The problem with surprising myself is that sometimes my subconscious displays an appalling lack of imagination. I've been tracking my auto-surprises for a while, and they do tend to be mundane, so I've been waiting for something a bit more zippy to happen. But yesterday, I had an exciting episode, so I'm going to submit this praxis now, so fate is not tempted to throw anything more exciting my way. Here's the list of ways that I have surprised myself since this task became available:

1) With a totally unexpected appointment to go get an immunization at 8:30 am. Since I had totally forgotten about the appointment, I had already gone to work and had to turn around. Which resulted in being late, but no serious consequences.

2) By fixing an annoying computer problem with superstitious behavior. The symptom was that after a Windows update, whenever I tried to use any program and typed, the cursor would jump around and random things would happen (as if I was typing keyboard shortcuts). My superstitious behavior was to install a Logitech mouse driver, although I do not have a Logitech mouse or keyboard. I tried this because my last computer had one of these drivers and never had this problem.

3) By knocking over and breaking a glass that I had carefully and deliberately set down out of the way so that I would not knock it over.

4) By running in a 5K road race and being able to jog the whole time, even though I'm not a jogger and have never tried to run that far before. I finished in under 40 minutes and it was actually a reasonably pleasant experience.

5) With the range of odd new tasks that I've had to do at work lately, such as drawing robot cartoons and advertising on Craigslist. Things that I didn't expect to ever do, but were fun.

6) With an abrupt and violent allergic reaction to nothing identifiable. I was at the gym, pedaling on a stationary bike after doing some rowing, when I started sneezing uncontrollably. After about 30 sneezes in a row, I went to shower, in case it was some kind of chemical exposure. (This may be a hold-over from being a chemist, where I was trained to use the eye-wash and safety shower if there was suspicion of contamination.) Showering did stop the sneezing, but then my eyes, nose, and throat started swelling up and I got hives. People were getting concerned and offering to drive me to a hospital. After about 15 minutes, it didn't seem to be getting worse, so I decided to get a ride home and take some Benadryl. Most of the symptoms disappeared within an hour. This whole event was very surprising, because although I've always had hay fever or other minor sneezy reactions to excessive dust or cats, I've never had this kind of quick onset reaction to nothing in particular. The really icky part was that one of my corneas swelled up and it took most of the evening to get back to normal.

Looking over this list, I've been thinking about getting older, and how it involves the inevitable, creeping inability to do things that I used to be able to do. It takes some getting used to --- not bouncing back as fast from minor injuries, for example, or losing the ability to eat and happily digest any sort of junk food without gaining weight. But, one of my goals is to go on surprising myself by doing the unexpected. I want to keep attempting to do things that I've never done, don't know how to do, and don't think I can do. That way, any future disappointing surprises will be balanced out by the exhilarating ones. I'm counting on playing SF0 as a means to that end.