Should I be worried yet?

I recently had a medical checkup, during which my primary care physician asked about my short term memory.  The doctor was the first to suspect Alzheimer’s disease in my husband and he was with us for the entire journey.    He knows well how gun shy I am about that disease.

“Well, I think it’s okay,” I answered.  “Though sometimes I can’t find the word I want.”  Short answer, maybe not entirely true given what I left out.

A few years ago I read about a test to determine the difference in memory failure between AD and non-AD short term memory.  

Simply put:  You lose your keys and then find them.

1) If you remember putting them there, you’re okay, probably just not paying attention.

2) If you don’t recall how they got there, mmmmm….   Not okay. 

I’m not sure if the neurologists and neurophychs sign off on that test, but you can see some validity in it if you’ve ever known anyone with AD.

So, this is a picture of me after I’d just located my reading glasses--the ones I'd spent a half hour  searching EVERYWHERE for them.

Should I be worried?

Tuesday I drove the seven miles into Moose Pass to the post office.  As I pulled into the parking lot, I remembered that I didn’t have my box key with me.  I have two keys to that box and I leave one in each vehicle, except this time the key was in the pocket of whatever jacket I’d last worn to the post office.

Now, forgetting the key usually isn’t a problem because Marcia, the postmaster, will retrieve your mail for you, as long as this doesn’t become a habit and/or nuisance.  I didn’t, however, get my mail hand-delivered to me that day because I was there in the middle of the postmaster’s lunch hour and the window was closed.

So, I went back the next day.  Again, I still hadn’t found the key.   Again I arrived right after the lunch hour started.

 Should I be worried?

I spent last weekend working on a project that I should have been doing instead of playing all summer.  This is the front of my carport:

 I needed to sand what's left of the finish off the log siding and refinish it.  So, I strung a couple extension cords from the garage to the carport:

See the nice orange cord?   I used a 4-1/2 inch grinder with a sanding disc to remove the finish, and a palm sander to finish the corners.  I decided to sand the two front posts also.  Not until I was on the very last part of the second post, after I had carefully sanded around that brown thing, did I realize that was the electric receptacle we'd recently installed in case I ever needed electric in the carport.

And for my final exhibit, this is where I found the camera I'd been looking for for five minutes yesterday.

Yes.  It was in my left hand.

To quote Alfred E. Neuman, "What?  Me worry?"