20160225.0637

This morning got off to a shaky start. As I was getting ready to take my shower, an earthquake made itself felt at Sherwood Cottage. I have not yet seen relevant data about it, but I do not need to to know that I was disturbed by the event. There is something eerie about hearing toilet water slosh around without having dropped something into it yet. (I do note, however, that a toilet is a wonderful place to be startled. If there is any place worth being when the crap is scared out...) But that part was not the most annoying; after all, with Oklahoma being the world leader in seismic activity, the ground shaking has become a common occurrence in the area of Sherwood Cottage. No, what was worse was that shortly after the shaking stopped, the circuit breaker governing the electrical circuit that feeds the bathroom (and bedrooms) flipped off. I got to put my pants back on (I was getting ready for my shower, remember) and go out to address the issue. It was easily enough done, but it disrupted the easy, accustomed flow of my morning, and I have to wonder what effects it will have on me for the rest of the day.

I make such a comment because work continues today. I am still working on the freelance project noted yesterday, having put together between a fifth and a quarter of the project. Additionally, I have at least one tutorial meeting; students are clamoring for my attention in advance of a project being due in its final version tomorrow. I have a conference call this afternoon, as well, which will pay me a fair bit for my time and attention, so I will be sitting for it. And I have a short stack of papers to assess, collected from a class taught at the local community college. There is no shortage of things for me to do today, as is true of most every day, so I need to be in good form so that I may address the lot. This morning did not help me get off to a good start; I will do what I can to plow through, because I must, but I have my suspicions about how things will go.

In the past, I have been told both that such thoughts make me oddly superstitious and that they tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. (Admittedly, I was not told these things by the same people.) It seems to me, though, that the two are mutually exclusive, with superstition taking as irrational the belief that such forecasting or omen-reading as I might be thought to do is accurate and self-fulfilling prophecy necessarily noting that what is predicted happens because it is predicted. Neither offers a solution; ignoring the events of the day leads to discontinuity and a failure to learn, while self-fulfilling prophecy seems only to work in one direction: the unpleasant. (The Good Doctor addresses the issue directly in Prelude to Foundation. And I am reminded that I need to re-read the novel yet again--as well as the rest of the series it heads. Someday, when I have time and a bit more stable footing...)