I can see but I cannot plumb.

If you've ever been tested for color blindness, you've seen Ishihara color plates. They look like they belong on the wall in the Museum of Modern Art as curated by Count von Count. They are round blotches comprised of smaller dots of related colors--let's say orange and red--in which can be seen (if your color perception is standard-issue) another set of dots--green maybe--forming a number. 7, 16, 5, 42...similar background dot colors surrounding blotchy numbers formed from dots of a contrasting color. The problem, if you are what they call color-blind, is that there is no contrast in depth, or relative saturation of the colors, between the digits and their surroundings, so if you cannot differentiate green from orange, you are out of luck.

You are also out of luck if your parietal lobe has degenerated sufficiently to leave you with a symptom called simultanagnosia, but the mechanical failure at play is different. Well, I was clearly not going to prove anything I haven't already observed in real-life anecdotal form, but when one's partner's brain is faltering, it seems natural to me to put it to the test and discern precisely how. To this end, I performed the following experiment:

First, I asked Jeff to identify a few numbers, as typed, in size 144 Corsiva Hebrew font. No trouble at all. Then I ran the Ishihara test, in which he was utterly unable to distinguish a numeral. But, if I pointed to the various areas on the plate, naming the colors involved, whether they were the ones comprising the number or those of the background, was no problem. Results: color-blind: negative. Simultanagnosia: positive.

This was not all I did today. I also broke the downstairs shower. It's been drippy for years. Ever since Jeff took this Speakman cartridge apart several years ago (for reasons that are now obscure in my recollection,) and was unable to reassemble it, the shower head has dripped. Most likely because when it was reassembled, it was done by me. And, as I do recall, I played with it quite a bit, and took a good many uneducated guesses regarding the direction of the various bits. Still, I got it functioning, and it's only been in the past year or so that the dripping has become really annoying.

So today I took it apart again, thinking I could perhaps stick in an extra washer or gasket or something. Frank at the hardware store suggested that merely cleaning the parts off well, so that they'd seal snugly might help. And indeed, it might have. Had I not dropped the little ceramic hot/cold dispersal ring (or whatever you'd call it) right smack onto the tile shower floor, where it cracked neatly in two. Following my next impulse, I called Yank the plumber who reminded me that Clement Hardware doesn't seem to have a Speakman parts source at the moment, but a part is what I'd need, short of cutting a hole in the wall.

Remarkably, I found it online. From somewhere called DoPlumb.com. I do not know whether I trust myself to install the thing when it comes, so I'd better keep Yank on standby.