Episode 275: Tea and Fresh Bread

0:00Hi, I'm Dr. Gemma, and welcome back to Cognitive, the knitting psychology podcast, cheerfully and somewhat irregularly in business since 2008. Segments today may include what's on my hooks, needles and spindles, a strategy, something I really like, put a lid on it, oh shoot, and blather, so sit back, put your feet up, pick up your knitting, crocheting, spinning, weaving or dying, or any other yarny thing you're doing, and get ready to enjoy. Well, hello, it's Gemma, and this is episode 275 of the new series of the Cognitive podcast. Your comments are very welcome, please feel free to comment on the blog at CognitivePodcast.blogspot.com

1:04or you can comment on our group, Unravelery. I am getting a comment about these recordings, the sound getting louder and softer, I cannot figure it out. I am trying so hard to park my recorder and not to move, but apparently it's making quite an exaggerated noise in places. I have no idea why I'm trying a new solution even as we speak, we'll see how that goes. In the meantime, in the warm thanks, I know this sounds odd, but I want to thank the United States women's hockey team, the Olympic gold medal winners for being a class act. I was so impressed by their captain answering questions from the press saying, I am not going to represent the reasons for someone else's behavior. That's not what we're here to do.

2:04And then she redirected the discussion to celebrating her wonderful teammates and to celebrating the fact that both the men's and the women's teams won gold. It was just a marvelous, classy thing to do. I was so impressed by this. I also want to thank all my listeners because all your comments, including things like, hey, the sound is uneven, aren't really helpful. So to both of you, no, I'm just kidding, but to all my listeners, thank you very much. I really do appreciate it. You know, I've been doing this since I think 2008 or 2009, and you try hard to get the quality right, but I do not use particularly fancy equipment. And I've gotten by and I've even recorded in the car driving to work when I worked in the prison. Thank you for hanging in with me with all of that because, you know, it's been an exciting

3:04ride trying to be a psychologist. I say this because when I was in graduate school for psychology, I was writing websites to help pay my tuition. Believe it or not, one of my early ones was for the United Nations. I've done some very strange things when I look back at my life. And I realized at that point, I made a decision that I could specialize in doing that and just give up working as a psychologist or a psychologist student at the time. And I made the decision to be a psychologist. And every now and then, I get this reminder that in the words of Dr. Leonard McCoy, a fictional character from Star Trek, I'm a doctor, not name one. In this case, I'm a doctor, not a computer scientist. And so I really do appreciate how many quirks you all have had to listen to through the years and that you stay with me. The quirk tonight, as I record this, is unwite doubt.

4:04It is Thursday, March 5, 2026 at 7.24 pm at night. It's been a pretty exciting week. It's great because the politics this week have been so bad that I can't even talk about them. You know, I'm always in this battle about that. How do you not talk about this stuff? I got nothing. I just, although I still admire the USA Women's Hockey team, I think they were amazing. I also, by the way, want to thank Stanley Tucci for taking them to dinner in Milan, Italy. Hey, Banny, Vabane. You can, seriously, Mr. Tucci, Vabane. In the meantime, I want to thank my listeners as always and my communities on Finch, on Reddit, on the ground in real time in the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys and most of all in this listening group. If you look at the show notes, you will see my birds. They are celebrating together in one of their bird houses, done in pink because I can.

5:08And they are celebrating my half-birthday because, as you can see, Finch actually notices that, which is good because I went to Chipotle and I was supposed to get a free drink for my half-birthday and they said, no, I still can't figure that one out. So they are my birds celebrating my half-birthday. I also want to point out that Cognitive Fiber Retreat 12, the Information Thread, there's a link in the show notes and it is scheduled for November 7, 2026. Please mark your calendars and please continue to check the thread. In the meantime, there's information on how to pay there, the whopping $10 and there's also the link for what Loretta 1031 wants you to know about her collecting donations for her crocheting club for school kids. In the meantime, you may be saying, hey, Gemma, what's on your hooks and needles?

6:09Well the stash toss is holding steady at 16 skins in, 34 skins out, which is nice. I am definitely working on upping the app count. I have been resisting the urge to buy and that's a long story. It's really about vestuary, which is I have this beautiful wood or green yarn and I realized I really could have made a full-size sweater out of it or jumper instead of making the little vest and I have yarn set aside in rose-colored yarn, it's called English Rose from Rios to make a vest and yet I went back and tried to redo this one and I bought two extra skins and I really could have made a whole sweater. So I'm sort of kicking myself and I almost said, let's just buy four more skins or three more skins, a heck with it and make that full-size sweater and then I realized I have tons

7:10of sweaters worth in my stash and I should not do that. Things said that very little work on the coral-strange brew. I did hit 18 inches, I'm debating if I want to go to 19 inches on the body but the cocoa strange brew, which was my Romeo sweater, which broke my habit of using scraps except I did. The scraps are in the yoke and that's how I was getting around my Romeo thing that I want to knit with scraps. Okay, having said, oh my lame excuses, the coral-strange brew, I wanted to do the body a little longer because the cocoa one has an 18-inch body to be honest as I'm wearing the cocoa one, it is stretching very nicely. Also I am still weaving an ends on it. Every day I go and weave in five ends except I keep forgetting. So I'm just about done on that to be honest but I was going to do that first and then do the washing in a little bit of just shaping on between two towels.

8:12All this is to say, I don't think I'm going to do 19 inches on the coral-strange brew body. I think we're just fine and I'm going to stop where I am. Meanwhile that means I have to assemble the body and then start working on the pattern for the yoke. I have a lot of ideas for that but I'm struggling because every year at Halloween I want a really harvest colored Halloween sweater and I don't make it and this could be the one and yet here I am finding reasons not to make it to go with other themes. Yeah. This would be because I am in the club for doodle nits, their monthly club and of course that means every month I'm getting this pile of cute motifs. Yeah, it's a lot of inspiration. I have to say to my second collector's book came from Fidelity and I'm not having such a blast. I really am.

9:13It's great to have all the cards in these books. I still have to go through into a little arranging but it's really easy and fun to do. Having said that, let's move on to my dizzy laser sock number two. There's a picture of it there just past the waist yarn for the heel. This is the second sock. I did start it and then I lost control. I love it and I've been knitting on it like a mad woman so I'm just about five rows from the toe where I will change to that brown yarn again then I will do the heel and then I will start my second pair of socks with these two yarns where I will reverse it. I will do the cuff and the toe and the heel in that beautiful yellow which is I believe laser sheep yes and I will do the body of it in the beautiful yarn from dizzy blondes the lami toes and I realize I'm probably going to do this one as a blueberry waffle sock

10:14because that brown yarn you can see it's faintly striped. It's very beautiful but I just think it would look amazing in the body of a blueberry waffle sock. Everybody stay tuned on that one. Ah, vestuary 2026. I decided to give you the full view of the steaks because they are beautiful. I did get myself up to the end of the steaks where I start shaping the neckline and realized it was time to shape I'm still using the vest pattern from Ann Buds the Knitters handy book of patterns. This is not a good one really to use for this. I have learned that. Now there's nothing wrong with this vest pattern but it's made in pieces. I think I want to look up a vest pattern that does include steaking but I'm so glad I'm doing this because I got to the end I started shaping the shoulder of the top and it tells you to bind off and I thought now what do I do?

11:15I bound off and that meant that I simply bound off across a steak as well and said that is that and figured out how to weave in the end so that when I cut the steak the bind off doesn't crash and burn on the main body of the sweater. So having done that I am now on the last three rows of both front and back and I am knitting them side to side. I decided okay this pattern this works I'm going to do this and I will finish the neckline and then I will go hopefully into doing the collar and no I won't but guess I will yes I will because I already bound off the steaks so I can do the collar and then I will go back cut the steaks and pick up for the armholes and of course tack down the steaks not in that order so a little research is coming. How would I tell you about this so far so good so far so good took a little research

12:16but it's a skill that I've enjoyed learning I like the way the vest looks now that yarn looks beat up let's be honest there's a picture of the front and the back of a steak the back is where you can see the raised ridges for the purl stitches and I'm not done learning yet. I do want you to realize when you have an edge and I'm going to stick and that will leave me with edges when you have those edges and you have that purling row that purl row the function of that is it will make the yarn flip over so the edge of that steak after I've cut it both edges will curl around and be hidden okay so it's going to be important to figure out how to tack them down so they don't curl around and promptly loosen themselves up and fall apart but this is a pure wool yarn so it should be sticky enough to withstand what I'm doing the next research is how you do that tacking down part anybody who has

13:18any recommendations I'm open to suggestions but so far I've kind of enjoyed this it really makes vest knitting kind of brainless I think I do need to investigate a pattern that accounts for steaking a little more than and buds pattern but her pattern is not about that her pattern is about knitting in pieces so in all fairness it's a great pattern I've made a lot of vests from it this is a different direction and I don't want to hold her pattern responsible for any challenges I've run into the pattern was not intended to support this and I do recommend this pattern to people making v neck vests all the time in the meantime I think that's everything that I want you to know about this and I really want you to see the pictures of the steaks and the picture on the left there in the show notes is looking at the right side the pictures on the right is looking at the back side meanwhile the prawn agnes oh I'm having so much fun with that every now and then you just got to throw it all to the wind and knit a big

14:21clunky sweater in a heavy weight yarn this is a size five a bulky weight or a chunky weight and I currently right now I believe I'm on the fifth or sixth scheme that is to say I had four schemes of the prawn colored prawn but not forgotten the opig yarn from oink pigments and I got down to two schemes left and I saved them for the arms and meanwhile at the bottom of the body I started to do a fade pattern using the prawn but not forgotten remainder along with a scheme of the ovary action I love it it's kind of wonderful looking and so I said okay a scheme for each arm and partway down the arms close to the cuffs I will again do some of the fading just to match what happened at the bottom and the ribbing but you know it is a beautiful

15:24thing to grab some size 11 needles in my case and just crank away on the agnes sweater this is designed by somebody at quince and company it has pockets I don't bother I never have but it's a darn good base pattern for a bulky sweater and they come together so fast I don't know why I guess the size 11 needles because really size five yarn is not that much thicker than a size four as far as I can tell but I'm enjoying it immensely and hopefully I will have something to show you I'm not quite at the elbow of the first sleeve because I'm not working on it with the dedication I'd like to have meanwhile nothing in the quilting department nothing spinning let's get on to a strategy I don't know how many times I've said this in therapy I'm not even sure how many times I've said it on the podcast you do have to know what you love when people

16:24are depressed they don't reward themselves and they spend a huge amount of time as a clinician talking to depressed people and trying to get them to determine ways to reward themselves and let me tell you when you're depressed even when your mood is down a little bit it is really really hard to get the logic that you must reward yourself a lot if you want to see this in action watch a dog trainer the people who train hardcore military dog service dogs you know dogs and shows television dogs I mean really more than dog show dogs if you watch the trainer carries a treat bag at their hip and they continually have their hand in it and the dog knows where it is I used to laugh because my German shepherds would fixate on whichever pocket had the treats

17:26my dogs currently know where the treats are on the kitchen counter when I let them out of their crates they don't look at me they look straight at the treat bag okay look even a dog gets it you need a lot of little rewards and I've said this over and over but here's what drives me nutty that most of my patients don't even know what rewards them and the other thing is they have really unrealistic ideas about rewards so every reward has to be big or it doesn't count so every reward sounds like we I'm going down to Disneyland today no rewards have to come in a huge range so I know this sounds crazy but I'm sitting here in the place where I see my patients and I'm looking at a pile of my rewards but you might not see them that way so let's look

18:29at my rewards a cat brush I reward myself when Minerva jumps in my lap I allow myself to gently brush her she can only take so much before her hyper aestheticia makes her bite me but she loves it and she purrs and she particularly wants to be brushed around her chin and face yeah I know brushing the cat how's that a reward it's soothing I have my phone I can always look at pictures or play a little solitaire game I have a little bag of salted almonds I can have a handful of almonds I have my bubbly water I can have a little bit of that but also I can get up and go to the restroom between patients believe it or not that is a reward that's a relief break and I get to race down the hall with Minerva running next to me because she has to come to the restroom and protect me I'm not really sure what she thinks is going on there that she has to do this but I don't

19:31ask her that question she's a good cat the rewards can be things like rubbing my own feet currently I have a new copy of our diagnostic manual version five TR and I am putting special tabs in it that is a reward when I have a good day I put seven tabs in the DSM still have to take me another two weeks unbelievable and then I can move on to its little sidekick the desk reference and its tabs but it is rewarding because I look at it and it looks better and I can find things faster when I'm diagnosing I reward myself with a few minutes on my jigsaw puzzle I reward myself by petting the animals by visiting the pony and giving her a carrot by five minutes of weeding out front yes I'm weeding because the rains are over I think for the spring so it's time to rescue the peppermint from the weed bed that should be the peppermint bed

20:33I have a lot of strange rewards sometimes I reward myself with a cup of tea as I'm making the tea I will probably wipe the counters down because why not I'm stuck there until the tea is finished so my rewards can very much be about satisfying my sense that I've done a little housework this week also I'm back to project touch up and I've been working on the door frames and the door handles thanks to a suggestion from the finch app and it's been quite a week just trying to get through those babies but that's okay project touch up is a bit of a reward because I look at what I've just touched up and it looks so much better so the rewards are very odd rewards can vary wildly from big to small bubble bath hot shower washing my hair all sorts of stuff clipping my nails I did that today after a rather tough patient it's really odd the things that will constitute little treats for you but treats really vary from person to person and one of the

21:37reasons I'm saying this is as a parenting specialist in psychology one of the things we find is how parents do not reward their kids but they're very fast on the punishment there is a time and a place for withdrawing privileges or goodies I get that that's punishment there is a moment for that but you don't want to do that a lot because it's not very effective okay you know all I can say I'm not going to go into that whole thing all I can say is on the positive aspect you want to teach your kids how to reward themselves and you do that by setting up rewards for them and teaching them what they have to do to earn a reward this is an adult skill when I work with patients I am going to be rewarded by a paycheck I know this today I saw the dentist again

22:38oh I'll talk about it and at the end of that I really just wanted to say too much I'm going to take the rest of the day off I don't have that many patients today I decided instead to see my patients and it was very rewarding but it really was rewarding because I also get paid for three more sessions now instead of using up sick a vacation time so this is a good thing this rewarding and it's really hard to know what rewards you and what rewards your kids and your family members unless you watch them carefully and it's a good thing to develop paying attention to these people and seeing what makes them tick the other interesting thing is they will tell you you can ask them and you have to remember that everybody's going to have different rewards reading a book listening to an audiobook knitting or crocheting spinning weaving dying all their hobbies I could go on forever but what rewards me may not reward you may not reward your kids

23:41so you have to pay attention to what people want and use it to motivate them motivating people with the promise of a reward is much more successful than punishment there is a ton of research on this the other thing is the slot machine logic I just want to put that in that humans believe or not we find unpredictable rewards much more emotionally satisfying than predictable rewards this is why slot machines are successful so when you have your people and your family and your friends on that treating you well and doing what they need to do you do want to pull a random reward out of thin air from time to time and say hey listen everybody did their homework this week I thought we would all have this kind of treat okay so don't forget those random rewards but also remember you have to pay attention to what actually rewards another person it may not be what you like I'll shoot well I didn't run the race last weekend because I wasn't trained because

24:47of these blooming windstorms we've had all winter long and that's okay because I still paid the money and that goes to a good cause students up and running in Santa Clarita it's the running group my kid ran with for years but I thought I still wish I had done something that felt like a charity so I celebrated the day of the run by donating blood instead and this was very interesting hey Gemma you mean you don't donate blood no I have not donated in about 40 years because I lived in Europe and I was on a farm a lot with a horse so you weren't supposed to donate turns out they said that no longer counts so to my surprise my son came home last week talking about how he donated blood at his college and I said I should look into that and found yes they have forgiven me I can donate blood so instead of the run I donated blood on Sunday morning it was a really interesting

25:50experience and here's how you do it you download the application from the Red Cross it's called blood donor very easy on the iPhone I believe they also have it for the Android platform you download it it will help you schedule a donation if you work your way through it there are links that explain everything you need to know and so I scheduled an appointment at a local church that was doing blood drives every week in February and I guess March 1st and I went to do it when you get there there is a rapid survey and on the app it will say do you want to do the survey the answer is yes I tried to do it by computer at the donor site and it was just a lot of information and felt like a lot now honestly no once you've done it once you're going to kind of get the feel for it and what your answers are but they have to go through and ask you questions like it said

26:54have you ever been pregnant the answer was yes and they said yeah there's a rare bacteria or something no that's not a problem for me so they will check some of your answers when you get to the site don't worry about it just answer honestly so you go on you make your appointment you fill out the survey when they send you the link to fill it out you go that takes care of a lot of the paper work in such and then it takes about maybe 10 minutes to donate your pint and it was very satisfying I walked out they had a low carb alternative that I could eat as a snack and bottled water in plastic oh well I had some of that I walked out feeling pretty good and I went and caught the train just to have a day down in Glendale down the mall because I just wanted that but yeah donating blood very easy now when you donate and you have the app you have a thing on the app called

27:54a donor card when you get the app it will not be completed you have to donate before they can fill out that information so I donated on Sunday my donor information I got an email yesterday on Wednesday saying they got my donation and were processing it and then today on my donor card in the app my donor ID number and my blood type showed up and a lot of really helpful information like when I'm next eligible to donate blood and also how I can donate the other types like platelets and whatnot so I was very very satisfying and that's the blood donor app and it's from the red cross and you have to go to your app store to get it and yeah I recommend it I should mention you prepare for all this really by hydrating yourself well and about two hours after I donated I suddenly began to drink liquid like a fish I just could not get enough it was a really great

28:59experience and I do recommend it not surprisingly there is a severe blood shortage in my area right now so they're really campaigning hard for it and it's a good idea in the meantime you can see the links for my upcoming races the next one is the sugar daddy 5k on June 20th so I have a lot of prep time there ha ha ha famous last words and I have the usual links for donating old medals and running shoes in the fluffy books I finished the cat who saved the library which I loved and the retard assassins guy to orchid hunting which I loved I cannot wait for the next books in those series I don't know if the cat who saved a library series can have a third book I really feel like that author is done what they can do nonetheless I am listening to will prescribe you a cat which is pretty eclectic and I'm enjoying it I do have the sequel will prescribe you another cat

30:00and they've just announced a third book coming out in a few months and I think it's called the coca road cat clinic it's a very interesting series again it's a little bit out there but it's intriguing also when you get a book like this the premise of every chapter in this is give somebody a cat and their life improves and that's not always true so when I read a thing like this I think oh no is this going to be some kind of fat everybody's going to get a cat now and they shouldn't turns out they don't do that in the book they do prescribe a cat in every chapter but sometimes the cat does its job and they take it back it's a very interesting thing the first chapter is not representative in the first chapter the prescriber wants the patient to keep the cat so he sets it up to sound very desperate but don't let that turn you off I almost stopped reading at that point and I would say don't get turned off by that it's an interesting book I'll let you know how it

31:03goes I'm also reading a spin-off book by Jerry Taylor the author of the wonderful St. Mary's Chronicles of the time traveling historians and she has a spin-off with these two characters that are just wonderful small hope and penny royal so I'm reading the first of that spin-off series the ballad of small hope and penny royal I know there's a sequel to it that I believe I even have but I just started it I'm listening to it also and I'm enjoying it something I really like well the blood donor app for the red cross as I've told you because it made me really happy and it's making me very very happy now to have it completing itself and helping me schedule my next donation which I think is April 26th also I was rolling around online and there it was the recipe for the easy crochet scrunchy and you can tap on that image and download it and blow it up if you want to see it this is a classic for crocheters every teenage girl when I was young except me made these you just

32:10get a plain old elastic hair band and you crochet around it to make it look floral and the more you fold it in your hair around your ponytail the more interesting it looks everybody should have this recipe so there it is also this is one of those charity fair things get a bunch of scrunchies at a CVS get a hook out use up all your scraps make these scrunchies sell them give them out as party favors whatever you want to do I also still have the link to my bundle unravelery of patterns for ice resistance materials hats badges and whatnot and the links so that you can donate to the people impacted by ice and to the immigration law center of Minnesota and you can also find a link to a collection of links called crafters helping Minnesota meanwhile it project back episodes on proton I need to change it but hopefully this month we will be doing episodes 201 to 250 of this

33:16new series at which point I will give you all a break from this and cycle back maybe to the old ones but I feel like all of these have been loaded if you want them still have to go back to the listener who said she had the episodes I was missing in the new series I just need world enough and time right now put a lid on it in the tea tastings I have been enjoying buttery short bread herbal from plum deluxe this was an unexpected pleasure I can't really figure out where I got this if this was in one of the previous advent calendars or what but it is a marvelous thing it is honey bush tea cocoa peel blackberry leaves natural flavor why this comes out tasting like buttery short bread I cannot tell you but it is a fantastic thing and I do highly recommend it as you can tell it is an herbal which is lovely I do not want you sucking up black tea too much

34:19or like me you may get high as a kite now of course when you have a good herbal tea the next thing is bread and butter and at the top of the show notes you can see that very thing and you may be saying but Jenna your keto can you eat this stuff yes because I have the wonderful book by faith gorsky and Laura clevenger called keto bread and my beloved husband got me this a few christmas is back and I sort of hemmed and haught and I finally settled down to it now last week I may have mentioned that I was gathering some of the more esoteric ingredients like flax seed meal and the special stevia glycerite which is like a syrupy sort of liquid stevia so I got those things really really nice and I realized that I wanted to make the quick bread and I wanted to make the pumpkin bread turns out they're pretty much the same recipe that is if you gather the ingredients for the quick bread you've got almost everything you need for the pumpkin

35:23bread so you can see them there on the left is the quick bread in the clear baking pan loaf pan on the right is the pumpkin bread notice that they're in parchment paper I was not thrilled when the recipe said to do this turns out it's a great idea nothing sticks it lifts right out of the loaf pan you get a perfectly formed loaf and clean ups really a breeze so I do recommend that you use the parchment paper which was a new thing on me and I'm really glad I did it also serves to wrap your breads and if you look at the top of the show notes you will see a slice of the quick bread with butter and it's fabulous and perfectly keto when I got my blood done they did my A1C and my A1C was great which means this stuff did not drive it up which is really good news I did limit myself to one or two slices a day that pumpkin bread was fabulous I just could not stop

36:30eating it they both go beautifully with soft butter spread on them and a good herbal tea but frankly when I really wanted to treat yeah Earl Gray I will see if I can dig up the recipes and put them in there for you in the meantime the bladder on Saturday my son wanted to go back to the museum whose name I keep getting wrong which is Lapma the LA county museum of art duh but it's a modern art museum by and large and we first went to the Grove which is about a mile away and we had a lunch there and we went early this time and so we got in the cheesecake factory had much better service they remembered us which was even weirder and so you can see a picture of this sort of pseudo classical architecture there that's British 17th century classical pseudo as I know it yeah okay forgive

37:33me I was just surprised that they were trying so hard to style the architecture like this I took a picture of it and anyway you can also see Atlachma there's a picture of this city construction it was not running apparently the cars and the trains go round and round but it takes up the better part of a large gallery on the ground floor so I put that up because my son and I both got fascinated with it and then of course we wandered around it's a fairly eclectic collection but I of course saw the antique dresses of which they had only a handful and I got caught up in the fabrics so at the top you've got an 1860s gown and I liked it because when you look at it you can see the difference in textures really are a point of decoration and in other words we don't think of it often this way but they change texture to make decoration to make something fancy so there's

38:35the back of the gown and you can see she's got this lacy it's not quite a fissue it's not quite shawl's the word for it and at the bottom of the bodice you can see the ribbon and I realized the first time that the background of course is silk the main cloth of the dress and then the ribbon and the lace make contrasting texture and it gives a kind of beauty in the back that's quite unique I mean on the front the lace and the ribbon are quite distant from each other but it enhances the look of the back and I just found that amazing so after that you can see a dress slightly later about the 1880s and again look at the velvet in the pictures against the silk and it is a very simple dress but that contrast creates the richness so it is also a more high fashion gown and of course at the very bottom you get to the very end of the 1800s

39:35and there's the for me the absolute crown and glory it's just embroidery that what makes that gown fashionable and couture is the embroidery so of course I took a picture of it and it's wool and I thought that was wonderful and that use of wool makes this into a winter gown as opposed to a warmer weather gown then in other words it's not so much the color as it's that wool that the heavier hand I guess is the best thing I can think to call it of that embroidery dictates the season I mean they wear long sleeves for a lot of the time when they're out in the street you only have their arms and shoulders usually at late afternoon events you know special high teas or a ball but with the other thing I want to point out that if you look at the 1860s blue and silver gown they point out that the owner would replace the bodice with something with longer sleeves that

40:39covers the shoulder and neckline for day wear so it is important to remember that they can disassemble these clothes and that is how they are maintaining them they are notorious compared to air clothing for needing careful maintenance but they can build them in pieces and that does allow for a certain flexibility the same with the trims when you take off the shawl and the ribbon on the gown at the very top with the bell hoops the 1860s gown you really have a whole new gown that you can redecorate and they do this kind of thing quite often to recycle old gowns and this is going on from the middle ages forward where are the ones who have disposable clothing meanwhile on Sunday of course there were the vampires that is I went to get my blood drawn I found it really amusing that they put the what I call the drama bandage on me the big red X I don't know why they do that they never used to but they do it now so I had to keep that on for an hour

41:41I don't know if she thought I would like burst like a balloon or what underneath it is a band-aid well a larger bandage over a cotton swab okay and I just took myself on the train because I just needed a quiet day because I had my son with me on Saturday Sunday I wanted a quiet kind of me day you know it really happened I went I got sushi from the conveyor belt occur that was fun and I went on the Starbucks I got coffee what I learned I really missed my son I was lonely but there I was okay the usual links to the services relating to ice and helping our LGBTQIA plus colleagues and my community resources and my calendar now Minerva gets the last word Minerva well I tried to train her to jump up on a chair on command to get her treats she figured it out got it right away we'll not do it she does all sorts of convolutions to get the treats without

42:46jumping up which to me means she knows exactly what I want yes she's lying in my lap being a big furry meatloaf ignoring me as I record this she knows exactly what I want she's choosing not to do it I find this hilarious it reminds me of the truth that when you have a dog who particularly a breed like a German shepherd or a newfoundland or a collie they really want to please you and they really want to cooperate with you when you have a llama they do not they think you're interesting they know you have the food they love you in their own way but they don't see a reason to obey you and now I'm reminded why we used to say that llamas are 200 pound cats in a bigger fur coat Minerva knows exactly what I want but she has drawn that line I find this hilarious by the way the only other dog I've known of that would do exactly what Minerva is doing I used to breed these when I was a teenager nor region L counts and the joke is with an L count

43:51you don't give orders you negotiate so apart from L counts I used to dogs that want to learn my orders and want to be rewarded but let me tell you having told you about rewards in this strategy the rewards are not high incentive enough for her to obey this command so Minerva's last word no no no no I am not following stupid orders having said that let's remember that Minerva does obey me in quite a few ways that make our lives easier like using her litter box and this is because Minerva even if she doesn't want to do commands it seems stupid to her she still understands that she is a part of our community in here in our household and when we work for the good of the community we are working for the good of the individual this is true now more than ever having said that everybody stay safe take care of each other and I will talk to you soon bye bye so we have come to the end of another episode of cognitive

44:57please do not use this podcast to diagnose yourself if you think you are having a mental health problem please contact a licensed mental health professional show notes for these episodes can be found at cognitivepodcast all one word dot blog spot dot com episodes can be found at iTunes under the name cognitive podcast but also can be found posted next to the show notes on the blog spot page thank you so much for listening everybody stay safe take care of each other and I'll talk to you soon bye bye