I'm doing something pretty dumb right now and taking a migraine pill that is going to make me feel like total crap for an hour or so while it is helping my stupid migraine feel better. I don't do hormones or weather changes well.

Here's what Nancy is obsessing about these days: Alzheimer's Disease. I'm terrified that I have Early Onset Alzheimer's. I'd love to have my doctor test me for the genetic markers. And I also don't want to look like a total freako hypochondriac!

Yes, I just read _Still Alice_, one of the most moving books I've read in a long, long time. In fact, I did something that I've never done before. I stayed up late finishing the book, and at 1:15 a.m., I turned it over, went to page 1, and started immediately reading it again. I wanted to look at those early signs and how she crafted the novel's flow, and it's just amazing. She is an incredibly gifted writer. And the book is kind of affirmatively terrifying.

I think the real root of my worry is that I don't know if my mother had some form of recognizable dementia with a name. It's one of those things where family denial and other health problems took the focus off this, and my mother's complete refusal to cooperate with any kind of diagnostics has left just a big question mark. She would repeat things, ask questions over and over, and her life was so simplified and tight that there wasn't much room for her to make noticeable mistakes. For the last 8 years or so of her life, her physical problems with weak arm muscles and post-polio syndrome left her unable to do the cooking. She didn't work outside the home or have volunteer responsibilities. My Dad was an accountant and paid the bills, especially as more bill-paying went online. And other issues could have clouded a diagnosis--possible depression (who wouldn't be depressed knowing they had a degenerative syndrome that was just going to leave them weaker and weaker and that there was little to nothing they could do about it?), not enough activity in her life. Nonetheless, I wondered then and I wonder now. And my recent spate of higher-profile forgetfulness that is remarkable to me has me a little rattled. So it's not quite that this book has made me panic like a medical student seeing herself in every pathology, but that I chose this book because it's a topic that has been on my mind.

I'm still not through Twilight. Every time I sit down to read it, I end up doing something else: wasting time on that time-wasting emetophobia forum, reading emails, reading something else, writing here, writing somewhere else. I meant to read for a few hours tonight, but I ended up doing all of the above. I don't know why.

Frances had her first gymnastics mock meet tonight. It was very exciting. She has so much work to do! She has missed quite a bit of practice in recent weeks because of the holidays falling such that Level 3's missed more than any other level and because she had ballet rehearsals and shows. Wednesday at practice she looked so inattentive and clueless and I felt like her coach wasn't doing much correcting, and I got worried that she had hit her ceiling--she was no longer a promising gymnast, but had reached the level where she would max out. I was concerned that they had given up on her and had accepted that she was going to be left behind when her class moves up over the summer, so the coaches had stopped actively working with her. As a reality check, and rather than wallow in our speculation, we talked with her coach. I guess we were a bit off. The news was the same as always. Yes, Frances is inattentive. Yes, Frances will get more mature with time. But they still are saying that she is the most talented athlete they've seen come through their doors in quite some time and that she has incredible potential for this sport. I suppose if only we could get her to actually care about putting some effort and concentration into it some day!

In the meet, she got lost a bit in some of her longer routines. But overall, she looked competent, especially on bars and vault, her best events. I have videos that I'll try to upload and post tomorrow. Now she is at a birthday slumber party for one of her best friends. Add in that we went to Inflation Nation today, and it was a banner day altogether.

The boys are also gone. They left for the river house with Marty and Peter this afternoon and probably won't be back until Sunday. They left with nothing more than the shirts on their backs, so it will be a minimalist weekend for them. I would say it's almost lonely with only Rutledge here, but I'm enjoying the silence (especially with the migraine...).

Ollie and I finished listening to _Belle Prater's Boy_ on CD--it's been our car book for about a week. It was really good, and Ollie enjoyed it because it dealt with some darker themes: death of a parent, suicide, an unsolved mystery. It went above Walter's emotional head, which is fine. I'm still always testing my character-age theory, and the characters in this book were 12, which is older than my listeners, so I really still feel that yeah, two more years and this would have been an even more effective book, and 2 more years and it might be of interest to Walter. We are also nearly finished with _The Secret of Laurel Oaks_ as a read-aloud. It's been a somewhat long book, but very interesting. It's based very closely on the story of one of the most haunted houses in America, but the names have been changed, and more characters added. It's a ghost/horror type story set in Louisiana in a mansion where a mother and her two daughters were poisoned, seemingly by one of their slaves, but we're not sure yet which one (or if any) did it or exactly why. This is also a book that really is aimed more at young adults, and as such, there are some themes that are either a little too mature for my kids as readers and that would simply be better understood and appreciated by young adults, which is really who this novel is aimed at (it should be shelved in YA and not Juvenile, as it was). The book alternates between chapters happening in the present with the family staying at this mansion while their parents are at an academic conference and 160 backs, when a wealthy family lived there with their slaves. The owner of the house routinely raped/molested the one young slave girl, and this would be my primary reservation about recommending this book to tweens--at best, they might not even understand the language and get what's going on, but at worst, it could be disturbing. And the plot does hinge a bit on this fact. Ollie is enjoying the history wrapped into the mystery story as well as the eeriness of the voodoo and ghosts.

New audio-book: _Ella Enchanted_. Next read-aloud: _All the Way Home_ by Patricia Riley Giff. My next book for myself: _Riding in Cars with Boys_.

We're also plugging away at _History of Us_ at about 2 chapters a day right now. I'd like to get closer to the Civil War before they go to Pamplin, but I just don't see that happening. I'm going to just rest assured that they know quite a bit already and not fast-track our basic history sequence here. Right now we're on the presidency of John Adams, the Napoleanic Wars, and the birth of American political parties.

The new math book is on the way for Ollie. I'm starting to get a little itchy about him not being on track to finish Saxon 6/5 before the end of the year. At a lesson a day, Walter is going to be fine, and we'll make a decision about what comes next after that. But for Ollie, he'd have to double up some or continue a bit into the summer, something I don't see happening. I should just let it go--we homeschool so that we can work at our own pace and not have to feel "accelerated" or be somewhere arbitrary because of the calendar or rest of the class. But there's something about finished up a year's work all tidy-like that just plain appeals to me.