People with all sorts of anxiety disorders worry a lot. Frequently, they spend inordinate amounts of time trying to anticipate and prevent negative outcomes. They fret for hours about possible risks like MRSA, heart attacks, traffic accidents, and airplane crashes. Sometimes they also spend lots of time trying to minimize these risks by excessive cleaning, avoiding traffic at all costs, taking a train instead of a plane, exercising to excess or dieting beyond all reason.

It’s as though they think that their worries and/or compulsive actions will truly help keep catastrophes at bay. In other words, spend enough time and effort and you’ll be safe from harm. Oh, it only it were so.

Many of our readers know that we live in New Mexico. Once again, fires in New Mexico are devastating our beautiful forests and tragically, quite a few homes. What seems astounding to us as our eyes water, noses drip, and we watch what are usually blue skies fill with smoke, is that this natural disaster is once more threatening the homes of those in Los Alamos and our National Labs. More than 12,000 people have been evacuated with no end in sight.

Just about ten years ago a similar fire threatened the Labs and burned over 400 home in Los Alamos. Surely, that fire should have provided ample warning to prepare for another such eventuality.  It’s utterly outrageous that this is happening again. Although local officials reassure residents, it seems odd that thousands of barrels of nuclear waste sit relatively unprotected. Some experts worry that these barrels could explode like popped corn, releasing radioactive toxins to the blowing wind. Oh yeah, and it only takes an incredibly small particle of this lethal material to cause lung cancer. Furthermore, New Mexico is well known for its winds—especially this year.

Not so long ago, we finished writing Child Psychology and Development For Dummies. We enjoyed writing it and helping parents, teachers, and childcare providers understand how children develop and what makes them tick.

Even though we had separate sections on normal and abnormal development (as most such books do), it occurred to us that this distinction is not as clear-cut as you might think.

That’s for two major reasons:

It’s spring in New Mexico. We’ll have some days of high winds, but for the most part, cold weather is gone for the season. People are starting to wear shorts and flip-flops, the costume of the summer trudger.

I have a cold. It started last week and lingered as spring colds usually do. I’m better, down to sporadic coughing fits, nose blowing, dragging, and the spacey feeling that colds often leave you with. Somehow I think that more than anything colds consume creativity and cognitive attention. They leave me with little ability to plan ahead, organize, resist temptations, set goals, make decisions, or even write for that matter.

Just ask my husband; he had to come in and save the first draft of this rambling missive. I don’t care. Colds do that to you–they make you a hopeless, inefficient, hesitant, straggler. And everyone here in the Albuquerque area seems to have one.

When I went to school, my mother packed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread for me. On some days, she’d switch to a couple of slices of bologna with mayonnaise—also on white bread. Cookies or an occasional apple finished off the meal. Packing food for lunch was pretty simple. We’d rush to long rows of tables when the bell rang, then stuff food into our mouths as fast as possible so that we’d have more time to play outside at recess.

Today is one of my favorite days– solstice. The beginning of winter or winter solstice means that each day for the next six months is a bit longer than yesterday.

This is very good news for our friends in the northern hemisphere who suffer from seasonal affective disorder. Hope returns, light is coming—light always follows the short dark days of fall.

Well being across the world is an interesting phenomenon. We searched in Costa Rica and learned a lot.

We were both the kind of students who showed up early to class, got all of our homework done on time, and worked hard to get good grades. Both of us can still recall the times we didn’t quite meet our own very tough expectations.

Through the years, we’ve attempted to listen to our own advice and do our best—but also know that we can’t do everything all of the time. And so, when our fun biweekly blog turned weekly, well that worked for a while.  But lately blogging became the oh my gosh we’ve got to write a blog today as well as write the next chapter and read those papers and supervise this student and we don’t have time to watch the grandkids or take the dogs running or go to the grocery store.

Driving down the freeway yesterday we were startled by a sudden loud siren. Plowing down the shoulder of the road was a large black vehicle that looked like a combination tank and space ship. The traffic slowed and moved to the right while a long line of police cars sped by. A few minutes later, we heard the first news bulletins on the radio. A man was shooting employees at a local business. The big black vehicle contained a swat team.

Workplace violence has become all too familiar. The incident yesterday, like many, was an explosion of violence related to a domestic dispute. The children involved in this incident will be haunted by what happened forever. Following these events inevitably many stories will appear about how to recognize and prevent these tragedies from happening. Unfortunately domestic violence is a common occurrence that has a dark history sometimes supported by cultural norms.

Dementia is a general term referring to various types of declines in memory, concentration and judgment. Dementia has a variety of causes, but strokes, toxins, head injuries, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s are among the most common.

Early signs of dementia include apathy, withdrawal, confusion, short term memory loss, problems following or maintaining conversations, disorientation (especially in unfamiliar areas), difficulty planning ahead, struggles with daily tasks such as balancing checkbooks, loss of initiative and motivation, loss of interests and a diminished ability to learn new skills.

As improved healthcare and nutrition allow people to live longer, the downside has been a soaring frequency of dementia. In fact, as many as half of those aged 80 and above may suffer from some form of dementia.