My brain got lost for a moment

What a day. What a week so far, and there's two more days of potential roller coaster yet. Vacation next week cannot come soon enough.

Monday swim was so-so at best. Water ran with Katie.

Tuesday was massage therapy, spending (for a miracle) most of the time on my traps and low back. My legs were pretty good, though there is lots of achy in there. No running so far this week.

Lots of stuff happened at work today, but we need not get into that. I was off to IKEA to get one more planter box. Linda had thought she got 4, but only got 3, and we needed 4. So I was off. In the middle of the store I had a bad moment where I totally lost my orientation to the world. Normally, I've got a really good sense of where north is. At almost any time you can ask what direction something is, and I can point towards it.

But tonight in IKEA I got turned around, and for a couple minutes I didn't know if I was coming or going. I didn't even know which direction was the parking lot. It was very disorienting. I console myself with the thought that they deliberately make it disorienting so you have to walk through the entire store and look at everything. What you look at, you might buy. Very clever, these Swedes.

It used to be, in the old IKEA store, I could walk through it almost blindfolded. I knew where everything was and where all the shortcuts were. Then they moved to the big store in Deerfoot Meadows, and I've been kind of lost in there ever since. I try not to go there much.

But it makes me wonder if this is how senility and dementia starts. We've all seen people wandering around lost. My one grandfather stopped driving after he took a detour around some construction, on the way to a place he had been a great many times, in a town he had lived much of his life in. He got off track, and couldn't get back on track again. He was found several hours later, driving aimlessly around.

Lately it seems like there is much for me to keep track of. It used to be the idea of simplifying your life was an attractive concept. Now it's becoming a necessity. I've already had to start building systems. My car and house keys always go in the same place. When I started wearing sunglasses, and hearing aids, I had to think about where they were going to live when I wasn't wearing them. I didn't wear my wrist watch to work today because it wasn't beside the computer where I keep it. Today I had to think about it for a moment, but I remembered I'd put it in my pack before the massage. There are times it takes me a while to recover that train of thought that tells me where I've put something.

And heaven help me if I was clever. There is a little counter weight that goes on the BBQ rotisserie. I do not have a clue in the world where it is, because I know I put it someplace after the last time I used it, so I'd be sure to find it again. Not. Sigh.

I sure hope this is just because I'm really tired and not sleeping well.

Have you ever been disoriented, and wonder if you've lost your grip? Parents need not answer, we already know.