{"id":27,"date":"2007-08-13T11:29:59","date_gmt":"2007-08-13T10:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/?p=27"},"modified":"2007-08-13T11:29:59","modified_gmt":"2007-08-13T10:29:59","slug":"ocd-and-a-great-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"OCD and a Great Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \"ocd2.JPG\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Its been a great weekend – and although busier than most – has left me feeling quite relaxed and at peace with the world, if not more than a little tired.<\/p>\n

On Friday evening the better half and I ventured down to the coast and met up with some friends and some boats to watch the ‘end of Cowes Week’ fireworks. With the wind very much present in my hair, a sunset to rival most others, and a ready supply of cake onboard, it seemed a truly\u00a0perfect\u00a0way to end the week\u00a0as the five of us watched rockets take to the air and erupt with a satisfying boom, sprinkling showers of impossible colour\u00a0over the water.\u00a0Thanks to Simon for making it possible (you can take a look at the photo’s on the gallery).<\/p>\n

Saturday saw a swift turn around as we headed back home for a much needed shower and then out again to a BBQ. This was another extrodinarily good\u00a0combination of things I enjoy – namely BBQ food, relaxed sunny evenings and most of all new people.<\/p>\n

It has started to turn into a bit of a strange hobby of mine that I very much enjoy spending time in the company of people I don’t know so well. It is something that has developed over a\u00a0number of years since\u00a0I\u00a0became sufficiently confident to introduce myself and strike up conversation. Now I revel in the chance to chat with someone new and learn about their own take on life, what interests them, what inspires them, and what, if anything, we share as common ground.<\/p>\n

This weekend I met a lovely lady who not only works in a vaguely planning related job, but it so conspires that she too has ‘obsessions’ that verge on being OCD – needing labels on tins to face forward in cupboards as an example. I was greatly relieved by this as I have started to develop habits that\u00a0are\u00a0worryingly becoming\u00a0‘must do’s. One of which is keeping my desk at work neat. Increasingly I am becoming a ‘tidy person’\u00a0in general\u00a0–\u00a0 a little sad because these things shouldn’t matter, although I can let the odd misplaced object at home go. At work however my belongings are tidied with almost regimental order, not in the least my magazine files that need to be placed in alternate colour order (stripey box, red box). In addition to this the contents of each\u00a0file are stored in not only date order, size order\u00a0but also ‘frequency of use’. My colleagues often\u00a0marvel at\u00a0my bizarre tidiness – because as anyone that works in a planning would know –\u00a0planning offices\u00a0practically breed books,plans, maps, drawings,\u00a0surveys\u00a0and anything that can be feasibly use, be shaped in the form of or bare a distant relation to paper. Keeping anything tidy therefore\u00a0takes supreme effort.<\/p>\n

What’s more – I have\u00a0a ‘thing’ about pegging clothes on the washing\u00a0line in order – with underwear having its own exclusive side of the whirlygig. \u00a0I order the clothes in my wardrobe by colour. I’ve started to have trouble thinking over a problem without holding a pen in my hand. I can’t sit with a dirty plate in front of me for too long, I find it very difficult to go out without washing my hair, and having sharp objects pointing towards me is a no no.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to even get onto the need to place the shaving gel behind the mouthwash in the bathroom.<\/p>\n

Its a little worrying, although I was heartened to be told at the weekend that such habits add to our uniqueness, and as a result we are different and thus special people.<\/p>\n

I’m going with that.<\/p>\n

Its a darn sight better than ‘weird’.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Its been a great weekend – and although busier than most – has left me feeling quite relaxed and at peace with the world, if not more than a little tired. On Friday evening the better half and I ventured down to the coast and met up with some friends and some boats to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-habits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alittlebitdifferent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}