Sunday, May 31, 2009

Helpful (urgh!) Gremlins

Y'know, Wonder Woman—or rather, Steve Trevor—used to have a gremlin friend called Glitch. (Oh! I despised him!) (And the gremlin, too.)

But gremlins can show up in real life. In one of her books Shirley MacLaine recalls a lost purse. She searched everywhere for it, twice, three times. Finally hours later it turned up, right where she'd been looking hardest.

I used to attend Psychic School in Durham. That's my diploma hanging on the wall over there. Fascinating stuff, though sometimes my eyes glazed over. My instructor, Sue Burton (she moved to Ohio quite some years ago and disappeared off my radar screen. Hey, Sue, wherever you are! You show up in my books! Of course I had to split you into two characters...) (for some reason my googling finally got a hit. There she is: Sue Burton-Hidalgo!!!), took pains to teach us useful things like dowsing.

We even had a guest speaker one time—fascinating lady! She'd been diagnosed with something like three months to live, so she read up on her disease, determined that she'd be one of the extremely rare survivors in that there was a bell curve of disease fatality that never quite got down to finishing everyone off, and compiled a list of healthy things to do/supplements to take, etc. that she sat down with every day. Going down the list, she dowsed as to which things she had to do that day to remain at optimum health.

Twenty years or so later, she still loved giving dowsing lessons.

Let's see, I'd just gone into a dash somewhere up there—So anyway, this guest speaker said she often got to the point where she was really into her dowsing where she could tell results without waiting to see the results of whatever method she was using.

Sue often said the same thing. As time went by, I often noticed this effect in my own work. Why, just in the past few weeks I could always tell ahead of time when the 'Canes were going to win or not.

Yesterday morning I determined that I wanted to paint this weekend, and that I just could not paint without listening to the CD that had arrived last Tuesday, "Zen Classics." That day I had opened the mailer and put it... where?

I searched. And searched. And searched. Okay, the place is a mess (as usual; I'm trying to change my ways!) but I knew it had to be on one of the top layers of Junk.

But I got to the point where I was searching through all levels. I knew it had to be either in the kitchen, on the dining table, or in the living room on the coffee table or mantle. Still, I searched everywhere.

And eventually I realized that Someone was hiding it from me.

Okay, Someone wanted me to clean a bit. That was fine with me. So I cleaned a while and searched. Nothing. Cleaned a while and searched. Zippo. Etc. Etc, taking it easier knowing now that I'd find it when Someone wanted me to find it.

Finally tonight I decided to fill up a few trash bags, ready to take down to the dump tomorrow. Got some recycling together, put through a load of laundry and dishes, turned around...

There it was. Top layer. Dining table.

I have since put the CD set next to the newly-excavated CD deck, where I will be able to find it easily in the next week. After that it gets filed in my new QVC CD super-efficient-CD/DVD storage box.

So does this happen to others? Any other gremlins out there?

And has anyone run into Glitch?

1 comment:

EilisFlynn said...

Everyone has a gremlin, I think. My gremlin's not quite like yours, though, because once that item gets hidden in my household, it doesn't get found for YEARS, if at all. Case in point: my sunglasses. If that gremlin thinks I'm going to clean to find 'em, it's getting a surprise, because I'll just go buy a new pair!