I have at last received a reply from the post office about the fact they keep marking on the envelopes that there was no access that day, not just for one day but the worst was a whole week. Since I have been here now for over 6 years everyday of the year, I have had enough of their laziness in just doing their job. The reply was that there is a fault with the lock on the door to the street, yes the lock is stiff, but they had missed one important point, to find out the lock is stiff in the first place, they have to first press one of the buzzers and then and only then they would be given permission to enter our close. The lock is stiff but if they had had a problem, they would have been told to give it a sharp push, I give them 1 out of 10 trying to get away with it but 0 out of 10 for true effort of brain power. I guess it will take another week to hear back from them but I can’t wait for the next excuses. I don’t often go head to head with companies these days, but it used to be something like a sport for me at one point. I am one of those people who hate two things, junk mail and junk phone calls, I am therefore listed as someone who should receive none, their arrival used to set me off on my quest to annihilate it once and for all. Every single one would be met by a phone call from me requesting that I was removed from their databases, it did take a couple of years but I very rarely now get any of them, even from companies I have accounts with. I really can’t believe that anyone actually responds well to junk mail, I don’t think I have ever even looked at any of it, including all the take away menus, they all land up in the same place, the bin, without a second glance or even being opened.

It is one of the major changes in myself that I have noticed in the last few years, there is something about the way I live that has made me far more laid back about almost everything. Junk mail for example doesn’t get me running to the phone any longer, I just stick it in the shredder, it isn’t worth getting angry about, regardless how annoying. I know I have said before that I now accept things like the house not being pin perfect, but it goes even deeper than that. If Adam was late coming home, even by as little as 15 minutes and he hadn’t phoned me, I would phone him to make sure he was OK and to find out what was going on, now, well it is closer to an hour before I am compelled to call him. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s more that I know he is probably fine and my worrying about him over nothing, is just stupid. It is though a huge change in my personality, to have gone from controlling my environment to perfection, to being relaxed and unruffled, well I wouldn’t have thought it possible. I can’t put my finger on what has actually made the change in me, or why it has happened, other than having to learn that I just can’t do everything. I am now relaxed about almost everything, even pain, getting upset about a muscle going into spasm isn’t going to help. I don’t even usually let it show on the surface any longer that I am in pain, yes I can’t help reacting mildly, changing position or tensing some other part of me in reaction to it, but I make no sound or drama about it. There are occasions when it catches me out, but the next second there is normality and life just goes on. I guess that has become my entire attitude to life now, it goes on. I guess that we all mellow in time but in just a few years I have turned into someone I wouldn’t have recognised a few years ago and stranger still, I like the new me.

Not long after I went to bed last night I found myself once again with bits of me with a strange strong heat, if someone had put an ice-cube in my hand not only would it have melted, it would have bubbled and turned into steam, yet when placed on my stomach, they seared as thought I had been outside playing with snow. There is never any logic as to what nerves actually do when they want to, but I really don’t get this dramatic temperature changes, I can only guess that the nerves are just reacting incorrectly and when given another signal at the same time like touching other parts of me, they then react wrongly to that as well, but it is so weird! Right now those same two hands are both tingling and numb at the same time, add in the cold finger tips and the rest of my hands at normal temperature, one of the classic combinations and not the best for typing with. I hate to tempt fate, but to be honest it has always been my nerve reactions that have amused me the most through out all of the years of strangeness, I just can’t help wondering what next.

I have to say that ‘what next’ question doesn’t just apply to my nerves, the previous 12 months have seen me go through loads of medical tests and to have add even more illnesses. Since the diagnosis of my COPD everything seems to have settled into a plateau, I’m not complaining, please don’t think that, but with all the dramas gone it just feels a little odd to not have an appointment letter sitting beside me, with all the horrid palaver of getting there hanging over me. In a strange way I had become used to the fact that I was about to have more test, more prodding and poking and more bad news. It does somehow just become part of your life, just like going to work or something, you do it almost without a single thought other than here we go again. Here’s to a year of peace and quiet without any huge drama’s, I suspect thought that that is just a little too much to expect.