"I'm Still Here"

My son sent me an email last friday with that title, "I'm still here." Since I last posted, his battalion has lost 3 more young men and the situation continues to be very dangerous. But he is still there and now we only have 2-1/2 months left until Sweet Homecoming!

Thank you for all your comments and for being concerned. I haven't been able to post because as Asst. Director (and future dictator of the world), I have not had 5 minutes to get to Blogger. It was really stressful to not be able to blog and set your minds at ease. Every single time I went into IE to blog, something urgent/important/needing immediate attention (according to someone else's opinion) came up. Sigh. I may not accept the title of Dictator of the World after all when offered to me, I'm just too exhausted. It may not be worth all the trouble and hard work, especially if I can't blog. I also need to do my nails.

On a lighter note, I was thinking in my car on the way to work this morning. There are two places where I do my deep thinking: My car (while I'm driving, of course, not sitting there in my car parked in front of my house, even though it wouldn't be a bad idea), and my bathroom. Ok, before you snicker, or even maybe if you already snickered, let me clear up here that I do not mean on the toilet. I am not a dawdler and I get my stuff done in like 5 seconds and head to the shower. THE SHOWER is where most of my deep thinking takes place. So many, many times I've had a really serious problem and under the shower I've had the "Aha!" moment of what I would do to resolve it. And there is one more place I do deep thinking: in my dreams. Very frequently, when faced with a dilemma, I will wake up after having dreamed something and my dilemma will have been automatically resolved. The night before I may have thought "Ok, I have to do this and this to resolve this." And in the morning, after my dreams wrestled with whatever issue was at hand, I will wake up knowing that whatever I thought I would do last night was silly and improbable and I have no other option but to (Insert Resolutionary Action Here). And it has always been the right action. Go figure.

What amazes me is that I consciously do not have much to do with any of this. My conscious brain is not taking the situation apart and analyzing it, then listing the possible actions, then weighing the consequences of those actions and then picking the obviously more logical one. It does not follow that pattern. It is more of an "Intuition and Impulse" kind of process whereby my subconscious is the one that analyzes and probes and probably uses what I learned in Business Statistics eons ago to come up with the best practical solution to (Insert Difficult Problem Here). And whatever personal CPU is doing this leaves me (my conscious mind) the hell out of the process since it knows I would only botch it. Super.

Where do you do your thinking? Are you a logical thinker, a mapper-outer of problems and a weigher of results in an orderly manner? Or are you, like me, a free-association type of problem-solver? I am fascinated by this subject.

Enjoy the picture of the lovely Morning Glory. This is one of my favorite flowers. Here in So FL it grows wild everywhere. There is even one type of Morning Glory that has a smaller red flower that is absolutely beautiful. I have tried growing these vines on the fences around my home to no avail. Obviously, the seeds need to pass through a bird's intestines in order to fully germinate anywhere.

Looking forward to your comments here!!!