Watch

It was a shock today when I unzipped the battery pouch of my camera bag to discover that I am no longer a person without a watch. I obviously put it in a safe place after all...

I was both pleased and disappointed. I've been finding out a bit about Loss Aversion Theory - the intriguing idea that we are much keener not to lose something we have than to gain something of equivalent value that we don't have. Better explained by wikipedia:
Loss aversion is a psychological concept that has been increasingly applied in the field of economic analysis. Finance and insurance are the economics fields with the most active applications. Loss aversion refers to how outcomes are interpreted as gains and losses where losses are subject to more sensitivity in people's responses compared to equivalent gains acquired. Kahneman and Tversky (1992) have suggested that losses can be twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.

After I 'lost' my watch I decided I would try to be more conscious of this in my decision making about what to abandon, from the contents of my many as-yet unopened boxes to the hotel room I'd paid for in Liverpool for Sunday night that I didn't stay in. I've found it very interesting to reflect on my attachments. (I even started to think about it in terms of marriage, but maybe better not to go there.)

As a quite separate experiment I wore the watch all day today and found I barely looked at it.

I spent quite a bit of the day with Secondborn who assembled the clothes rack that Maria lent me yesterday and suddenly my bedroom looks a lot tidier. (Alternatively I could have got rid of some clothes...)
In the process of assembling the rack I discovered that my Allen keys are missing - along with my drill whose disappearance has been bugging me for weeks even though it's 20 years old and needs replacing. More to think about.