DANGER! ENTERING DIMWITTED TERRITORY.

 

   We all know the embarrassing times of entering a room, looking around briskly as if we know what we are looking for, then not remembering what we came in for, and going out again in the vain hope that re-entering the room will trigger anything--someone--anyone?? Focus on the word "vain," please.

 

Now I am in my mid-seventies, I find that this par for the course. I am beginning to accept it, even when I curse. But there are other things happening to both me and my husband which "give me furiously to think," as the Belgian detective once remarked. 

1/ I order things I didn't mean to order from Amazon (curse you, red knight!) because I can't read the tiny print. Spurred on by my second son who worried that I might be pre-diabetic (because of a high glucose reading several years back), I went online and after pondering, ordered the "One Drop" thingy. It arrived. I took out the instructions which--you guessed it--are in ----type. Unreadable by me, even with a magnifying glass. THEN I realized (doh!) that you had to have the whole damn kit to access any readings.

 These were just the strips you put your hard-earned blood drop on. You would have to order a glucose-reading meter at $42 a pop, which seems bad money after worse, or however it goes. This happens to me a lot these days.

2/ Several months ago, Rick decided he needed a few packages of Fig Newtons (some of us do not classify these as cookies, but as a laxative masquerading as a foodstuff.), and as he has to wear glasses for near vision, he ordered what turned out to be a massive amount of these babies. We will be turned to ash and in our little festive urns in the dirt of the Williamsburg Cemetery by the time these are gone.

 

3/ I keep ordering compression stockings in the wrong size, the wrong color, some with open toes, some with closed, but never right in any size or color.

 I have balled them up and put them in a plastic container. Marie Kondo would be appalled. In fact, she would be appalled by my: closet, drawers, carpets, desk, papers, folders, jewelry boxes, shoe boxes, whatever may need organization--it ain't got it. 

4/ I realized this year that I can no longer do the amount of veggie gardening I have in the past. This is actually out of dimwitted territory, but the amount of gardens I now have--4 perennial gardens and 2 veggie plots--definitely qualify for this category.

5/  My husband just contributed a grand entry in this list of dimwitted territory events. He puts down 5 pee-pads nightly for our mostly incontinent, 16 year-old Jack Russell. Sometimes she uses them, sometimes not. 

This morning I came down to find them all turned over, so the plastic was on the top, and the absorbent cotton was on the bottom. Nita had peed on top of the plastic, and I gingerly folded it up and carried it to the trash. No, I did not wash it off and reuse it! There are some things a body cannot bear.

6/ Last but not least--Annie's Smoking Microwave! I was making keto brownies yesterday 'cause that's the kind of day it was--cold and blowy, not a sit on the deck in the sun kind of day. I know this recipe by heart, or I thought I did, and in a frisky manner chopped up what I thought were 6 oz. of Baker's very dark chocolate, to melt with 6 tablespoons of real butter and 2 tbsp. of coconut oil. After 2 minutes it all looked good, then I realized I had miscalculated the amount of chocolate oz., only doing 5 instead of 6. (Those little makers on the bars are deeply confusing to an ageing broad.) So I put the 1 oz. in a glass measuring cup, turned on Microwave for 1 min., still not really melted, did another--la-di-dah, puttering around the kitchen--when I saw smoke issuing from the Microwave.

 Opened it to a heavy cloud, saw the blackened remains of said chocolate, and carried glass cup over to the counter where it promptly shattered into dozens of pieces. "Rick!!!" I shouted, my go-to when bad things go down. He came in, deftly swept up the glass, kept the dog out, and helped clean up while I finished the brownies. I wish you could have seen me trying to do simple math on how many chocolate squares = 6 oz. Sad, really.

Good Lord! It is so damn humbling to do something you thought you knew well only to find out that that "well" has some holes in it. I envision my brain as one of my bits of lacy lingerie, rather pretty, but insubstantial. Sigh, or Le *Sigh* as a fluent French-speaker once posted. 

Feel free to join the conversation on "dimwittedness", and just remember I have to vet the comments before they appear. And not too long, please!