Remembering too well

An unexpected problem has arisen now that I am well into the fourth year of remembering every day that passes.

When a memory of a past event in this period comes to mind it is sometimes difficult to know how long ago it was. It's not the old problem of having no idea of how much time has passed with no anchor to orientate me. It is because events from two or three years ago still seem fresh.

As an example, my wife and I have visited the coast around Christmas time for the past few years. My memory tag for one year is arriving at my sister-in-law's apartment in a taxi. Remembering it recently, it took me a moment to accept it was in 2013 as it was so clear.

I had to walk over my mental calendar to be sure.

A long time ago I introduced full date tagging for images. So the image has the date 27 December 2013. The trouble is that in running through my refresh technique (see link under 'about me'), I become lazy and miss off the year.

So I've changed the technique now to give the year first when I pull up an image during my regular run throughs.

Relaxed remembering

The memory reboot method I developed last year is becoming an occasional technique I use to make the process of remembering each day that passes much more relaxed.

As the end of March drew near, I switched to the reboot instead of the two-day window I usually pass over each month. I am tempted to do this when I hit the 28th of the month, because when I try to recall the images for the 28th and 29th day of each month, February presents a problem. Then in the following days months with only 30 days trip things up.

So I went back to the beginning, running through every day sequentially from when I began this process on 17 December 2011. I try to cover several months a day, but sometimes did not manage any. It took me until 10th April to catch up. Since then I've gone back to the two-day window, picking up recalling the 10th and 11th of each month.

Even taking over ten days for the sequential run through is no problem as usually images are only refreshed about every 30 days with the moving window.