Selective listening

This tale begins with an article I read about one way to avoid senile dementia. It said to do word searches and other word puzzles to exercise your mind. I discovered that our paper has several things I could try each day. I went right to the word searches since that seemed the easiest. I began to see the being dyslexic would be an advantage since most words were backwards.
I looked at the Crypto next, where you have to decode a phrase. That was not my forte, so I moved on. The jumble is similar and like the crypto too hard for my unexercised brain. I settled on the word game.
Here they give you a word- like respite- and you have 30 or so minutes to come up with as many words as you can ,using those letters. They have to be four or more letters, no use of 's' and no reusing the same verbs with the addition of ed, etc. I really thought this was' up my alley' . I found quickly that I had a hard time visualizing the letters and moving them around so I came up with a great solution. I retrieved our scrabble game and used the letters in it. I still have not come up with all the words they print the next day, but I am doing better.
The problem came with what to do with the game the rest of the day. I did not want to take it back upstairs and retrieve it each day. I am a neat freak so could not have it sitting out and had to search for a creative hiding place. Wow, I came up with a great one- the dryer! Put it in and close the door. It is safely stowed away. The mental gymnastics must be working already. What a creative idea!
Well, of course there would not be a blog from this if it was that simple. The next day I put the sheets in the dryer and walked away. Instantly I heard a crash and ran as fast as I could to retrieve all the pieces now spinning around in the dryer. Ha. But not to be deterred, I put it back after I was done, now sure that I would not forget again. I shared all this with Jon and he had a good laugh on me.
Last night I was upstairs blogging and I heard this terrible crash. You guessed it. Jon was using the dryer, supposedly to take wrinkles out of his Levis. I have to say that that is the first time in months he has used it, but use it he did. I ran down to grab the letters out of the dryer and try to explain.
" Don't you remember that told you about all this?"
" No"
" Well, I did. Was this one of your selective listening times?"
"I guess so. But I still don't get it. Why is the whole scrabble game in the dryer?"
I won't bore you with a rehash of all that. Suffice it to say that I had to some up with another idea. I put just the letter tiles themselves in a ziplock bag and stuffed them in a drawer and returned the rest of the game upstairs to the game shelf.
Even the Bible talks about selective listening. Samuel was a young boy and God called him three times but he thought it was Eli the priest. The third time he got it right:
" Speak Lord, I'm listening."
Missing out on what God says is more critical than the shock of scrabble tiles in your dryer! Listen up.