Jeremiah and I both have trouble remembering when we've locked the door or turned off the toaster oven before leaving the house. Associating a routine action with a movement, sound, or other event unrelated to the humdrum behavior can help you easily remember it. As it turns out, performing an unrelated action in conjunction with a habit can also help you remember to do the routine thing in the first place. Now that's interesting.

From today's Science Daily:

"In extended medication-taking situations, the habitual nature of the task may make it difficult for older adults to remember whether or not they took the medication on a particular day, especially if pill boxes are not used," explains Mark McDaniel, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

"To remedy this potential problem, older adults could be instructed to take their medication while placing one hand on their head or in some other unusual or silly way, like crossing their arms," he suggests. "Our results indicate that older adults can use these sorts of more complex motor tasks to effectively reduce repetition errors in habitual prospective memory tasks, such as taking a daily medication."

The key here is that muscle memory is working along with your brain's memory of the narrative of your day. And what works for the old, works for the young.

BoingBoing posted about this study today and got some interesting tips from readers regarding the pairing of movements, speech, or sounds with routine actions to help cement a memory and avoid that nagging "Did I remember to lock the door?" feeling. Advice includes:

• "When I lock my car I will check two of the doors are locked, or when I lock my house up, I will shake the door." - Gerg


• "I have the tendency to think I have forgotten to lock it (which will haunt me all day), so I say the name of the day to myself when locking the door. I can then recall that if I have recited the day's name it is associated with locking the door and the memory is easily retrievable." - Ocncty


• "I hit a metal column in my basement to remember turning off the iron. I do not know why unplugging it cannot be remembered distinctively from day to day, but making a sound can." - Oxdeadbeef


• "For a long time, when I've needed to remember something important, I associate a reminder with something I know I will see at a time when I need to be reminded. (e.g. Yesterday, I needed to return a library book, and the library was close to my bus stop, so I associated the area around the bus stop with remembering to return the book). What they're talking about is the same, just using kinaesthetic rather than visual associations." - Kieran O'Neill

Give it a try! Or let us know how you remember that you've performed those routine tasks so you don't have to drive back home, like I sometimes do, because I'm not sure if I turned off the stove.

Have you recently received a report about your local drinking water quality (a Consumer Confidence Report), but don't know what it means? We did, just last week - these reports are issued nationwide around the beginning of July - and I threw it away. It was kind of liberating, actually, because each previous year I have made a habit of poring over these reports knowing that I couldn't understand them. One problem is that a lot of scary sounding chemicals are listed in the report but there are certain very low levels that are considered "OK" to have in your water. Whether these levels are set at truly safe levels, I don't know; but I do know that just seeing a substance on that list, and some measurement greater than 0, is not necessarily cause for alarm.

But this year will mark another first for me: I'll be calling up our water supplier to ask if they can send me another copy of that report. Thanks to NSF International, we now have a resource that can help us interpret our water quality report.

For example, I now know what all those pesky abbreviations that go along with the numbers mean. Key ones include (my summaries, based on NSF's info):

• AL: Action Level. The concentration of lead or copper in water that triggers treatment requirements for a water provider. Requires no public notifications.


• MCL: Maximum Contaminant Level. The maximum level of a contaminant allowable in public drinking water. When exceeded, consumers must be notified by the water supplier.


• MCLG: Maximum Contaminant Level Goal. The level of a contaminant in drinking water believed to be safe.


• NA: Not Analyzed. Water has either been deemed "non-vulnerable" to a contaminant or is not required to be tested for the contaminant.


• ND: Not Detected. Water analysis equipment has detection limits; this means that within those limits, no contaminant was found.

The site's guide to drinking water reports also provides an overview of what's in CRR reports, a discussion of units of measurement and what they mean and, most invaluably, how to interpret your water quality report's data.

NSF International is a non-profit public health and safety organization that is active in writing standards for food, water, and consumer goods both in the U.S. and worldwide. They also test drinking water treatment products including pitchers, tap filters, and home water treatment systems and certify those that meet their standards.

Last weekend my family took a camping trip in our home state, Oregon. We stayed on a huge lake, surrounded by coniferous trees, including redwoods. Mt. Hood stood proudly in the background, still topped in snow.

For the most part, it was a fun trip that included activities interesting to both the teenager and the toddler, with an itinerary developed along the lines of my previous post on planning fun camping trips with kids. We took long walks, floated in our raft, did some fishing, and enjoyed evenings around the campfire.

There were a few challenges, though. We weathered a storm (including hail), for one. We struggled with a tent that no one could set up. And we fought that age-old scourge of campers: A battalion of mosquitoes.

Those little pests love mountain lakes. But we were prepared!

We took Buzz Away Extreme Spray, a natural insect repellant. It was important to us to use a product that is DEET-free, herbal, and most importantly, that works.

One thing that makes this product work well is that it comes in a spray bottle - common among the nasty DEET stuff but not so common for natural products. Some herbal products are oils or lotions and more difficult to apply. Being able to spray it on our heads and over our clothes made a big difference in repelling the relentless critters.

We did have to re-apply every couple of hours, but when we did, it worked. I have tried other natural products that seemed fairly useless. This time, I came home with no bites AT ALL. My husband (who used it less frequently) did have bites on his legs.

The only downside is that the smell is fairly strong (think Citronella).

Buzz Away also claims to repel other pests like ticks and fleas. We didn’t run into any of those, but I wouldn’t doubt it. One interesting claim they make is that DEET-based products repel fish as well. Not sure about that although it certainly piques my interest as we did do some fishing on the trip. But the bottom line is that we are not willing to risk the potential harmful effects of DEET for humans.

As I stood by Timothy Lake and watched a swarm of mosquitoes fly around my toddler, I was glad we had our Buzz Away Spray. We might have gotten a couple of bites, but we could have been miserable!

You can pick up Buzz Away! mosquito repellant on Amazon or on the Buzz Away website.

What about you? How do you ward off the critters when you are enjoying the great outdoors?