Lists

Anemometer has been on Pacific time since I signed up for a blogger account, so the time stamp on my postings is three hours off from my local time. Since I move around so much, I didn't see much point in changing it. And of course during NaBloPoMo, the time difference gives me three extra hours to publish. Sneaky, I know.

Once again I'm working through a To Do List, things I should do before I leave for San Francisco on Friday. No matter how well I plan, the last 24 hours before I leave home are always spent in a mad rush. If I start making a list a week or two in advance, things usually go well.  I'm not terribly confident at the moment.

Funny thing, the list making. While it's an effective tool for me, I do realize that it can let those memory muscles atrophy. How many phone numbers have you memorized since you got your mobile phone? Which reminds me of an article I read a few years ago on Excite Japan entitled IT Boke ("boke" means something like senility). It said that doctors were reporting a significant increase in the number of people who were coming to them with memory issues. Previously this problem was limited to folks in their forties and fifties (and older), but recently it was affecting people in their twenties and thirties. The article stated that this had a lot to do with people no longer writing things down by hand or having to remember things on their own. Everyone in Japan has a mobile phone and uses a planner, most of those also electronic. And now that most things are written using word processing applications, there's little need to remember how to actually hand write all those complicated Chinese characters.