I took small plastic lidded bins I’d just emptied, and started putting the sorted papers in year older, the oldest on top. Each January 1, I discard everything that’s more than seven years old (so, anything from 2010 or earlier can go; one year from now, 2011 can go, and so on). This way I need three of the plastic boxes plus one small one for last year.

As I did this, I had an epiphany when I realised this will be the last time I’ll ever have such a huge job to do, and not because of a sudden change of behaviour to be thoroughly organised: We don’t get bills or statements in the mail anymore, so there will be very little to file. In fact, the current year’s file is just a plastic sorting folder, something I’ll never fill up during the year.

This also means I no longer need the filing cabinet where I filed bills and statements as they came in, but the bigger story there is that I’ll never have to sit and file receipts again—easily the houseold job I despise most of all and put off endlessly. Instead, I can take each folder, distribute the contents to the appropriate year’s box, and then the drawer will be empty. I DO have archival stuff, mostly samples of things I’ve done, that I want to keep, and the filing cabinet will be good for that, I think.

All of this has happened because nearly all our statements and bills are now online. I keep them on my computer, but if there’s a disaster and I lose them I can just download them again. This is one way win which this digitial age has made my life so much better.

And I probably realised all of this because I was sick. If I’d been 100%, I’d have just moved everything out of my office so I could reorganise it, but since I couldn’t do that, I decided to sort and purge stuff to be filed, and that gave me time to realise the fuller implications of what I was doing right then—and in the future. Sometimes being sick isn’t all bad.

In any case, I’m doing better. So is everyone else, too: The sun is shining here today.