Recipes for Life

I love to bake. It requires measuring, mixing and cooking, using specific ingredients to make it just right. Baking I consider to be different than cooking because you need to follow a recipe a little more closely for items such as pies, cakes, cookies and candies than you do for a roast, green bean casserole or scalloped potatoes. To me, baking means sweets and cooking means real meals.

I'd like to draw an analogy between recipes for life that are baking and cooking related. Things that we should do, such as brush our teeth, shower, eat healthy foods, get rest and exercise are the baking items. The cooking can include watching TV, staying up late, eating those delicious sweets that are baked and sleeping late. Our lives are basically one big cooking show, because we never live our lives strictly by the recipe of what we should do, and it needs to be that way.

The recipe for a happy healthy life includes all of the above.

Is It Alzheimer's?

Am I in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's disease? Key indicators:

Start a sentence and can't finish it.
Put things away and can't remember where they are.
Cannot remember names - family, friends and acquaintances.
Don't remember words to express what I'm talking about.

This would be described as MCI, or mild cognitive impairment in the textbooks, because I can still perform all the ADLs, Activities of Daily Living, and my language, attention, cognitive function and verbal ability are still okay. I have found some information at www.issueswithalzheimers.com, and there are a whole slew of informative sites from our dear government promoting awareness of the disease.

Of course, it could be that I just have too much on my plate, with two active children and a husband to maintain. Also, the fact that I'm writing and working for about five different clients every week could have something to do with it ...