I forgot (AGAIN)

After awarding myself the meme shown below this morning, I within a few hours I had managed to ‘win’ a stunning BONUS AWARD 😩

Even I was seriously impressed by my own ability to forget what I was doing this time.

There was this trapdoor

I have loft access via a drop down ladder, and the opening becomes a potential trap door opening while the ladder is down. That said, I’ve been walking around up there all my life, and have yet to even come close to stepping into the opening.

However, it’s sometimes a nuisance, and I get fed up dancing around the open trap if I’m busy, and wanted some way to close it (for years).

The opportunity arose some years ago, when I was gifted a piece of steel plate, roughly 2×1 m×1 cm thick, and thought it would be ideal, probably unlikely to collapse under my weight 😉 or move about.

Being rather heavy, I came up with a rolling solution, allowing the plate to be slid over the opening when wanted. It seemed to be fine for a while, but the rollers eventually parted company from the plate (the loft gets extremely cold and extremely hot, and humid) as every adhesive I tried failed under the load. The plate is not simple mild steel (it has never shown a spot of rust) and too hard for me to drill for any fixings, so adhesive was the only option.

I gave up the idea of covering the opening, too much hassle, and just went back to never getting near it – until recently, when some plumbing issues meant having to be up there a lot, with a fair amount of work to do.

It made it worthwhile revisiting the cover, and looking for a better/new way to move it.

I started by looking at ways to redistribute the supports, to make sliding it back and forth easier. While this change did make it a little easier, the improvement was minimal, and barely worth the effort. Rather than making a real improvement, it was really just organising the same things a little better.

However, these changes led me to noticing that what looked like a square opening was actually rectangular (it was square, but the layout of the rafters affected the thickness of the frame), and the steel plate turned out to be a better fit over the opening if turned 90°. This hadn’t been obvious before, or considered originally, since there was really only one practical place for the plate to lie when not in use.

Things are different now, and there is now a storage option for the plate if it rotated 90° – something I wish had been possible years ago, as it makes things a lot simpler.

What has this to do with “I can forget what I’m doing while I’m doing it”?

This morning, I got up and changed the supports around the opening for the plate.

The only problem was that I did it to suit the original orientation of the 2×1 plate, NOT the 90° rotation I’d discovered was a better fit yesterday!

I got lucky though.

The support I’d altered for the original orientation was just the same as the one needed for the 90° rotation of the plate.

I might have been slightly upset if I had NOT found that to be the case.

However, when I realised what I had done, and forgotten about the plan to rotate the plate before finalising the revised instal, I just couldn’t believe what I had done, and finished, before I noticed the mistake.

ESPECIALLY just after awarding myself that meme.

Bad news – it’s like a little avalanche

I wish I’d known a little ‘Oopsie’ moment last night was a herald of worse to come – I could just have stayed in bed, instead of thinking “Oh, it’s still not raining, let’s try to do something”.

Then, relatively far from home, I headed to one of the big name non-British supermarkets I’ve found to be a good place to visit when nearby, as it always seem to have a handy range of useful stuff ‘Reduced for Quick Sale’.

That part went fine, but when I’d gone to lock up the wheels in the car park, it seemed I didn’t have my keys, and could use the usual ‘High Security’ chain, and had to rely on the supplemental little combination job I carry for quick stops.

The missing keys were perplexing, as I have a fairly secure system intended to make it hard for me to lose them – they’re on a springy reel, and the reel is clipped to an inside pocket, and that pocket is itself kept closed by a Velcro fastener. Not only that, the springy reels and set of keys is bulky enough to be noticed if it’s in the wrong place, or not where it should be.

I also know I must have had it all the last time I was out, as I used at another supermarket, so must have packed it away in that pocket in the usual way, or I’d have noticed something was wrong then.

There’s also other items in that pocket, and they’re still all present and correct.

So far, I’ve checked all the other pockets (unlikely, since the reel/keys are clipped into the correct one though), the place I throw my cycling trousers, the floor, the side of the chair, the tabletop, below the table – and everywhere else I wander after coming in when I’ve cycled to the shops and back.

Then I repeated all those searches – and extended the range.

Not a thing!

If I just stuffed the keys in a pocket at random, I wouldn’t be so aggravated, but with both the bunching, the reel, the clip, the Velcro latched pocket – I just don’t see how I could have simply lost these keys (and the reel), and not noticed.

I’ve had mishaps before, and noticed almost right away – so this one has me stumped, and I guess I’ll be repeating the search for some time to come, until I convince myself they really have gone (or maybe I’ll even find them).

If only I still needed car keys.

Bonus misery

When I visited the last shop I locked up the bike at, I asked Security if any keys had been handed.

Needless to say, none had – something that doesn’t help much.

Given where I KNOW I last touched them, and where I next went, it’s still not certain I lost them.

So, I have to battle with the OCD effect of thinking they might only be a few feet away, and I just haven’t spotted them!

Surprise! Digital cameras NEED memory cards to work

The nice day clearly affect mental abilities.

I usually run a system of leaving camera hatches open if the memory card is no installed. The idea being this should work as a ‘memory jogger’ when grabbing a camera as I head out.

Usually works too.

But NOT when I have to open the battery hatch to remove that item for charging.

So, today I managed to collect and fit the charged battery, but with the accessory hatch closed, forgot there was no memory card in the camera.

Ten miles away, and over half an hour out, the camera would release its shutter, and it was only when I fired up the status screen I got the message, ‘Card Not Inserted’.

Better still, having not been in a hurry and just ambled through the day, by the time I cycled back home, then back to where I’d just been, dusk would have been falling, and I’d have been back to night photography, which would have been fine – if I hadn’t got the night shots last week, and decided to add some daylight shots today, since it wasn’t raining during daylight hours.

Just an observation – It’s mucky out there

Not sure why, but my bike looks as if I’ve been doing actual mountain biking, and is covered with mud every time I go out at the moment.

Not sure why this is happening, maybe something to do with the endless rain we seem to enjoy at times with this crazy weather.

I only go out hours after the rain, not while it’s falling, and this habit hasn’t produced the sort of mud coating I see nowadays.

At least it doesn’t get as bad as this example – although I note that disk brakes appear to be self-cleaning.

The REAL bad news

While I’ve been kind of forgetful forever, I was sad to be caught by one of my neighbours as I was heading out this afternoon, and learned that one of my long-established neighbours has dementia, and it seems to have become quite severe quite quickly.

I suspected this as I hadn’t bumped into them for months, but had seen them from the window on a number of occasions, and had become concerned – nothing definite, but having lost someone very close to dementia, I had experienced its development all the way from the trivial signs I hadn’t recognised at first, all the way to fully developed illness which I had to cope with as a carer.

Sadly, I’d noticed symptoms as far back as last Christmas, but had thought I might just have been imagining things, given my first encounter with the disease.

I’m not a doctor, so couldn’t really raise the points I’d seen with anyone (they are lucky to have a lot of family), but the thought has weighed with me all year, until things recently took a turn for the worse as various activities indicated a problem, then someone was good enough to take me aside, and let me know what had been happening.

For the benefit of anyone like me (rotten memory all their life), maybe getting worried, keep something like this handy (many versions can be found):

Almost forgot spotting this handy T-shirt

The one good thing about noticing how much I forget about nowadays is that it’s not something that’s got worse as I’ve got older – I can remember forgetting stuff all my life.

It’s probably a good thing I didn’t pick a field of study which is wholly dependent on remembering/memorising everything, such as medicine or being a doctor. I think the world population would have slightly smaller today.

As it was, engineering/electrical/electronics/physics was tough enough, given its heavy dependence on mathematic and formulae – but enlightened educational authorities were relaxing their demands on memory when I arrived, so were beginning to become more interested in ability and understanding, as opposed to learning by rote and merely memorising stuff with no understanding about what it meant. That said, chemistry was a killer – never studied at all (thanks to no teachers at any of my schools), then taught by a lecturer who was so bad the whole first year complained to the university board a few weeks into the first year course, and he was ‘Talked to’ by those on high. I only passed by the skin of my teeth, and even then only by memorising rather than understanding, such was the truly abysmal ability of that lecturer.

That said, I’ve recently concluded that effort by me to ‘improve’ my memory may have been counterproductive.

I regularly go out to my GCW (garage cone workshop) only to be diverted by some outstanding task I spot there, and realise I have completely forgotten the reason I went out there (and have to go back and retrace my step to find out why I did go there in the first place).

On a similar theme, I often forget why I’ve gone into my storage area to dig out some obscure piece of junk I’ve developed a need for, only to find I have forgotten why I’m there because I’ve been diverted by the need to tidy up stuff left lying around the last time I was there. Again, I have to go back to look at what I was doing, and sent me to the store in the first place.

A more recent gem is remembering to go get a face covering before I head out to the shops, only to find I’m half way there before realising I don’t have ti with me!

However, I think that is probably more a result of mentally ticking off the action of making sure I have the covering BUT not stuffing it in a pocket at the same time, as opposed to normal forgetting. Remembering to get the thing seems to cancel out the action, and means that the need for the covering drops off the mental list of things to do – but ignores the fact I didn’t complete the task by shoving it in my pocket.

But for the horrendous grammatical error on this T-shirt, I might want (or need) one.

Forgetful T-shirt