Per Mission

In a marriage or other serious relationship,  serving the partnership is a priority; you can't just go make major decisions without consulting the other partner.
A partner who does that is signaling that the relationship has changed, although the other partner may not notice or may hang on hoping. Hope can be cruel!

But now that I am on my own, I have to learn to make my decisions without the customary consideration of how it affects Kris. This sounds stupid to write after all she has done, but feelings and habits are not rational.

I thought of this on the bus this morning,  as I chewed over filing for an extension in my federal income taxes. It'd be nice to have that behind me, but they are especially complicated due to the divorce. I have to apportion the assets (income, withholding) from before the divorce...each of us gets half... and that post divorce. This would not be so bad if I had access to my old spreadsheets but the crash and switch to Mac means I have to learn how Mac Numbers works. I had hoped the lazy way ...TurboTax...would do the trick but, although it seems much better than when I first tried it tears ago, it still doesn't do divorce apportionment.
The logical thing to do is filed an extension. I've done it before and it's no big deal. I thought of telling Kris and realized I don't need to: it is nothing to me. I am sure she counts on me to do her taxes and if she brings the subject up I'll advise an extension, but it is no longer my mission in life to buttress our relationship.
Quite the opposite.

Ordinary Order

Until recently, my work was generally creative in nature. I was an applications programmer for decades, and while that meant that the end purpose of my creativity was generally chosen by others, within my work there was ample opportunity for creating newer, better and satisfying arrangements of code, visual design and documentation.
The work at WSBA afforded even more opportunity for creativity, since they had neglected whole segments of service .... a little too much opportunity, it seems, for the IT Department, shamed at yet another failure of theirs that I had warned of, eliminated my position (and continued their career of expensive failure.)
I learned then, at age 50, on the street, the creative opportunity of starting over. Ageism is a thing and its only comfort is the sure knowledge that the young managers who are afraid to hire someone older than themselves will one day meet it themselves. Fortunately I put together a business that by hook and crook covered my expenses ... until Kris decided she loved alcohol more than me and I had to start covering the mortgage alone.
As a stopgap, I turned to one institution that by law is blind to grey hair, and am now working for the government being a cog. I enjoy serving the people who call for help; it's satisfying when I can get them WHT they need and when I cannot at least there is the consolation of providing dignified and respectful service.
But it's not creative. By design, and appropriately so, it is highly, highly regulated. It is perhaps the most ordered environment I have ever experienced, and that in itself is an experience.
This orderliness leaks over into the rest of life. I now have only a certain segment of free time between work sessions and to this rigidity must adapt, for a while at least. I ask myself: Is this how most people live? 
"ORDINARY" comes from the Latin "ordo" meaning rule, regulation or structure. Ordinary life was originally that according to a set of rules, only later coming to mean unexceptional or typical. This new ordinary for me appears to be the rule for most.
I may have missed a lot of opportunity for understanding by not experiencing the non-creative life. I might never have understood this until compelled to experience it. This is wonderful! It's always something new around, even when it is the ordinary.

Glasses adjustment

I feel today was very fortunate. I located a lot of good materials for the online store set them up for shipping before bed. My housemates suggested we do milkshakes at Full Tilt, something I never think to do on my own, but was always turns out to be worth it! But the greatest piece of luck may have been whacking my glasses while lifting some heavy boxes. This is through the glasses so out of shape that I absolutely had to go to an optometrist to get them adjusted. The adjustment went swiftly and without any problem, and they would not even charge me the result was like getting new glasses. Frames had gradually bent over the years and really had not been quite right for a long time, but I had not thought see if there was an optometrist at the Alaska Junction, but course there is! What had started out as an unfortunate accident turned out to be a fortunate adjustments I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned from that, if only I knew what it is