I'm Borderline OCD

I make off the cuff comments sometimes about being OCD but I'm not. I thought I was for sure until I finished reading more information online about it today. The best example I can give to prove I am not OCD,  is my 'obsession' with an organized clean desk ... but my desk is not clean. LOL I will on occasion get the urge to clean every room in the house spotless but that doesn't mean I keep it that way. If I were OCD wouldn't I NEED to keep things spotless?? My mother was like that.


One picture of my computer desk would show that it is not clean but organized. It is not overwhelmed with stacks of papers and other things.  I still have the sorted photos in small stacks based on the hounds name, waiting to be scanned in a slow printer/scanner whenever I get the urge.


A few weeks ago I was looking at eBay to see what some old software was selling for plus some old VW maintenance manuals. I wanted to see if they were worth listing on eBay to sell. That small stack of software CD's and books are still there.


That is definitely not someone that has OCD.


What about my possible obsession with making spreadsheets for everything? These are the ones I keep updated:

• checkbook register w/auto payments all loaded for 2019
• monthly miles driven
• diet measurements
• income and expenses by category
• savings
• auto maintenance
• each hound has their own health log if sick or injured
• dental plan analysis
• grocery cost comparison with three stores
• internet data used
• personal health issues log
• best foods to eat sorted by research
• usernames and passwords
• daily electric kilowatt usage  (why?)

That looks a little excessive to me. You too??


When I thought about all the spreadsheets I do, I was positive that would make me 100% OCD ... but there is a fine line to determine that and I am straddling the fence.


The determining question on OCD is:  Am I doing those spreadsheets because I want to or do I need to?


Well almost immediately I would answer "I want to" but then when I think about what would I do if I lost all of them, deleted, totally gone .... would I want to rebuild all of them or feel like I need to rebuild all of them because I had to have them?


Looking at that question I feel myself teetering, trying to balance myself from falling on the other side of the fence into the field of OCD.


I begin to see that I MAY not be doing all of this data entry because I want to but because I need to. The thought of stopping the checkbook register and the income & expenses by category makes me anxious. Instantly telling myself "no way, I'll never stop those."


A friend tells me that until I do stop them, I am not totally free.


The others listed I could stop doing them, have stopped doing them but came back to them. Understand that not all of these are updated daily. Nor does it take a lot of time for a couple of entries IF they happen.


For some of them the data is not logged in until something happens, like personal or hound health issues and new online research on food, dog food or whatever.


Sometimes I think I keep doing any kind of spreadsheet because it keeps me kinda attached to the job I retired from, where I lived on financial spreadsheets. It's not that I need that to feel good or anything because I love being retired and would do it again the same way same time frame. It just makes me wonder why I have such a strong attachment to spreadsheets.


There are those I use to update all the time but they have been retired and filed in my documents folder on the computer. Things like analysis for dog food, trading cars, buying or selling my house, moving west ... I also had a spreadsheet that gave me a good view of my finances if I were to retire.


In fact that specific spreadsheet told me it was a great move to retire and I could financially afford it.


So really there is a fine line between being OCD. Just because I keep a clean car with nothing laying around inside of it does not mean I am OCD. It's just that I like having a clean car. Now if I were to clean that car daily .... then I would be OCD.


I might be organized (all DVDs, CD, are alphabetized) and downsized, but my life has a 'lived in' look to it. I mean I wear my jeans more than two days in a row. Whereas growing up my mom washed my jeans daily and had them back in my room before I opened my eyes.


I always wondered what she thought of that stuff she would pull out of my pockets before washing them, that did not include car keys?  Ha Ha


I want to look more into why my my brain is so scattered. Is it a getting older thing or have I been this way for years but never had the time to notice.


This post might be one of the few I have written publicly in seven years of blogging where I stuck to the same subject as the title.


What do you think of a post with no pictures?


Any thoughts or experiences with OCD?

All They Wanted Was Their Walk

Due to staying up too late watching baseball games on the west coast, this past week I've gotten up to let the hounds out and fed them breakfast every morning at 'their' normal time, but would go back to bed. Sleeping 2:30am - 7:00 am is never a good deal.

So this morning was no different and by the time the first cup of coffee was consumed the skies were clear blue and the sunshine had returned in full force. We start the slow climb to 76° these next few days.

The hounds ate their first meal as fast as ever and then immediately went into their 'stare down' wanting to walk. At 7am it was still too wet to walk anywhere, plus I was going back to sleep. Is that too much info?

As soon as that first cup was consumed both bloodhounds were standing like those bloodhound end tables you may have seen being sold on the internet. I knew they were ready to go ... wet ground and all. Yes ... it was still very saturated with all the rain we got yesterday. The higher we walked the wetter the ground became.

With the day off and all that rain to wash away the old smells and giving them new smells to explore ... the hounds were not only high energy, they were all over the place on this walk. So many places to go that they were almost in a frantic state as they scrambled back and forth along the walk.

At this point in time I was sure they had locked into something and would never stop running. Luckily I did not see any deer on the horizon but they had found plenty of the deer tracks to make them almost take off over the edge and down into the gully. A quick loud yell helped them change their minds.

Once again Stella had a mind of her own and I didn't even bother trying to get her to move. I just kept walking. Little did I know she would find another 3-4 places to stop along the way home.

They may have started running together but something caught Stella's interest ... over toward 'the no fly zone' which goes from the back of the field and anything past 10' toward the left if I am looking toward the back of the field.

This pose always confuses me ... since any bred of dogs don't see well, what does she see?? Or is it her nose that is getting her to pose like that?

Once again I was not going to even attempt to yell to come on because she was going to ignore me anyway. It's the DNA of the bloodhound breed. Sadie stood watch for a while, looking back at me and then back to Stella. She decided it was time to leave Stella and came running toward me.

As usual once Stella figures out no one was with her ... she came sprinting and just brushed up against my leg at full speed. I have to watch her up until the very last second and dodge if needed because she has at times hit me at full speed and didn't even flinch.

Living proof the walk was wet ... the Nike's are not waterproof.

I'll continue some reading about the online biz I mentioned yesterday but with weather being so nice today, I'll be outside most of the afternoon enjoying the weather. I need to get up on the roof today and check some spots after the high winds the other night. I also need to do a little more on that fence that I keep trying to repair.

Some things are changing in the online sales business that may make my decision pretty easy to not pursue it and continue to be a retired "slacker" ... which I can handle.

Amazon and eBay are in the process of making it impossible to sell products and have them drop shipped from the supplier. I always liked that type of drop ship business because I would have 3,000 - 10,000 items listed in both stores plus a separate website and would not have to spend a dime on inventory ... until a sale was made and then paying for only the item that had sold.

In addition to those changes, the NFL doesn't like their officially licensed merchandise being sold on Amazon and eBay, where it cuts in THEIR BILLION dollar business, so they are attempting to ban those sellers and threatening the suppliers. If one pro sport wins that battle you can expect the NBA and MLB to follow suit. Here is the article that discusses it. Sure counterfeit products are part of the problem but all of my suppliers are authenticated and legit.

So ... I am beginning to think it might be a lot nicer sitting back in the sunshine drinking ice tea after a fresh cut yard ... enjoying 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Downsizing is Never Ending

I'm not really taking a break this morning because I haven't even got started on today. It's 9:15am local time. I've had a couple of cups of Starbucks Columbian coffee, read blogs not only about RV traveling but those on my Feedly list that covers Mac O/S, Bedlam Farm, Sports, etc. Still after all of that reading, only 2-3 hours of my morning has slipped away. I'm not really a morning person but the hounds wake up daily about the same time (6:30am) and want to go outside for their morning trip. I am usually more productive in the hours after 12 noon.....so I have convinced myself today I can still get a lot accomplished even with a slow start.

After almost 2 months of retirement, I am finding out something my dad told me years ago after he retired ... "know what you are going to do for that day when you get up" ... maybe not a list of things to do but a good idea of what you want to accomplish. Otherwise it's like a few days I have had getting nothing done with a whole lot of hours spent on the computer either reading, commenting on forums, looking at spreadsheets or like yesterday .... moving all of my .jpg files from my "Documents" folder into a "Pictures" folder. I also downloaded them in bulk into iPhoto which was pretty fast, going through over 4,000 photos by "select all", import into the iPhoto library and clicking the box "not to import duplicates". This caught any photos I had not previously imported into iPhoto after my switch from Windows to Apple in October 2010.

Sad to think it was beautiful yesterday and I sat inside doing self-imposed computer work. I was still able to sit outside and watch the soft summer rain in the late afternoon. While smelling the rain, I pictured doing the same thing in places out west in my future travels.

Now to the title ... "Downsizing".  I did some major downsizing last summer and fall, taking 3 Hummer truck loads (cargo area) to Goodwill. That was mostly clothes, dishes, and silverware. Then this past winter I didn't buy anything that I did not need....zip, nothing! Yet as I walked around last night sorting stuff that was either going to be sold online or taken to Goodwill, I could not believe how much I had to get rid of, even after getting down to the basics last summer and fall. The clothes I used to wear for work can now be sold or donated.

Where does "stuff" come from?

What would you think if you went to see a house for sale and that house was fairly empty? Should it be all or nothing? Such as selling everything from books to desks and some furniture or should I leave the interior of the house looking full, as if someone really did live here?

I am past the point of giving things away....possessions that are left have more value than "free", plus any money earned from online sales is gas money down the road....that is the way I look at it. So it might be more time consuming taking photos and writing for sale ads for Craig's List and eBay but there is some potential dollars sitting around here for things I no longer need.

By the time potential buyers view the house, it might be pretty bare. Will that be a problem in getting the house sold? I'd hate to have to wait until after the house is sold, and then rush to sell things during the time period the house deal is closing. If for some reason the house has not sold by the time I leave to pick up the Escape trailer, I've always planned on leaving it empty for the realtor to show.

Usually my rule on clothing is if it has not been used in the past year or two, it is gone. I am having a hard time applying that same rule to my vintage 33LP vinyl record "unintentional" collection, or the 80's cassette tape collection and a lot of the CD collection. I can't remember the last time I even listened to a record album but find it hard to let them go. I have an interested Craig's List buyer for all the music I have. I think getting rid of all the cassette tapes and record albums is a good idea, while keeping just favorites of CDs and DVDs. I need to download the CDs into my iTunes or iPhone and play them that way.

DVD's are another story. Like all media changes, I never intended having as many as I do. Yes, I do watch some movies more than once or more than a few times over the years. Due to available hard drive space I will not be downloading them into any iMac or iPad to watch later.

Other than that, I don't have much left. Some of the furniture, the vacuum, the Rug Doctor carpet cleaner are spoken for when I leave. That only leave things I think I will store somewhere out west in a very small storage room, for when I want to set up a new base camp. Then I think forget that storage and sell everything. Whatever is left, I could have a weekend yard sale and I'm pretty sure most if not all would be gone.

As I write this post about downsizing and telling you what is left, I realized I really don't have that much more to get rid of.

Well, I'm going back to work loading stuff into the FJ for my recycling trip today, a possible future Goodwill trip and taking photos for my eBay and Craigs List ads.

Action Has Started

This week I was finally able to mentally let go of thinking over and over what I had decided to do or not to do. That seemed to help me a lot mentally of not second guessing my plans and have a clearer idea of what was taking place. By doing that and listening to what my mind was telling me, things have been falling into place and some things at a fast pace. I actually marked my calendar for the first time today, showing the date that I will send in my resignation at work. It will be a shock to many. I will then have my last day at the job two weeks later, then a week at home wrapping up loose ends and plans to be on the road by the end of that week.

It's been a really good few days. I have been in the action mode the past couple of days. I have re-listed my Mini Cooper and Chevy Truck on Craig's List. I will sit them down by the highway with For Sale signs after the snow stops flying but thought I might find a buyer sooner via Craig's List. I have also taken pictures of things I will be selling on eBay. I usually take pictures first of all of the things that I am selling, download them, edit them and then write the ads for each item to list it.  I've always had good luck with eBay and was a full-time seller, Power Seller a few years ago before closing my online business in 2010. So, it might take me a little longer to get the ads written but by Sunday night I plan to have the majority of my items up for sale either as fixed price or auction items.

Taking a tour through the house, there is not that much work to clear it out. I have downsized a lot last summer and this past fall, so now that has paid off. With what possessions I have left, I know exactly what is going and what is staying. The inside of my house is not barren but just the minimum things I needed to live in a house.

Remember when I have said that yard work and general house maintenance had gone from enjoyable a few years ago to a dreaded waste of time recently?  I cannot wait to get away from that. It's a never ending battle where there always seems there was something to do to the yard, house or one of the 3 vehicles, taking up most of my free time on weekends. I will trade all of that for just some of that maintenance being transferred to my rig as needed.

I will probably not talk names of states in my plans until I actually hit the road, but the "road trip" is all laid out and in the final stages of preparation.

The "momentum train" has left the station and is moving forward at a nice pace.