My life-long Bipolar and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders manifested themselves in rather interesting ways when I was a kid (and for that matter, NOW). I’m sure I had ADD too, but that was long before this malady was diagnosed and became trendy to have these days. I was ahead of my time with ADD before it was known! I’ve always been on the “cutting edge” of new mental disorders. Having had, and have, the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (which will henceforth be referred to in this missive as OCD), I can look back and understand somewhat the basis of some of the more peculiar, but innocuous, actions I indulged in during my “kid years”.  For some reason, as a kid, smooth things always made my uneasy. I always had the overwhelming urge to “unsmooth things.” The most legendary example is when just before school started after summer break, our mother would get us 3 kids all of our school supplies, i.e. paper, pencils, rulers, and PASTE. The school supplies were kept in our Grandmother “Ollie’s” vacant bedroom. Every year I would sneak into the room, open all 3 paste jars, and “roughen up” the smooth tops! And EVERY year our mother, after hearing the complaints of Tim and Sue, would say to me, “Well! You just HAD to mess up the paste again!”  (Indeed, I HAD to!)  Another area this “obsessive anti-smooth” manifested itself was with cellophane.  The macaroni boxes all had a cellophane “window” in front of them for reasons I’m still not sure of. I’m not even sure they still come that way these days since I “live out of a microwave.” At any rate, when I saw that the macaroni was below the cellophane “window,” another sudden “urge” came over me to punch a hole through it, and I did! The next time my mother made macaroni (usually for goulash), if I were in the vicinity, I would hear the uncooked macaroni tumbling out of the hole onto the range and the floor. The next sound was a frustrating, “OOOHHHHEMMM (in a sobbing tone) That kid!”  In my later “kid years”; I noticed that I “had” to count certain things.  In spite of improved medications, this malady persists even now (Psychiatry is not an exact science as I am discovering on an ongoing basis). I can still recall some “counting totals” from our High School senior Washington D.C. trip in 1966. Did you know that there were 26 columns of “Smith’s” in the D.C. phone book? And the wrought iron fence in front the White House has 18 small points between the big points on the top? Well… now you know! If you think this is “useless” information, just imagine if you got a call to go on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and they ask you this! You never know! OCD can have its advantages as you can see! In addition, there is an average of 2,640 steps from our farmhouse porch to the school. I would venture to say that I am the only one that knows that! This was calculated when I was in high school after it was uncool to ride the school bus and/or a bicycle and before I had a car! I see I still have more space before I overshoot the “one page” limit to post. (I detest articles and stories that are continued; hence, I try to keep all my stories to one web page if possible, part of my OCD I’m sure). Another OCD thing that really “bugged” me all through public school, college, and grad school was blackboards. If after erasing the board and even a small part of a letter was left unerased, that used to really get to me! I had to continually fight the sometimes-overwhelming urge to get up, grab an eraser, and get rid of that last little bit of white or yellow chalk! These days, my latest OCD is counting lug nuts on vehicle wheels almost everytime I see them. I learned to count them much faster by my “horizontal method” (see below).  When the wheel is in motion (it must be very slow), I cannot use my “horizontal method” and it becomes much more difficult to count them! The same method also is used to count wheel cover design stems in vehicles, which is still difficult even with my “horizontal method” when there are several of them!  By the way, I’ve noticed that all of the new government Ford pickup trucks at work (including my F-350 4x4) all have 7 lug nuts instead of the usual 5 or 8! In my “home office” here I have 7 CD-ROM R discs left, and 4 old “floppy” discs on top of my desk, and 9 stitches to the inch on the cowboy boots I am wearing, and  3 pens, and 22 sheets of paper left in my printer, and 4 old soda pop “speck stains” on my computer screen, and a “sticky note” composed of 16 words with 92 letters and 4 periods, and 26 icons on my Windows XP screen, and 2 cats, one cat has 14 dark orange rings around its tail, and 1 Paxil container with 8 Paxils left… gulp… er, make that 7 now… Hmmmm, all of a sudden I feel like I can end this missive now, you can “count on it”…