Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Ten Things of Thankful (TToT) bloghop. Created by Lizzi back in aught nine or ten (don’t rightly remember, other than it was a time ruled by curiosity and the boundless enthusiasm available only to the very young or the congenitally-innocent. We did things that weren’t merely new in a personal sense, it was new everywhere. Like European settlers in the New World, except behaving more like old and distant friends stopping for a surprise visit, as opposed to the novice bank robber, who, upon being hit one of those paint things, gets angry and tries to wipe the paint off the currency, even as his cohorts are running for the getaway car… and becomes angry at the customers instead, despite the fact that they were in line first and, besides were now sitting on the chewing-gum stained marble floors.)

Like that, ya know?

Kristi is our host. And we are fortunate to have a person with her qualities of charitable patience (without the condescension some people decide to add to how they relate to the world, which then makes the best of human qualities not quite as good. Like trying to eat the intricate decorations off a fancy anniversary cake only to find out its made of that non-sweet, sugar-stuff.*)

One of the truly remarkable elements of this particular gratitude bloghop surely is the availability of something called, the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules). It is a tool, an insight, a permission for all who would participate to allow their imaginations to sit at the planning table (as opposed to the card table set half in the living room, a suburban Coventry for those whose only crime is to be too short and too young to sit with the ‘adults’). With the BoSR/SBoR, we are encouraged to not only share the people, places and things in our lives and world(s) that cause us to experience gratitude, but to be fanciful and daring in our public expression of a list of Ten Things of Thankful.

1) Una

2) Phyllis

3) the Wakefield Doctrine

4) the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) and it’s truly unique concept of hypo-gratuitous items. (One of the reasons we’re still here, adding posts, years later, is that this is not your NVP version of gratitude appreciation. The TToT is grounded in the sharing of the people, places and things…. etc, but …but! it also recognizes that sometimes bad things happen. In all scales and import, everything from broken shoelaces to fatal illness. It (a hypograt) is a valid item to construct a TToT list.

5) might have baroqued that description of hypograts a bit much, but I have one to include in my list this week. The seeming wiping out of the stuff on my computer. That is a hypograt.

Short story convoluted: I took my computer into the shop for repair, ’cause it was slowing down to the point of futility. The people at the shop, they say, ‘Hey we might have to wipe out the drive to fix it** Don’t worry, you have a program that will totally back up everything so you can restore it all’. So I brought the computer home and turned it on and it was like one of those amnesia movies. It looked like my computer, but there was nothing on the screen that wasn’t on countless other anonymous, brand new, computers. My stomach rolled, but I called into the Savant Help Center and they continued the mantra, ‘Don’t worry. Click this and then click that to get the computer back. It may take a few hours.’ Three days later, after hours of moving the cursor a fraction of a millimeter to try and catch the progress bar in the act of moving… finally the moment came, it was done restoring. Except it didn’t look any different than it looked when I brought it home, (a living, breathing but scary-silent Timmy who didn’t ask, didn’t even look for Lassie). I called the Savant Help Line.*** For whatever reason, the person ended the conversation with a phone room sincere, ‘Sorry man, the stuff isn’t there to restore.’

6) Quick jump to Mimi. While all cohosts have this capacity, Mimi is for, me, the power of example of the ‘Transformation of Hypograts’**** Thanks M.

7) So, knowing that I have a choice, in the quality of the reality I exist, I sat down at my stranger-with-copper-disk eyes of a computer and found some peace in acceptance. Then, probably a necessary step, I blew on the spark of, ‘Most everything I had is out there in one form or another, maybe this is an opportunity‘. Finally, still feeling mostly-awful, I found the path to What-the-Hellville and threw out the alien stuff, ie FaceTime, a subscription to Herd Monthly and, even, the ‘Connect this to Every Other Device You Own’ app. Mostly, I restored my desktop photo, (the picture of Ola at the top of this post). I then started walking deliberately, (in a metaphoric sense), through the virtual world and managed to restore my Windows Office suite and my Scrivener and the other applications that seemed to have been lost. I felt good about doing that, and proceeded to reinforce one of the learning opportunities inherent in this TToT exercise and M’s examples, and appreciated what I had. Then, being a clark, I decided to try to get into the backup application. (It’s a combination of an external hard drive and an app on the desktop)…. I found the files I believed I’d lost.

8) Our having the good fortune to have, as part of our family unit, over the years, three perfect canines.

9) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE

10) Secret Rule 1.3

* not saying I ever tried to eat one… but it was not all that enjoyable

** people of a certain advanced tenure are encouraged to nod in restrained appreciation of the clever 70s cultural reference

*** hey, here’s a difference between the olden days and modern times… say you’re nervous or stressed the hell out and you need to make a telephone call. Today, if you’re stressed enough, you’ll like, totally misdial… shaky fingers will miss tiny buttons on your phone’s screen. Back in the day, you would’ve had the experience of your entire hand shaking as your dialing finger, trapped in a little circle on the metal dial. Then, when you’d had enough, you could try to get your index finger stuck in the next hole, to ride it around the dial

**** such an art, or more precisely, such a quality to have, that a person can transform a horrible negative into something that supports and engenders the positive. Still working on it.

music:

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