Cloudy cold morning
On Wednesday morning I was up around 5:30AM and got my photos edited and post up. I got the kitchen cleaned up and then I started paprika short ribs in the crockpot for supper and got ready to go to exercise class.
When I got home from exercise class I rested a while then ate some lunch and got ready to go to the memory testing study.
My mom survived the hours long trip from VT to CT and then slept the rest of the day.
Visual short-term memory (VSTM), a critical part of everyday cognition, deteriorates from around 21 years of age, with item capacity halving by the age of 75 (Brockmole & Logie, 2013).
It was being done at UMass and the senior van picked me up at 1PM because we weren’t exactly sure of where we were going. Turns out we ended up in the wrong parking lot but it had a handicap sign so the driver wanted to stay there as there was plenty of room for his van.
The woman running the study came and got me and the study was relatively easy. There were color pictures of everyday items in a box. Your task was to either: study it, draw it with a stylus on an ipad, trace it with the stylus, or write a description with the stylus. There was a prompt to tell you which task.
This was supposed to make you notice the location of the item in the box, the color of the item, and details about the item. The testing was more of a group thing as there would be no individual results.
I had problems remembering the color as I dislike purple and like blue and green, so I think I tended to use liked colors. The item was shown to you in grayscale when you were asked to remember it.
I was total crap at location in the box as I forgot to pay attention to that. But I think I remembered all the shown items vs not shown items. It took about 40 minutes and I discovered when I got there that they paid $15/hr to take the test. So I came home with $15.
When I got home at 3:30PM my contractor was at the barn collecting the solid concrete bags. I helped him stretch out the cable and get the kinks out. Then we ran it through the holes he had re-drilled to make them slightly wider. We got it clamped to each end of the turnbuckle.
We put the already clamped bag in the east hole and then got the cables around the 2 bags in the west hole.
Then we did the last bag in the east hole. I had 2 partial bags we added to this hole, just to get rid of them.
We finished about 6:45PM just as it was getting too dark. I was so exhausted.
I ate supper, checked my e-mail, and went to bed at 8PM.
On Thursday I have several things I need to do. My helper friend comes at noon and we are going over to the farm 2 doors down to clean out mulch hay for my garden.
I want to finish the trellis project which is filling in and packing dirt around the cement bags, then putting the mulch back down. I also want to get started on the Small garden clean out. The hay we get will go in there, I think. I haven’t decided if I will put hay down before the tarps or wait until we take them up.
But it’s going to be a long day, as all Thursdays are.