This morning something was wrong with my brain, because I really struggled doing French on DuoLingo. I've never made that many mistakes in French, and rarely in Irish. Then Travalon and I went to Mass in the gym, and I was having trouble with the chant notation, thinking it was different than what we were actually singing, but when I looked again, it was correct. The priest seemed to be suffering from the same confusion too; he decided to do the final blessing in Latin, which he never does, only it sounded like it was half in Spanish. It really sounded like he said, "In nomine Patri, et Hijo, et Spirito Santo." Or was my hearing confused? Of course, knowing that I carry a gene for Alzheimers (though it is a gene for the late-onset variety), I wondered, "Is this it? Am I in decline?" But when we got home, I looked up common causes of mental confusion, and one was dehydration, which makes sense because I don't think I drank enough water yesterday, and also my liquid output smelled odd, another symptom of dehydration. So I drank 16 ounces of water, and that seemed to wash the confusion away.
Today Travalon and I split two of the chocolate bonbons.
We split the two on the bottom, the 24-karat gold one and the sea salt toffee one. They were so tasty. The ones on the top are chili and candied ginger with saffron. Sorry, no pictures of my loot from yesterday, I never got around to taking them, but I somehow forgot to post this photo yesterday:
It's a closeup of the padlocks on the pedestrian overpass that people seem to put on it when they get married. I know yesterday's post didn't have nearly enough photos, and you probably feel shortchanged, so I do deeply apologize for that.
Today Travalon and I went back to the Lodi segment of the Ice Age Trail so I could show him the sweeping vista he missed last weekend. He took some photos along the way:
We got to the top of the bluff, but right at the spot where you turn the corner and see the beautiful vista, there was a sign that said: "Ye kennae go no further." Or at least that's what my mind is telling me it said because I've been watching too many videos of a woman who teaches the "Scots Word of the Day." What it actually said is that we had to stop because there was a controlled burn ahead. Travalon went ahead anyway, so I followed him, but there was so much smoke that we turned around. If I get lung cancer in twenty years, we'll know why. So once again Travalon was thwarted in his quest to see this vista. However, we could kind of see it down at the bottom of the bluff. Here are some photos.
Then we went back to Whalen Grade and saw a Bonaparte's gull.
We saw gulls and pelicans in the distance.
There were scaups closer to us.
And two male northern shovelers.
"Hey Frank, want to know how to be a better musician? Stay tuned..."
We stopped by the dam in Sauk and saw three pelicans there.
Also, Jilly Moose sent me this photo, of a rosary she made for her niece who received her First Communion today. I love the colors!
I was a bit scared of going to Irish class, considering my failure at French this morning, but I seemed to be my normal level of incompetence and not anything noteworthy. At band practice there were a couple of times I read the notes wrong on an Irish jig, but I was looking at music on someone else's stand that was at an awkward angle for me, so maybe not any reason for concern. And when I did DuoLingo once I got back home, my French skills were back on point. So I'm going to guess that my cognitive skills aren't declining sharply but were just foggy because of a lack of water yesterday. I did have a drink at the dive bar, so that on top of not drinking my usual amount of water might have been enough to do it. Guess I'm getting too old for alcohol.
No comments:
Post a Comment