In through the out door

Not that long ago I was on my way to see a client at night at their farm in a rural area east of where I live. When I was writing down the address I transposed two numbers on the location for the township road that this person was on. Instead of driving to number 264131 on the township road I drove to 246131 instead, about twenty miles from where I should have been. Of course it had to be about -30C at the time.

Once I got that straightened out I got to the right place about fifty minutes late. I felt very dumb about doing that especially since when I have the right address I am pretty good at finding a place and I rarely get lost. I really dislike being late and I strive to be on time. Being late for an appointment really bothers me.

I admit to having some infrequent dyslexic moments and sometimes I really have to watch myself. There are times I can look at a set of numbers and I will write them down with two of the numbers reversed and no matter how many times I look at what I incorrectly wrote it looks absolutely right to me. I once had an instructor in a university class tell me I wrote "backwards" as some of my thoughts on paper seemed to be in reverse order compared to how someone would usually write the same thing. I learned to write and rewrite papers then get someone to proofread them. One of the reasons I sometimes do not write a lot on this blog is that I can write something and read through it several times and it will not look "right" to me.

When I was a kid I never told anyone about it simply because I never thought it was an issue. It only caused me occasional minor problems so I never thought about it much. To get better in school and to compensate I just tried to do things to help me get better. My father was one of those "no excuses" types so there was not a lot that I ever brought up to him. I am not blaming him, times were different then. So I tried to improve om my own. I literally read hundreds of books on anything and everything in my younger days. As long as it held my interest I would read it. Biographies and well researched history books are still favourites of mine. A few books I read several times because the first few times they did not make sense to me, the order of what I was reading seemed off. Upon repeated readings they would make sense. I mainly read to see how others wrote and pick up some cues from them and my spelling improved immensely. Reading also expanded my vocabulary and hopefully made me smarter. I was good, sometimes great, academically in school. I was not a very confident student.

Writing is something that I am still not all that comfortable doing even though I like to write some stuff for fun. A former aquaintance who knew about my blog told me a few times that when I did write something here it was badly spelled and poorly written. That slightly wounded me. I actually went back and reviewed a number of posts to see if the person was right. Upon review I could not find anything noteworthy to fix. 

Anyway I might try a bit more writing on this blog. We shall see. The problem with writing is finding something to write about.