Monkeying Around4

It's funny how the mind works sometimes.  An idea can get planted in your head and in spite of evidence to the contrary, there is no shaking it.  Take for example my many fruitless searches of my basement for a set of Monkey Lights that I had purchased from our local community bike shop.

My investigation of the basement took me to corners and shelving units that I hadn't visited for some time.  There were lots of boxes half full of papers.  A can of old casters.  Milk crates of old vinyl that had never seen a turntable.  Children's books.  Two boxes of greeting cards that my wife intends to do something with in the future.

When I've looked in all the places where I think the missing item might be, I then begin to search all the places where I think it won't be and usually it is on that search that I'm successful.  This time, I only had to lift a box of disposable gloves from near my bicycle work bench to find that the Monkey Lights had been stored all along right where they should have been.

My mind was so fixated on the package looking a certain way that I must have looked at it many times while working on bikes and not seen it.  Sort of not seeing the forest for the trees.

The installation of the lights onto the spokes of my front wheel was simple and took at the most twenty minutes.  Half of that time was spent running back into the house to get tools I had forgotten to bring outside with me.

My wife was already in her pajamas and the only way to get her to come outside to watch my new lights was to tell her in an excited voice that she needed to come outside to see the beautiful colours.  I knew that she would think that I was talking about the Northern Lights of which she is very enamored.

She was surprised but not disappointed when, clutching her housecoat tightly about herself she ooed and awed watching me zoom past first in one direction and then another on the street in front of our house.