That I sometimes wander. Not just my mind, but my entire universe?
“Off on a tangent,” my Mother used to say about my personality quirk. I actually looked that little word up the other day, after I went on one. I sometimes wonder how these side trips happen to me, but not for very long. There is a danger in thinking to much, I might head off on another tangent. The funny thing is, most of the time I actually notice I’m headed off on that not so little tangent but elect to continue. Crazy.
OK, so I looked around the web for help. I found a definition on The Free Dictionary, you can read it your yourself. Funny thing, is says “to pursue a somewhat related or irrelevant course while neglecting the main subject.” Since I’m not sure about that, I check another source, UsingEnclish.com, which says “if someone goes off on a tangent, they change the subject completely in the middle of a conversation or talk.”
OK, so am I completely changing the subject, being irrelevant or somewhat related, or neglecting the main subject? You tell me:
I was happily entering data into my computer genealogy program the other day (well maybe I wasn’t that happy), when my mouse quit working. Annoying, but fixable. I grab another mouse, and plug it in, it works fine, but I see dust. Dust is not good, it makes me sneeze. So Granny thinks, “I will vacuum up this dust and stop my sneezing problems for five minutes!” As a begin, I see the cord monster:
Oh, no. I feel a tangent coming on, but a powerless to stop it. I remove all the cords, and move everything off the desk. I vacuum. I wipe, I cuss. The computer tower is dusty, so I move that, too:
The contents of my disk are now on the table. For those who didn’t know, TP is available every day here, tissues are another issue entirely. There’s a song, “Tissues are an Issue”. (Really, that’s just a tangent).
The desk is clean! There is no dust!
I remove the side of the computer tower, blow it out and vacuum up the dust. I take two old external drives and set them aside, I don’t use them anyway. I return the rest of the mess to my desk, dust free.All this stuff is very satisfying, and very Granny-like, but has ABLSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WTH A NONE FUNCTIONING MOUSE.
I’m doing all three, just for the record. It was fun, but it didn’t make the mouse work. I figured out later that the old mouse worked just fine, it wasn’t completely plugged into the port in my KVM switch. Why I use one of those is yet another tangent, which I will avoid.
Have a good day. Remove the dust. Watch out for tangents.
