S2E7. More Mistakes On The Journey

It’s been a while since I reported on the kinds of errors I’ve been making, so I thought I’d provide an update.

As I mentioned in ‘Another Year Older’ (S2E3), I’m still making errors, but they don’t bother me as much as they did a year ago. Perhaps I’ve just gotten used to them, or maybe I’m more confident that they are not harbingers of worse things to come and so I don’t dwell on them. In any event, here are a few that cropped up this week.

On Monday night, Sally and I watched “King Richard,” the Academy Award-nominated movie about Venus and Serena Williams’ father and his dreams for them, starring Will Smith. The next day when I asked Sally a question about it, I called it “King Lear.” 

It happens…right?

Although I’m recalling the names of many people in my past with greater ease, there are 2 classmates from the Ph.D. program at UConn whose last names, for the life of me, I just can’t remember. I’ve gone back to it days and weeks apart, but no luck. What makes this so bothersome to me is that there were only 8 of us in that class (including me) and we spent 4 years together. And it wasn’t even 25 years ago. You’d think I’d remember them, wouldn’t you?

I’ve never had any problems with word-finding, so it came as a real surprise when I stumbled on a word this week. I was trying to tell Sally how I discovered that a sponge was caught in the ___________, except I couldn’t find the word. So I said it was caught in that thing in the sink that chops up kitchen scraps. She immediately filled in the blank with ‘garbage disposal.’

The odd thing, though, is that ‘garbage disposal’ was in my head the entire time, but it didn’t seem like the right phrase. It’s meaning was detached from my vision of what I was describing.

Weird, huh?

My prospective memory seems rather porous and fluid. I’ll form the intention to do something and then get distracted by something else which banishes my original intent from awareness. But no sooner does it disappear than it reappears. It’s a case of easy go, easy come. Bottom line, it’s not such a bad thing because it all comes back to me pretty quickly. It gives the phrase ‘gone but not forgotten’ a whole new meaning!

For example, I have an evening routine where I prep our coffee and tea so it’s all set up for me to make the next morning. There are several steps, the last of which is to fill the coffee grinder with beans. I’ll remind myself to do that while I’m going through the earlier steps in the routine, but then near the end, I will have forgotten about it, but I’m sure there is something else I need to do. Right on cue, the memory of filling the grinder pops into view!

At this point, I’m pretty confident that I won’t forget things for too long, or, at least, not long enough for something bad to happen.

Sally asked me to pick up some cottage cheese at the super market and I flat-out forgot to put it on my marketing list. Once inside the store, though, I remembered that there was something else she asked for that wasn’t on the list. Even before I got to the dairy aisle, I knew it was cottage cheese.

Here’s a bad one:

I was making quinoa on our glass-top stove and the sauce pan was simmering on low heat. When the timer went off, I removed it from the burner and let it rest for 10 minutes so the seeds could absorb the rest of the water. We had a wonderful dinner.

About an hour later, when we were cleaning up, I noticed that the ‘hot cooktop’ indicator light was still on. The surface should have cooled down by then, so that struck me as strange. That is when I realized I had neglected to turn off the burner when the timer rang.

Oh lord!

And then there was Wednesday morning…

I make my own kefir. It’s pretty easy. You just purchase kefir stones and plop them in some milk and let it sit for a day or two at room temperature. (The stones are re-usable, so you strain them out of the kefir and store them in the refrigerator until you’re ready to make more.) Then I like to add pureed strawberries and bananas. Easy peasy!

On Wednesday morning, the kefir was done fermenting and so it was time to add the fruit. I sliced the strawberries and broke up the bananas and put them in the blender. Then I poured some of the kefir in so there would be enough liquid for it to puree. 

OMG! I started pouring the kefir in before I strained out the kefir stones!

My first reaction was panic. How would I ever recover the stones? As luck would have it, I had caught myself just as I started to pour the kefir into the blender and, fortunately, most of the stones had sunk to the bottom of the container that held them. So I strained the contents and discovered that most of the stones were there. 

I then picked through the strawberries to recover any stones I spotted. There were some, but not many. Whew!

It was bad enough to forget to strain the kefir before adding it to the blender, but to make matters worse, I specifically reminded myself the night before that I had to strain the stones out of the newly fermented kefir before using it. In the moment, though, I just didn’t remember that I had reminded myself!

Mercy…is this what it’s going to be like?  😀

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