Looking Up Left

I watched the show, Lie To Me when it was on several years ago.   Through that show I learned a lot about how there is a lot more being conveyed than the words a person is saying if you know how to read the nuances of communication.

On one of the episodes they mentioned that the person was making up a memory instead of recalling a real memory because when we stop to recollect, we look up and to the left.  I don't know if this is true for everyone or for every time, but I think it's true for me a lot of the time.   I was driving in the car the other day, thinking about something and whatever that something was I was trying to remember details about it.   I noticed I was looking slightly up and to the left every time I tried to recall specifics.

Interesting, I thought.   Let me see if I can do the same thing but to the right.   It was mentally uncomfortable, I can tell you that.   I would look up and to the right and try to think of something but I would be distracted by things in my visual frame of view.   I think I'd best mention at this point that I wasn't driving down the road and looking aimlessly off in various directions, collecting data for this blog post and not paying attention to passersby or other vehicles.

It was unproductive.   I couldn't drop out of the visual input from my eyes to engage in memory recall.  It may not be a "tell that someone is lying" but it could be something like crossing your arms with one arm on top or interlacing your fingers with your hands and having the same thumb on top every time.    It might just be that that's how I learned the skill when I was young and now I use it whenever I'm trying to remember the number of cups of cheerios in the cookie recipe I've been making for twenty years.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is working on putting both Legos and Duplo blocks together still.   He's been making some strides in both following instructions and creating his own models.  This is what he came up with today, color pattern and design:

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wanted a frozen drink for lunch.   She really liked it and spent a lot of time drinking it in the back seat while we went to the next stop on our schedule.  When we got there, she was shivering in her car seat, trying to tell me she was cold.   I told her cold drinks could do that when you drink a lot of them at once.

Fitness Update:  25.2 miles or 26.4 miles.   I'm not sure if I ran a marathon distance today or not.  I am sure it was very cold when I started and the fountains in the park were still frozen hours later when we stopped in to get water.   Eventually they thawed out and we got some much-needed hydration.   When I got home the distance tracking app I use was at 25.2 but Apple's Health app said 26.4 and both were tracking from the same starting point.   Either way, I'm tired.

Cram It All In

I'm sitting at my computer trying to type quickly.   I'm doing so because my fingers are cold.   I don't know why, but my fingers are always cold in the winter.   My neighbor runs with her hands in her sweat shirt, Uncle Jonathan doesn't run with any gloves and I run with one pair of gloves inside a pair of ski mittens.    But that has absolutely nothing to do with my starting point which was I'm trying to cram a lot of things in before dinner and before our movie night guests get here and interrupt any chance I have of writing this blog post with chatter, questions and banter in my general direction.    Nothing like interruptions to cramp the style of a writer.

Oh, and I wanted to write a lot tonight here.  So I'm cramming in several little things into one post.  Only I've wasted time talking about my fingers being cold.   Now that I think of it, that's how a lot of my blog posts go: me planning on writing one thing and an entire other thing ends up on the screen when I'm done.    Okay, enough of this.  Seriously this time.  I'm on to topic one...

Finally Shoulder-length
I've been growing my hair out for what seems like an eternity.   It seems long because my hair grows infernally slow.  I've watched it get longer over time and for months and months it's been what I would call, "shoulder-length,"  I'm not really sure what the definition is for that term so I used the broadest possible range of what I thought people would have in their mind when they said, "she has shoulder-length hair."   It could mean almost touching the tops of your shoulders just as your neck ends.   It could also mean the much longer length of where your shoulder turns down and becomes your arm.  That's several inches on my body.  But finally, my hair is what I would now term, "long hair" as it is definitely below my shoulders.   I don't know what other hair-length terms come into play now other than the, "down to her waist" which is a length I won't be making it to.

My Car Just Got Faster
Our car just got faster over night.   I don't know if this has ever happened in the history of car-don...and it's pretty freaking cool.  Elon Musk tweeted today that the, "Tesla P85D 0 to 60mph acceleration will improve by ~0.1 sec soon via over-the-air software update to inverter algorithm."   He further said that the vehicle we have, the P85 will also improve, but not by quite as much.    Last night, we got that software upgrade and this morning, our car had a new inverter algorithm to go just that little bit faster.   Can I say again how much I love my Tesla Model S?

The Four Hour Display Case
You know how some things just hit you as silly?   Legos have done this to me lately.    You get a cool model.   It's got eleven-thousand pieces or something and it takes you four hours to put the thing together.   When you're done you have a stunning (even if blocky) model that looks like a pixelated rendition of the actual object.    What do you think of doing next?   "Where can I show this thing off?"  If it was a particularly expensive model you might think, "I'm getting a display case for this baby."   Why do we do this?   We don't put books that took us twenty-three hours to read into a display case.   We don't frame pictures of our turkey dinners because they were a masterpiece to behold.    And yet we want to put something that someone else designed, a company manufactured and then we followed instructions to put it together onto a pedestal.   And even if we don't show it off, good grief, you can't take it apart because...well I don't know, wouldn't we want to take it apart so we could put it together again and re-enjoy the whole process?  Isn't they why we got the Lego model in the first place?    I'm guilty of all of these thoughts, and I can't adequately explain why.

The Dinner Crown
My dentist (and next-door neighbor) has two crowns on order for me.   Wait, no, four crowns.   two for the left upper for the implants.   I haven't been chewing on the left side for over a year.   Then, he put two temporaries in the right upper and is going to deliver all four on the same day.  There is a problem we didn't expect though:  The back upper-most tooth on the right is very shallow.   The temporary is barely holding on.   Two days after he put it on I was at dinner, eating some very crunchy potatoes and five minutes later realized I'd swallowed (and chewed up) the temporary crown.    He made me a new one, this time of acrylic for strength, and we've been working a fine line of me chewing as much as I can on the left and re-gluing the crown when it comes off.   It needs to stay in place so that the gums don't move inward.    At this point, I have borrowed dentals and temporary glue at home and I know how to cement it back in.   It's just become laughable at this point, but we're getting close to the delivery of the permanents on the 2nd of February.   The permanent glue will solve all the problems.   That cement doesn't come off without breaking the crown and pulling it off in pieces.

The Big Boy Update:  I told my son to try a bite of my escalloped apples at lunch.  I told him he used to love them (he did, he'd eat a whole bowl of the sweet things.)   He told me, "yeah, but when I'm four I don't like them.   When I'm five I'll like them again."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter had a wand this morning in the car.   She would wave it and say, "Pocus Pocus, the window rolls down!"   My husband would roll it down from the driver's seat and my daughter thought she had magic powers.   This went on for a while until we told her the wand was, "out of magic powers for now and needed to recharge."

The Hand Mirror

I have a hand mirror in my top drawer at my vanity.  I'm not sure how many years I've had it, but it was made well before I was born.   I've had many hand mirrors in my life, but this one is one my mother gave me for nothing very special or eventful, and yet I've kept it.

It's no secret I like new things more than old things.   I don't want to live in an old house and revel in days gone by.   I don't want an old iPhone, I want the latest one and I don't care for antiques, I like shopping for new, modern furniture.   But then there's my hand mirror.

I don't know when or why, but I believe it was in the 1990's at some point that I mentioned to my mother I needed a hand mirror.   At that time she was still going to garage sales with my father every so often.   She never had much interest in material things, so she didn't go with him too much but one weekend she went with him and found an old, antique hand mirror for me.

She bought it and I've used it ever since.   I don't know that I was initially too excited about it as the mirror surface was irregular in a few areas, the mirror was heavy and it was old.  But I stuck it in my drawer and it's been with me since that day, traveling from house to house with me for likely twenty years now.

A few years ago we had something clogged in a gutter our gutter cleaners couldn't get out.   I remember my husband asking me to bring my hand mirror to him so the worker could use it.   As I brought it I was explaining how it was old and I wanted him to be careful.   About forty seconds later he handed the mirror back down and I was confused.    I thought he was going to use the mirror's handle to push down the leaves—which made no sense—instead of using it at an angle to look down the gutter down spout.    I felt foolish, but was glad to have my mirror back

I use the mirror every day now and I have a special twist and flip motion I use to put it back into the drawer.   My daughter discovered it two days ago and decided to kiss her reflection in it.   I really like my old mirror.   I think of my mother often when I use it.

The Big Boy Update:  My son likes to make up stories in the bed at the end of the night.  One night he was telling me a story which featured him as some sort of transformer super hero.   I asked him a question about his super powers and he told me, "my arms aren't made out of hoses, they're made out of carrots."   Well then, I'm glad we cleared that up.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been into tutus lately.   Every time they get clean, she pulls them out of the basket and puts one on.   She looks very cute in a tutu.

How Did You Not Know It Did That?

I had a lot of toys over my childhood.  Some of them did things like the remote controlled fire truck I got for Christmas one year or the baby doll that you could feed this pretend baby food and after a short while, it would fall out of the bottom where you had a diaper.    I remember both of those vividly.     But there were more toys and contraptions and creations and all sorts of things I worked with and played with as a child.

I remember my mother would come in sometimes while I was playing with something and I'd make it do a particular thing and she'd say, "I didn't know it did that."    I remember thinking, "boy, my mom sure is dumb.  How could she not know it did that, she bought it for me."

Today, I realized I've become the dumb mom.   We've gotten toys for our children and hoped it they would occupy them for long periods of time while educating them in a clean and quiet way so that upon our return, our children would be smart, sophisticated, well-mannered little human beings.  That, or we just hoped they'd be happy and give us time to get some things done or relax for a bit.

I carried a toy to my son today that went with the group of toys he was playing with that I'd found in another room.   He picked it up, moved it around in a way I didn't know it moved and then did something that made it talk to him.    I said, "I didn't know it did that," and suddenly understood my mother from so many years ago.

The Big Boy Update:  My son asked me, "what does 14 and 15 and 18 and 100 make?"  When I told him one-hundred-forty-seven he said, "that is the biggest number I've ever seen."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We have a step stool that has the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on it.   My daughter has learned their names.   Or, at least she thinks she has.   She told me they were called, Ahmet, Crockett, Nina and Frank.  Maybe Donatello, Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo have some new nicknames.

Break In!

My parents took us to dinner tonight.   We went to a new "mega buffet" of primarily Asian food.    When we got home the children were getting into the bath when the phone rang.   It was my father saying when they got home, someone had been in-progress of robbing their house.   They think the garage door opening had alerted the burglar (or there was a lookout) and the culprit escaped through the broken sliding glass door.

My parents were surprisingly calm.   They had called the police and were assessing the situation.   The burglar had gone straight to the bedroom, looking for jewelry and valuables and had taken some of my mother's things including her watch from college and her wedding ring.   Some of my father's things were taken, but most of his items were missed or hadn't been gotten to when they got home.

My mother's wallet was out on the desk, opened, but all money and credit cards were still there, suggesting this was where the burglar was when interrupted.   I called back a short while later to see how things were going to hear that the police were there, dusting for finger prints.   My mother had had her car entered earlier in the week in their driveway (she hadn't locked it) and had the change stolen.   The officer said they should report things like that because it indicates activity in the area.

It will be freezing this evening and a large, door-sized hole in your house lets out a lot of heat, so my father was preparing to cover it with plastic sheeting until he could get it replaced in the morning.  

My parents have taken this very well, saying it could have been far worse, and I agree, but I must admit I'm angry.   I think the thing that makes me the most sad is the loss of my mother's wedding band.  It was a plain gold band, but it was a band she's work for over fifty years.      On the whole though, she's okay, and that's the important thing.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is my little Style Captain.  He knows exactly what he wants to wear to school.   He picks out his own clothes and puts them on himself, but if you ask if you can help with the clothes as he's still eating breakfast he will tell you, "yes, can you get the blue pants with the red stripes and the black shirt with the red spider?"   And if one of those items is dirty, he can tell you what other option he wants as he mentally goes through his wardrobe.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Mirror kisser.   My daughter got the hand mirror this morning and looked at herself.  I'm not sure I've had the hand mirror out when she's been around in a while so I gave it to her so she could see.   The next thing I know, she's kissing herself in the mirror.   I told my husband to look and we watched her look at herself, smile and then kiss herself.   I told her I'd let her have the hand mirror again when she got home from school.

Fitness Update:  Five miles at Five.   We ran from five o'clock to six o'clock this morning.   Our pace was faster than it is on long runs, but we'd like it to be faster.

Hyper Braking

I'm like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future tonight: I'm "outta time" so this blog post will be brief.

I hadn't heard of the term, "hyper braking" until we were having a discussion during the break between movies at Friday Night Movie Night here.  I had mentioned seeing a recent commercial espousing the cost-savings you can achieve by responsible driving.   The commercial claimed up to one dollar of the cost of a gallon of gas could be saved, just by good driving habits.

I've been working on good driving habits myself in the Tesla, working on my Wh/mi average per trip.   I hadn't bothered trying to drive particularly economically in prior cars.   We discussed the plausibility of the claim, given the recent drop in gas prices.  

My friend said the only way it was possible was by doing something called, "hyper braking" and people who did that mostly annoyed everyone else.   He didn't have to explain what he meant by the term because I could imagine it: coasting to the extreme and slowing other cars behind you in a way contrary to most people's driving habits.

I can easily see how someone could go to that extreme, although it seems rude.   I coast to a stop gradually when there are no cars behind me and go speeds that benefit my energy consumption to the extent that my driving is in line with the expectations of other's on the road.    

I would have never thought there was a problem out there with people doing too much coasting though.

The Big Boy Update:  My son threw up this morning.  We don't know why.   Sometimes he does it when he coughs and this morning he had a lot of congestion, needed to blow his nose badly and possibly gagged himself.    Then, the stomach acids got to him and all he wanted to do was wipe his tongue on a cloth for a while.   He was so distressed he threw up again (the little bit of orange juice he'd had,) so we decided to keep him home from school.   He watched a little television and then I gave him saltines and ginger ale.   He loved them.   I was worried he was sick and I didn't want to give him too much, but not only did he eat a lot of those, he ate a full lunch as well.   I'm not sure if he was sick or not, especially since he had no fever, but he seems fine now.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  There is a character in the show, Mickey Mouse Club House named Toodles.   Toodles is sort of a circular thing that flies around and delivers handy helper tools just when you need them.   My daughter had the following conversation with my husband tonight:
   Reese: "Does toodles have a penis?
   Daddy: "No."
   Reese:  "What?  Yes, toodles has a penis like me!"
   Daddy: "Uh, no you have a vagina."
   Reese: "What?!"

Eat and Run

Sometimes people can get a little crazy when it comes to exercise.   I've been there in small bursts before, but overall I am far too lazy an individual to get addicted to too much exercise.  But sometimes you have to do strange (or some might say crazy) things to get in that run or workout you planned on doing.

This weekend I had planned to run twenty-three miles with my neighbor.   We planned to do an early departure on Saturday morning so I could get back and showered in time for a birthday party at our neighbor's house.   That was the plan.

Twenty-three miles is a long way and if you don't eat a lot the day before, the run is much more difficult.   It's not fun.   You do this thing called, "bonking" in which all sorts of strange visual or mental things can happen to you.   I'm not kidding about this, look it up.  

So to prepare, I did the thing called, "pigging out" on Friday.   And then the rain started.   The cold and the rain.  The rain that rained all afternoon, night and was going to still be raining in the cold during our running time.   During the only time we had on Saturday we could run.    So we cancelled.   We thought about running, but we decided we weren't that crazy.  I think Uncle Jonathan knows what I'm talking about here.

We moved the run to Sunday, only there was a problem because my neighbor had to go out of town for a gymnastics meet her daughter had.    I thought she had to leave later but I said we could do just sixteen or eighteen miles as we were ahead on our training.  That sounded like a good idea so I did more eating in preparation for the long run in the crisp, morning cold air.

Then, when I was out last night, eating everything in sight at this party one of my husband's customers was giving, I got a text.   My neighbor had realized she needed to leave much earlier in the morning to go to the meet and would I be interested in—and she would totally understand if I wasn't—starting to run at 4:45AM because she had to be back at eight o'clock.     That's right, 4:45AM.

It was so crazy I said, "what the hell, sure."  Then I did the thing I'm now going to call, "eat and run" and ate more food because I was going to be working hard in the cold in the morning on that  run.    I got home, went to sleep as quickly as I could manage and got out on the street at four-forty-five.

We made our sixteen miles.   I was glad I ate a lot.

The Big Boy Update:  Remember my son's pocket knife cut?   We looked at it today to see how it was healing.   The pressure we put on it helped the flap to re-adhere and it's looking very good so far.   My son was happy about how things were going.   He told me as he was looking at his finger, "part of my boo boo looks like ham."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  After getting dressed for bed in her pajamas, my daughter saw the laundry pile on the bed.   She climbed up, selected the big pastel multi-colored tutu, and put it over her pajama pants.   She is sleeping with it on as I write this.   She's not normally into tutus, but this one is a new fad.  That, or she just re-discovered it in the back of her drawer.

Fitness Update:  16.2 miles today, ten miles shy of the marathon distance.   It's strange to be out in the dark and know there's no reason to even pull out your phone to look at what time it is because the sun isn't even close to being up and you have an hour of running to go after it does come up.