Once we were in his kitchen and something spilled. He asked me to wipe it up with two paper towels. Not one. Not three. Two!
Somehow I had managed to fly from Tokyo all the way to Georgia but I needed help figuring out how many towels I’d need to absorb that particular amount of spilled milk.
( chuckling ) GF does this constantly! It’s usually the second half I miss, and when I ask her to repeat, I specifically use the last word of the part I understood so as to give her the appropriate place for her to begin. Of course she repeats everything, prompting me to blurt out “no no no, I heard that part” with as little hostility and impatience as I can muster.
I do this, and yes, exactly, the question is in the buffer but hasn’t yet been processed, so I ask “what?” but if you wait a bit the question reaches the CPU and I can answer it.
I do not do it on purpose I swear, it’s just the way my mind works.
i.e. I heard and comprehended most of it the first time. If there’s a gap in the convo I can mentally re-hear and re-process what was said and understand it fully the second time. If the other person keeps on blathering I’m forced to choose between replay or listening to the now current sentence. Can’t do both, and both the capacity and the half-life of the “tape” is only a few seconds. So my usual response isn’t “what”, but “hold on”.
As I’ve gotten older and my hearing has deteriorated, I find that I can still replay the tape, but it’s now often unintelligible. The sounds I recorded were just as muffled and jumbled as I perceived in real time. So no second chance for me any more. Or at least not very often.
I used to pride myself on my ability to eat all the components of the apple, the skin, the pith, the core, the seeds, even the peduncle and yes, the sticker. (an skill I developed when my parents tried to stop me from eating ALL the apples in the fridge and I needed to get rid of the evidence of my thefts).
If my wife goes to bed before me, she sometimes leaves her detritus on my side of the bed. I often have to relocate her phone and Kindle. Sometimes hair clips. At least once I found her laptop. If it’s dark and I’m keeping the lights out it can be a whole discovery journey where I keep finding more things as I nestle into bed.
She also wears socks to bed and then takes them off in the middle of the night. I once found six pairs of socks under the sheets.