New and improved chess excuses

The sun was in my eyes, my mouse slipped, he cheated, he played on in a lost position, her ample bosom distracted me, he played off book, I had a hangover, etc.. Here's a new one that I've heard a couple of Knights allude to, which I would like to declare: I have been doing too many tactical problems!

The fact that my previous 45/45 game was lost largely to to quiescence errors (see previous post) is troubling because such errors are so elementary. (See this Heisman article for a discussion of such errors.) It wasn't that I missed the captures my opponent had, but I just lazily thought, "Oh, I'll be able to make up the material" without actually doing the calculations to see if I was right!?

I think that part of the reason for this apparent laziness is that I have been solving exclusively one- to two-move problems in CTB, and it has started to become a habit to only think a couple of moves ahead, even for obvious move sequences. Longer sequences become cognitively screened off because I know that's not what CTB is looking for. I need to be wary of such pernicious side-effects of my tactical training!

While troubling, the counting/quiescence errors should be some of the easiest to fix if I am just disciplined during the game. I have to think through the consequences of every serious candidate move to see how the dust might settle. I have always been surprised that there aren't more elementary tactical problems that are meant to help you avoid quiescence errors. Wolff's Idiot's Guide to Chess has about a dozen such problems. I'll do them again. I'd like to get my hands on a thousand such problems.