Maybe I'm being ageist

but it seems that, as you age or, perhaps more particularly, get beyond a certain age, your ability to deal with a variety of issues at the same time lessens or leaves altogether. You become focused on one thing to the detriment of everything else. Multi-skilling is having a cup of coffee in your hand when you walk into the lounge & that's the extent of it. Turning the light on as you do so is a task too many.

It's why I'm concentrating on the cyclone to the exclusion of everything else. I haven't put other things on the back-burner; I've taken them totally off the stove. I excuse myself partially because it's our first up-close-&-personal cyclone, so time is naturally taken up gathering up & putting away anything that might go flying in the wind, checking that there are torches handy & enough batteries to support them & the transistor radio if the power goes down, that there's enough bottled water, & a firstaid kit, &&&. But instead of resting secure in the knowledge that everything has been done that can be done & moving on to something else, I find myself checking the tv news channels, the weather channel, Google news, the BoM radar maps.

Balls in the air. Singular. In the past, I have accused myself of procrastination, of putting things off because I'm too lazy to do them. But I'm starting to realize that it's not laziness, just an inability to handle more than one thing at a time. It's not the enthusiasm thing where you're so caught up in something that you let other things slide. Rather it's as if whatever task you take up has accompanying barriers that slide into place & do not allow room for anything else to slip in. I do not ring up & make a hairdressing appointment because I'm busy putting together the print edition of Otoliths. I don't do the print edition because I'm busy putting together the next electronic issue. I don't do the electronic issue because I'm busy posting to this blog. I don't post because I'm working on a poem. I don't work on a poem because it's my time for ringing the hairdresser & making an appointment. Which will then exclude.....

The first fingers of rain have reached out & touched us, the wind is gradually increasing in speed. I check the current radar images. The curve of the cyclone can be clearly seen, & we're now affected by the bottom edges of it; but its last projected track still has it staying a distance off the coast &, if that continues, it'll mean more & heavier rain for us, greater wind strength, but minimal impact.