Posts Tagged ‘forgetting’
Got Away
Made it to the lake place yesterday afternoon for a few days of solo holiday. Without doing much in the way of additional cleanup of snow from Wednesday, in the morning I walked Asher with Cyndie, and we did horse chores together. The scenery was pretty striking, with the bright morning sunshine bouncing off the oodles of snow that had fallen.
The horses didn’t seem as fixated on their grain as usual, and Light even left her food to seek some hands-on attention from Cyndie. After obliging Light with lots of robust scratching, Cyndie ended up covered in shedded horse hair. When she got back to the house, Cyndie changed her shirt but moments later reported she was soon covered in dog hair.
After breakfast, Cyndie assembled enough home-cooked meals from our freezer to feed me for more than a week and sent me on my way for the drive to the lake. Before I left, I drove my car around the hay shed a couple of times to convince myself the crude job I did of clearing the heavy, wet snow would be adequate for traffic while I was away. We are expecting the farrier today.
I texted a message to Cyndie to let her know the tire tracks were mine and not some unexpected visitor. When we were walking Asher first thing in the morning, I spotted footprints in the deep snow of the north loop trail, so we trudged over to check them out. Cyndie asked if they were mine from the day before when I brought Asher back from the neighbors’, but I said no. We wondered who would have been walking on our trail.
Then, when we came upon a pile of branches under the snow, I realized it was me who had made those tracks. I remembered noticing the branches and had thought it was a limb that had fallen in the storm before figuring out it was the pile I had created when cutting up the downed tree a couple of days before.
Memory problems much, John?
When I had been pulling Asher down the middle of the unplowed road after his escape, I spotted a truck coming toward us and diverted to the ditch to give the driver the full width of the road to navigate his way against the drifts. We then made our way along that short section of our trail to reach our driveway. I blame the temper tantrum I was having at the time for completely forgetting we’d made those tracks less than 24 hours before. [shaking my head in embarrassment]
There is a lot less snow in Hayward. The short leg of the driveway to our place hadn’t even been plowed.
I am going to see how long I can keep myself from shoveling the front steps as an exercise in letting one of my compulsions go unaddressed for once.
While puzzling in the afternoon, I listened to a couple of 1960s recordings of Bill Cosby’s standup routines. I have no idea what caused me to think of choosing that.
I think my mind really needs to get away for a while.
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Payback Week
All’s fair in taking turns covering the ranch while your spouse gets a break from the routine. Cyndie is out of town for a week, and I am chief cook and bottle washer, dog walker, and horse wrangler while she is gone. It’s a bit of a mixed blessing for me since I really do enjoy time on my own, but unlike my time up at the lake last week, now I am responsible for the care and feeding of our animals throughout each day.
It’s not that much different from when both of us are home, except everything tends to take a little longer alone. The benefit of getting two things done at the same time is gone. Luckily, our animals all demonstrate a respectable amount of patience with me. I think they can tell I’m on my own.
To my benefit, a January thaw has taken away a lot of the stress of doing anything outdoors.
I thought about doing some tree branch trimming, but for the life of me, I can’t remember where I put a new pruning hand saw I got for Christmas. Didn’t find it in the shop or the storage cabinet in the house garage, so it must be somewhere more ingenious that I picked so I would know where to find it later.
Think, John, think.
As long as I was rummaging around in the shop, I decided to bring a wood sculpting project to the house and spread it out all over the dining room table. It’s one of those perks of being the only one home for a week, leaving a mess out, and not having it be in anybody else’s way.
I’m ready for the week to go smoothly, so Cyndie won’t have anything to worry about while she is away. I want her to have such a great time that she will come home eager to pay me back with another chance to escape to the lake when no one else is around.
You should know that all my gleeful ranting and raving about having time alone lately is simply because it compliments the wonderful times with Cyndie when we are home together and times with my many friends when I get to let my gregarious side run wild. Don’t let my advancing age fool you into thinking I have become a crotchety old, anti-social curmudgeon.
I’ve got a couple more years left until I fully grow into that description.
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Lost Glasses
So, this happened… Upon returning from my bike trip one year ago, I couldn’t find my main pair of glasses when I unpacked. After I had emptied every bag and every pocket and didn’t find them, I looked again. Every possible location got checked twice. Finally, I called Gary and asked him to check his car. I had ridden with him and that was the only possible place left where I could have stashed them.
He searched for me and did not find my glasses.
It took me about a month or two to get over it and accept that they no longer existed. I had looked everywhere I could possibly have packed them. I told myself that Gary must have missed them under the seat or they had fallen out of the door when I got out of his car.
This year, as I was preparing for the bike trip, I retrieved the blank piece that fills the void on my bike when I want to ride without the battery. I don’t use it very often. In fact, I hadn’t used it all year. It’s a handy block of hollow plastic where you can stow a tool kit or maybe some glasses…
Yep. I found my glasses that had been safely stored in that tube for an entire year.
Honestly, I thought I had looked in that tube, two different times. Did I just imagine that? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter at this point. The glasses sat in there for the whole year and I didn’t put that cover on the bike until the day before leaving for this year’s tour.
Before snapping it in place, I popped off the end cap and found the prize. Found the surprise.
I texted Gary first thing to let him know my glasses weren’t lost in his car last year. 😑
For the record, I hate packing.
I should probably take to recording myself narrating where I am putting things as I go so I will be able to find them again later.
It’s a first-world problem but now I have to figure out how to bring my old favorite glasses back into rotation with the two pairs that I replaced them with… ideally, without losing them again.
D’oh!
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Finding
.
looking
for the last thing
you haven’t been able to find
looking everywhere
except wherever it is
finding everything
else
resorting to looking
where it positively wouldn’t be
twice
just in case
looking for something different
to trick the universe
into revealing
what you are truly after
forgetting
what you were truly after
again
settling
for the next best thing
because it will be right
where you expected
to find it
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Accidental Gamble
Yesterday, Cyndie shared a story that required an admission she didn’t want to make. Before I expose the drastic oversight, let me just express how challenging it can be to take care of vulnerable chickens day in and day out. They are completely at our mercy to tend to their needs and watch over them.
Our methods are not foolproof, but as I drove past the barn yesterday when I got home from work, I saw our three hens calmly puttering about and looking healthy as ever. It was a reassuring postscript to the tale Cyndie had woven over the phone a little earlier during my commute.
As she described it, the first hint that something was amiss occurred as she approached the coop in the morning. There was no sound from the hens who would normally be making a ruckus to be let out by the time Cyndie normally arrives. Moving past the coop with Delilah, she headed to the barn to secure the dog and prepare servings of chicken food before coming back to open the doors.
That’s when she noticed some movement in the trees. She didn’t believe her eyes at first, and ran through several possibilities in her mind.
Those were some big birds.
Are they chickens? Could they be from a neighboring property?
No. Those were our three hens. How did they get out of the coop already!?
Cyndie worried that some critter might have compromised the door. She fretted for the health and safety of the pullets housed in the other half of the coop.
Upon arriving to find the locking bar was safely placed on the ledge above the hatch where she normally stores it during the day, she came to the ultimate conclusion that the chicken door on the back side of the coop had been left open all night long. When Cyndie had closed the front door to secure the pullets on Monday night, she had forgotten to close the little sliding door on the backside.
To our great relief, no marauding predators took advantage of her having forgotten one essential step in securing the coop for the night.
I’m pretty sure that’s a gamble she won’t accidentally take again for quite some time.
The process of closing the coop will involve some double-checks from now on, I suspect. Not unlike the step we long ago added, where we open the side hatch every night to confirm no uninvited critters are hiding inside when we close things up.
You might call that one the “possum rule.”
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Completely Forgot
My poor brain can’t keep up. I expect it must be dropping old information out the back each time I try to stash something new in the front. I was just blessed with an opportunity to discover that I had forgotten entirely about a very valuable lesson learned through experience. I even blogged about it at the time for good measure. Granted, this was from 5-and-a-half years ago, but still…
In a humorous message exchange yesterday with my friend, Rich Gordon, I thought he had me mistaken for someone else. He had asked “What’s the best stuff to use to lubricate my garage door springs? I saw you had a repairman over recently.”
No. No, I haven’t had anyone here recently. I guessed that he had me confused with someone else. My response was to answer with a smartass quip in jest, figuring he would notice he meant that for someone else.
When he came back to ask in all seriousness, we discovered the miscue. Rich questioned his sanity for thinking he had just read about this in my blog and that triggered my scouring the “Previous Somethings” archive for the time our door spring broke. I confirmed that I did write about it, just not recently.
I’m guessing the old post from November of 2014 probably showed up as an auto-generated link of similar post suggestions that Rich inadvertently clicked without realizing he was delving so far into the archives.
As I reread my old writing, I was embarrassed to see I had clearly pointed out the need to lubricate the garage door spring, but soon after, I completely forgot anything about it. Out of sight, out of mind, even though I use our garage doors almost every day.
The icing on the cake of this whole memory failure appeared in the comments under that original post. Way back then, Rich and I already had this same discussion about what to use for lubricating the spring.
Guess what just moved up near the top of my home maintenance “to-do” list?
Garage door springs are not something that should be included in the category of “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” chores. Somehow, I spaced this one out entirely. It’s nice to have gotten a laugh out of it, but there’s an element of nervous laughter threaded through it. The power of those springs and the amount of weight they are counter-balancing is not something to be trifled with.
Now, if I could somehow figure out what important detail just dropped from my memory after bringing the door spring back to the front, that would be just great.
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Embracing Uncertainty
Noticeable change happens again. The industrial influence on our morphing climate notwithstanding, change is always ongoing. It is a matter of degree and a relative measurement.
At one point, geologists thought continents drifted. Now it is recognized that tectonic plates are in a constant state of interaction. Astronomers figure the days are numbered for our sun, putting the beginning of the end somewhere in the range of only a few billion years.
Some people once thought the earth was flat, even though it wasn’t. I expect there are people who may have thought Saturn would always have rings around it, or at least, for the foreseeable future.
Two headlines in my Science news feed caught my attention yesterday and triggered this thought exercise about our perceptions of a dynamic universe from a static frame of mind.
New research is confirming the theory that Saturn’s iconic rings are temporary. The particles are “raining” down onto the planet, pulled by gravity. Saturn could become ringless within 300 million years, or sooner!
Meanwhile, scientists have discovered a new, and most distant object in our solar system. Who ever thought we actually knew how many planets there were?
Guess where this line from yesterday’s list poem came from?:
• Take care about ever being too certain.
Closer to home, Cyndie and I are trying to figure out how both of us lost consciousness around a simple act of returning a bucket to the house from the barn. On Sunday, we took a few minutes out to catch a couple of the Buff Orpingtons and clean their butt feathers. I hold the hens while Cyndie wields a variety of tools and tricks to reclaim feathers from a stinky mess.
After that, we tended to horse chores and then headed back to the house. Cyndie asked me to carry up a bucket of things, and one or the other of us (we are no longer sure who) had Delilah on a leash.
Two days later, in what seemed another world away, Cyndie asked me what I did with that bucket and the stuff that was in it. This many days removed, my first thought was, “What bucket?” I honestly had zero recollection of what she was referring to.
What had I done?
Slowly, I began to recall carrying the bucket up. It seemed to me that I was at dual purposes, and set the bucket down —on the front steps?— to do something other than going into the house. I suspected it was continuing to walk Delilah, but now we can’t be sure who had the dog.
Why would she have asked me to carry the bucket, other than because she was taking the dog for the extra walk?
Since I regained memory of having carried the bucket and its undefined contents up to the house, I figured I must have set it somewhere simple. Tuesday night, I looked in the garage, but didn’t see it in the most likely spot to temporarily set something.
As I stepped to the door back inside, the bucket came into view. It was empty and someone other than me (who could that be?) had placed it beside the indoor steps to the house.
Cyndie has no memory of having done so, thus her headlamp and face mask that she thinks were in the bucket remain mysteriously lost.
What is it with us and losing headlamps lately?
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One Second
What is the shortest memory span possible? If I am remembering this right, I think I may have just experienced it.
Honestly, I forgot something one second after it happened. How is that even possible? Multitasking, I guess. I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t remember exactly what may have distracted me while I was putting wood on the fire Saturday morning.
Two logs. That’s as complicated as this task was. I opened the fireplace doors and tossed the first one on the remnants of glowing coals. On contact, a red-hot ember popped out and landed right in front of me on the stone hearth.
Without hesitation, I chose to place the second piece of wood before sweeping up the errant ember.
I leaned forward to place the second half-log on top of the first, balancing myself against the heft by reaching out and pressing my hand firmly onto the hearth.
The searing pain of the glowing ember stabbed through my finger as my mind instantly realized what I had just done.
One second earlier, I had watch the hazard appear. In the time it took for me to switch to thinking about placing the next piece of wood, I forgot about the ember? Seriously? Is that even possible?
It’s embarrassing. Luckily, it is also a little funny, albeit painful. So, I’m laughing over the insanity of it, and sharing it for your amusement, too.
If ever there was a “D’oh” moment, this was one.
I have no idea how I succeeded in getting burned in two places on that finger, as the ember was about the size of a single blister. Somehow my reflex reaction, after I was able to shift my weight back off that hand, must have caused a double contact.
The involuntary curse that erupted was equally a result of the pain, as it was over my having noted, and then forgotten, the ember in such a ridiculously short span of time.
Color me easily distracted.
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Relative Something 