Coincidentally I realized that this is my 100th blog posting. Who would have thought I could keep it up for that long :-) …

It is turning out to be a pleasant winter in Buenos Aires is. Most days, the temperature is in the high 40s or low 50s. I wish there were more rainy days, or at least gray cloudy ones. But I guess I just have to suffer with the sunshine and clear skies.

This week, I decided to give myself a “reset” week. I use an application called Evernote. And over the years I have accumulated hundreds of notes and clippings from various emails and websites. All items I found particularly interesting at the time.

The idea of a reset week came from a guy called Paul Allen, who has created a business paradigm around the concept of “Get Things Done”. Often seen by its acronym GTD.

The idea of a reset week is to go through all of your paperwork and figure out what it is you need to do, organize your notes, organize your note taking process, and set up a way to track your projects / To-Do list. The point that he made, that struck me, was that when you don’t have this stuff organized, then you have a morass of information that is always niggling at the back of your mind. And if it’s disorganized and all in a bunch, how is it doing you any good?

He originally talked about a reset day, but I gave myself a week. The week turned out to be more realistic. But it has been valuable. I am going through all these notes and I am discovering a lot of valuable stuff. I also have to say that I have deleted about one third of the notes that I found. I think they fell into the category of “What was I thinking?”. 😊

I re-discovered some items I had clipped from the Art of Manliness website. It was a series of essays that he posted on the Spiritual Disciplines. I had clipped them, but never read them. And now, having read them, I really wish I had done so before. I have the link to them here below, but I can say that taking the time to read these was, at least for me, one of the most worthwhile things I have done for quite some time. There is only five of them. The one that I found that impacted me the most, was the one on gratitude. I have to say, I hear people talk about having a gratitude practice, and being grateful, and I am. At least, I thought I was. But one of my common failings is I have a tendency to skim stuff at a very shallow level. Always with the good intention of going back, but I usually don’t. In this case, on the subject of gratitude, I’m very glad that I read this article, slowly, and completely. And in fact, my plan is to read it again today. Well, horse, water, drink. All I can do is strongly recommend to anybody reading this that they take the time to click on that link and read those posts. They are extraordinarily worthwhile.

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/introduction-spiritual-disciplines/

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/spiritual-disciplines-gratitude/

And in addition, I took the opportunity to go through my Contacts. I had 755. I winnowed ruthlessly and am now down to 548. And I’m not done yet. Yay me!

A small world anecdote. About three days ago, I caught a taxi from my doctor’s office back to my apartment. And in the short conversation with the taxi driver I realized that all of this time I have been mispronouncing the name of the street that I live on. But I always used it as a location reference point for taxi drivers. The street name in question is Arrevalo. I always pronounced it with the stress on the ‘a’of ‘valo’. The stress is supposed to be on the ‘e’ of ‘Arre’.

We had a short discussion and I took the correction for the name on board and practiced it a few times. Then yesterday, from a completely different part of town, I flagged down a taxi, got in and for the first time trotted out my new pronunciation of the street name, and all the sudden the taxi driver turned around looked at me and started rattling away and after a few seconds, I realized that this was the same taxi driver that it corrected my pronunciation two days ago. What are the odds in a city the size of Buenos Aires? And, by the way, he complimented me on my pronunciation of the street name. 😊

And speaking of the doctor, it appears that I have some surgery in my future. It seems that the cyst that has happily taken up residence in one of my carpal bones, is occupying almost 50% of the bone. In addition, she says that there’s a possibility that the long-term cause of this was that my ulna was a little bit longer than normal and has been rubbing up against that particular carpal. So the solution appears to be that they will shave the end of the ulna so that it doesn’t impact against the carpal anymore, and they will clean out the area occupied by the cyst and fill it with bone shavings from a bone in another part of my arm. And if that sounds a little painful, it certainly made me cringe. She said that although it’s not an emergency it definitely needs to be done, and sooner rather than later. The amount of the bone that is occupied by the cyst makes it weak and prone to fracturing or splintering under a shock or undue stress.

Well, of course, I’m going to go get some second and third opinions on this. I wouldn’t actually hesitate to get the surgery done here except for the fact that this is my right wrist, my dominant hand, and I don’t really want to get an operation like that and then be living alone in Buenos Aires while I go through a long recovery before I can travel. So, I will wait until I can get back and do the surgery either in the Philippines or Thailand. I’m not hugely nervous about it, because pragmatically, I can see where it must be taken care of. No two ways about that. And all I can do is make sure that I get several opinions and locate the best orthopedic surgeon I can find to actually do the work. I am however, starting to practice doing things with my left hand. Brushing my teeth with my left hand would be funny if there was a video. 😊

Found a new restaurant today called Moshu. Very nice food but the size of a postage stamp. My friend Véro recommended it to me. Wonderful breakfast and cinnamon rolls. Apologize for the bad picture. I try to be discrete about taking photos that include other people. But still - a very nice place.

That is all for this week I think, and I wish everybody the best for the week ahead. And, without being maudlin, I would say that I am very grateful to all the people who read my blog. Thank you.