Three Things

Studies show that learning new things delays the onset of dementia (as does doing things with your fingers so, presumably, blogging will keep me cogent for decades to come).

Yesterday I learned three new things.
How to prime my lawnmower.
What causes monkeyface.
How many calories are in a pint of Hefeweizen.

Every time I start my lawnmower I count on the possibility of two things: I will dislocate my shoulder yanking on the starter cord. I will have a heart attack yanking on the starter cord. As an act of kindness, my lawnmower brake cable disintegrated last week, sending me, cable in hand, back to the lawn mower rehab clinic where I purchased said mower from the slow-talking, possibly Arkansas-born, mower guru. When I observed that starting the thing was likely to lead to my premature death, the mower-guru said, "Do ya prime it before ya start it?" "Uhhh, prime it?", I replied. He led me back through the lawn mower cemetery until we found one with sufficient superstructure that he could point out the priming button. Knowledge is power (mower).

People who only buy grocery store strawberries, those large, gleaming chunks of seed-studded Styrofoam, won't know what I'm talking about, but real strawberries sometimes look funny. They're bumpy and small and wall-to-wall seeds at the tip. I thought I had neglected my strawberry garden by poor watering (ok, I did) but the Philbrook Farms strawberry farmer told me that's called Monkeyface and it happens when the weather gets cold and the bees stay home in turtlenecks and long johns and don't go out and pollinate the berry flowers. His berries looked just as pathetic as mine.

The third thing I learned yesterday was that Hefeweisen beer has a whopping 1300 calories per pint! Wow! Jeepers! Holy cow! The best part of this factoid is that it is wrong. My source, a beer-drinking person who should know, was not, I'm pretty sure, pulling my leg. However, I looked it up. There are 210 calories in a pint of Hefeweisen.

There. Now you might have learned something new and my fingers are extremely alert.