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not remembering
Thursday, March 17 2005
I spent much of the day out on the laboratory deck mounting the top section of the antenna rig to the lower mast section (the point of attachment being the antenna rotator). Then I raised the whole thing up into place so that it rises just above the house's roofline at the north end of the house.
To address the perennial problem of how to route various wires through the wall, I decided to run a permanent inch-wide PVC duct out to near the base of the antenna. This will allow for significant future changes and expansion without having to drill additional holes. Any surplus capacity in the duct can easily be stuffed with some sort of insulating foam.
As I worked, I kept experiencing a troubling (though relatively minor) mental problem. I'd go downstairs to get something but by the time I'd get there I would forget whatever it was I was seeking and would have to mentally retrace the actions that had led me to go downstairs to begin with. It was some sort of problem with short term memory, the kind I might have from smoking pot or during a severe hangover. I'd had some wine last night, but my consumption hadn't been excessive. Indeed, this had been the first alcohol of any sort I'd had in seven days. (Periodically I do things to break my impulsive alcohol habits.)
The specifics of the way I'd lose my memories seemed to suggest that my mind was being overloaded with processing - perhaps it was preoccupied with something. Last night's news that the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge would probably be drilled after all had come as yet another insult to political (and environmental) sanity, but it had by no means been a statistical outlier coming from the barbarians who run the country.
Perhaps my problem was just an unusually severe bout of my usual web-induced attention deficit disorder. Whenever I sit in front of my computer I can rarely read a whole web page through without stopping to do things in other windows every several paragraphs or so. Working today in the real world, away from the inherently distracting world of a multitasking, windowed environment, maybe my disorder had finally figured out how to find distractions in the real world.
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