On getting Alzheimer’s… I resonate with Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s hopes in “Our Irrational Fear of Forgetting” that we make “cognition-related fear-mongering shameful and rare” but also with Alan Jacob’s response that perhaps fearing losses associated with Alzheimer’s disease isn’t as irrational as she suggests. (I also liked the comments at Jacob’s post and the further link to “The Human Face of Alzheimer’s.”)

I confess to anxiety around Alzheimer’s/dementia, which rises in me particularly when words and names go missing or I forget to do something obvious. In reading these articles and reflecting on my fear of getting the disease, it occurs to me that a big part of it concerns what my children may go through should it happen to me. And that, in turn, grows out of my experiences around my late father’s Alzheimer’s and the process I’m living now with my mother’s decline — milder than his so far, but significant cognitive decline nevertheless — and the way it changes, well, everything! I’m not navigating these things as smoothly as I wish, so I project that forward to what my children may encounter, IF… Ever the mother, I suppose. (Even though, as they say, the kids will be fine!)

Brave woman… Rachel Held Evans took on Mark Driscoll, and it did some good, at least she’s graciously taking it that way. But wouldn’t it be nice to have fewer flippant comments, fewer explanations, and some “real man” changes in his attitude?

Oh, just take a break and read fiction instead… Short shorts, if you like, four of mine, over at Rhubarb magazine. Or bake a rhubarb pie. Which I certainly would, if my oven hadn’t crashed on me, that is. Repair guy said they don’t make the broken part any more. “Go shopping,” he said, sounding way too gleeful. Links to appliance places next; sigh.