i'm a slow learner . . .

when i say it takes me a while to get up to speed, i'm not talking minutes or seconds, i'm talking years.  light years.  eons.

an example you ask?  my 1988 honda was nine years old before i discovered the coin change holder while looking for the fuse box.  and it's not like i hadn't missed it.  i could never understand why the car didn't have one. 

another?  kidlet used to do her homework on the dining room table.  to me, the lighting from the chandelier was good but not great.  it was also a pain in the ass to dust.  all those little globes facing upwards catching every dust mote that happened to waft by.  she never seemed to mind the lack of direct lighting but one day, doing close work, she reached up and flicked a little here before never noticed  switch and a little light came on flooding the area with a right proper beam.  how could i have missed it?

but i am catching on.  remember my newly purchased red bedspread.  i was bemoaning that fact that it was actually too ample in size.  first time i have ever complained about that!!!  so as joanie and i were doing our early morning meanderings, i groused and she suggested i turn it one quarter turn on the bed.  now i'm not saying i would never have figured that out by myself but it probably would have been the week before it died of old age.

but now we come to the corker.  my bathroom vanity, not having been updated since the house was built in 1988, has a set of six round light bulbs above the mirror.  being blinder than a bat, i buy the highest watt bulbs i can find.  starting last week, i noticed that after standing at the sink for more than a minutes or two, a light would flicker and it would all of a sudden become noticeably brighter.  it kept happening and i kept trying to remind myself to check it out and replace the faulty bulb.  today, i remembered.  it wasn't a bulb.  it was the fluorescent recessed lighting in the soffit.  say what?  in the seventeen years we have had the house, i never notice it and apparently they have never needed to be changed in all of those seventeen years.  go figure.

i'm waiting for the day i wander around the house and discover kidlet has a brother that i failed to notice.