Water, water, everywhere

I was chatting by phone with a friend yesterday afternoon. She was telling me about an albino squirrel that had gotten in her apartment, its quarrels with her aging cat, her reluctance to deal with it, her feelings of hapless victimhood. All in all, it was a saga worthy of Stephen King channeling Erma Bombeck but as long and rambling as The Stand.

So I decided to water my plants while interjecting the occasional "You're kidding?!?" to let her know I was still there. All was well with my multitasking until I became aware of sounds like rush hour in a men's urinal--water cascading from three or four over-saturated pots onto the tile floor below.

I guess I can no longer tend and attend--to plants and to conversations--at the same time.

Forget to eat and improve your memory?

Fruit flies, threadworms, mice, and monkeys live longer when they are calorie deprived. The skinny silhouettes of old nonagenarians suggest that the same holds true for humans. Here's a small study that suggests brain benefits for those who underindulge.

German neurologists invited 50 overweight, aging Deutschelanders down to the lab for a diet trial with a twist. The subjects were, on average, sixty years old and a little overweight. Twenty of them reduced their calorie intake by 30% for three months, twenty ate the same number of calories but switched out their fats to the unsaturated variety, and ten motored on with no change at all.

At the start and the finish of the three month study, the subjects took a memory test that checked their ability to recall a 15 item word list after thirty minutes. The calorie-deprived group upped their scores post-dieting by 20% but the other groups had no better recall than when they began.

Could this mean that fewer calories enhances cognition? Maybe...as always, the researchers called for more research (and perhaps for more research grants).

Four Cups of Tea

Not so much a memory lapse as a lapse of consciousness. And who but a menopausal woman would nod off over a book in the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon?

In my defense, I was already 7,234 steps into the day. That included one Jazzercise 'Express' Class, a trip to Target, two loads of laundry, and vacuuming the entire upstairs plus the living room. So I felt entitled to a cup of tea at the kitchen table, feet up on another kitchen chair, and a moment with my current read "Three Cups of Tea."

My tea was still warm when my afternoon delight abruptly screeched to a halt as a half-dreaming jerk of the arm knocked that very cup of tea, nearly full, into my lap.

My cup runneth over, as doth my coffee pot...

Again. Dang, did it again, twice in as many months. Turned the coffee maker on, but alas, no carafe beneath. Went upstairs, checked e-mail, plucked my eyebrows a bit, found my watch, made the bed, and moseyed downstairs to the smell of burned coffee which had overflowed the basket, on to the hot plate, down the counter, into the canned soup department in the cupboard below, then on to the (fortunately) coffee-colored kitchen carpet. Good thing Mr. Denver Doc snoozed through it all, arriving finally in a freshly mopped kitchen none the wiser as to my morning moment.

Junked mail

don't read this post if you object to trash talk...

My husband shouted upt the stairs "Any mail today?"

"Oh yeah," I bellowed back, "It's on the counter."

"Which counter?"

Oh heavens, must I point out everything? "The kitchen counter, of course."

By now, I'm downstairs wondering how blind a soul can be. Alas, there on the kitchen counter is a small pile of catalogues and empty envelopes.

"You didn't throw it away, did you?"

What does he think I am anyway? "No, of course not," I said as I grabbed the kitchen trash bin and began to look through it.

Well...yeah...maybe I did...

Does this scene ring a bell?

Reality Man smirks as he finds the phone, then writes in to rat on Reality Woman:

Tobi will not be outdone. One of our portable phones went missing. The usual suspects--the dogs--could not be convicted. The "handset find" feature seemed to produce no sound--until this morning, when I, the non-menopausal SO, turned on the feature and wandered near the trash can, which was plaintively beeping. The menopausally-challenged one ascribed it to "overzealous" cleaning of her space.