Factory Reset

I’ve written a few times before that in the autumn, the trees in our Enchanted Forest surround us with various shades of gold to such an extent that it feels as if the air itself is golden. I’ve tried to take photos but I’ve been unsuccessful. I think that some forms of beauty cannot be captured in photos. However, I finally was able to take a photo that does pretty good at showing what I’m trying to describe. I used no filters or anything. Isn’t it beautiful?

The day after I took this photo, many leaves fell and the trees became noticeably barer.

The temperatures have been very warm–in the low 60s–but we are still getting rain, rain, rain. The chicken yard is saturated with water and I sink deeply into the muck with every step. I told EJ yesterday evening that if it continues to rain, I’m going to need waders. I’m surprised the chickens don’t sink into the muck, one by one, and disappear forever. I checked the forecast and it’s going to rain until Sunday evening…when the temperature plunges and the rain switches over to snow. It will soon be time to get out my warmest winter coats, hats, mittens, and boots.

Yesterday morning after we returned from EJ’s gym session at the hospital, I went out to the coop to remove the unhatched eggs from the maternity ward/nursery. I expected it to be a very dirty job so I wore my oldest ripped jeans, thinking that a hazmat suit might have been nice. I took a cat carrier with me in case I needed to put the Mama hen and her two chicks in it while I cleaned their area. I also grabbed an empty poultry feed bag from the garage as I headed out. Once in the coop, I laid the feed bag on the floor to kneel on because I didn’t want to risk kneeling in chicken poop. I actually didn’t need the cat carrier because Mama and her chicks moved aside as I reached far in for the unhatched eggs that were buried in the straw. Once I had retrieved the eggs, I put clean bedding in the shelter and replenished their food and water. The job only took a couple minutes and I didn’t even get dirty–although I put the jeans in the laundry anyway, just on principle.

Once each week for the last two or three weeks, I’ve been finding large dog treats in our mailbox. I thought the letter carrier was leaving it for Hannah, which was sweet, so I made a thank you card and put a (human) treat inside. On our way to EJ’s gym session yesterday, we paused to put it in our mailbox. When we returned from the gym, we noticed a dog treat wedged in our neighbor’s trash receptacle–the one the trash pick-up people provide. Then, suddenly, I realized that the trash people had left the dog treats and our neighbor who doesn’t have a dog had been putting them in our mailbox for Hannah. Our neighbor had tried to tell me last week that he was doing that. He shouted it to me while he was standing a ways off in his driveway. I couldn’t actually hear him–only a couple words like “trash” and “mailbox.” I didn’t want to go closer to him to better understand him because Hannah is such a handful around unfamiliar people and I knew the neighbor had once been bitten by a dog similar to her. So I just smiled, waved, and shouted back “OK” and moved on. I wonder what our letter carrier thought when she found the thank you note and treat? LOL. I feel rather embarrassed.

My phone had been increasingly announcing that it was running out of storage. Apparently, this is a common problem with Android phones. When I got that message in the past, I researched how to gain more storage, which alleviated the problem quite a bit. But this time I kept watching my storage steadily decrease even though I had deleted app caches and junk files, had all the apps I could move to my SD card along with my photos, had my photos backed up to the cloud, deleted almost all my apps, and even used the 9900 code to delete the log/cat files. At best I gained only a few MB and my storage continued to decrease until my phone screeched that storage was 100% full and my phone might not work properly. The next step was to do a factory reset to return the state of the phone to what it was like when it was new. I live-chatted with the cellphone company and the technician verified that I had done everything possible, a factory reset was needed, and doing so would resolve my storage problems. After making sure that doing a reset would not totally screw up my phone, after making sure my data was backed up, I took a deep breath and did the deed. It wasn’t that bad. I lost very little data. I now have all my favorite apps re-installed and still have approximately 15GB of storage available. It was a huge success and I forgive my phone for being so troublesome.

My favorite birthday gift is making memories and we spend the whole month of October enjoying the beautiful autumn, which is why we declare that we celebrate my birthday for the whole month. As October draws to a close, I’ve been thinking of other wonderful intangible gifts EJ has given me. One that comes to mind is the gift of “being angry.” That doesn’t sound like much of a gift, but it is. I remember as a child that when I wanted to confront a sibling about something, my Mom would say, “Let it go. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t make it worse.” I don’t get angry often but unresolved hurts/problems would remain hidden where they would slowly accumulate into a bigger problem that when finally expressed would be explosive. I learned that expressing anger was hurtful and I hate hurting people–or being hurt when someone explodes at me. But one day EJ told me that he would prefer that I express my anger, resolve the issues, and move on. We rarely get angry and we are still careful about causing unnecessary damage when we are, but it’s very freeing and healing to be able to say “You hurt me when you did this” and have the other say, “Oh, I’m sorry! I’ll try not to do that again.” Or, conversely, to recognize that it was ME that was in the wrong because I misunderstood what the other said or did. Whether he is wrong or I am, the issue is addressed, resolved, forgiven, and forgotten. That is a gift.

I don’t enjoy it, but I don’t mind if someone confronts me about something. However, I find it very frustrating when a person confronts me but refuses to allow me to also confront him/her. I’m thinking of one of my sisters who, even as an adult, used to occasionally get mad at me and completely rip me to shreds. She vehemently listed all the faults, failures, and sins she felt I had committed and then she’d finish with, “Now that we’ve addressed this, let’s promise to let it go and never mention it again.” Fine, only SHE was the only one who aired her grievances. She never gave me an opportunity to offer a response, an explanation, or a defense. Finally, after many years of “letting it go and never mentioning it again,” I told her that I loved her very much but we BOTH needed to have an opportunity to air grievances because otherwise the issue is not really dealt with. It remains hidden, festers, and eventually would ruin our friendship, which I didn’t want to happen–and which eventually did. It hurts me deeply to be unable to address and resolve issues. Unresolved issues erode and ruin friendships. Relationships grow stronger when both are free to confront and clear up hurts and misunderstandings.

I think it’s very similar to having a phone whose internal memory is being clogged with hidden issues which eventually causes the phone to work improperly. Sometimes we need to delete caches, junk files, and other storage stealers–and maybe even do a factory reset–in our lives as well as our phones.

Just something I’m thinking about.