Forgetting

Well, Chinese New Year's was a week's worth of activities and with Chinese classes starting up again, I missed a few days with the blog.

I started in Taiwan with 5 hats but now I'm down to the 2 ugly hats. I keep forgetting them. I don't usually wear a hat but with my white hair, I think I stick out too much, so I'm wearing a hat nowadays. It seems most men my age in Taiwan have chemically enhanced black hair. They are like Ronald Reagan, who had a full head of black hair into his 70's. (There was some speculation that RR's prolonged use of Grecian Formula had something to do with his Alzheimer's disease while still in office. I think at that time everyone was looking for simple causes for Alzheimer's disease.)

But I know I'm not alone in being forgetful. Even though it rains a lot in Taipei, some people refuse to carry an umbrella because they fear they will just forget it. And lots of people do forget their umbrella.

Many stores and restaurants have these umbrella stands to keep the wet umbrellas from coming inside.

But separating the umbrella from it's owner just makes it more likely that the owner will forget. And now the business winds up with extra umbrellas that have been forgotten and not retrieved. So the umbrella stands have the surplus of umbrellas on one side of the stand so that if the umbrella is retrieve the embarrassed owner doesn't have to contact the business owner.

What's a little funny is that the business hasn't any customers, it hasn't rained in a few days but the umbrella stand has lots of umbrellas.