My daughter and granddaughter seem to have little problems multi-tasking.  I suppose I do a lot of that too.  In all likelihood, most people do.  Even if it means being physically engaged in one thing, and thinking hard about something completely different.  Sometimes, as a result, things go slightly awry when focus is not completely on the task at hand.

Increasingly, I find on occasion that I've lost the thread of something I'm involved with.  As, for example, preparing breakfast while also putting on other things to cook having nothing whatever to do with breakfast, but becoming sidelined because I'm prepared to sit down and eat breakfast, and completely lose track in my immediate memory of something cooking away on the stove.  Particularly if I've given it a 'head-start' but having the heat too high, meaning to turn it to low as soon as it gets going.

I found, on Friday, that I'd forgotten I had put sugar, cornstarch, cranberry juice and halved, pitted cherries on the stove.  I'd left the heat high wanting to accelerate the process, to begin steadily mixing it until it thickened and became clear once it heated up sufficiently.  Except that I completely forgot to watch it, and then realized my colossal blunder when I could smell the cherries beginning to burn.  Fortunately I was able to complete the process without disaster occurring; while my memory momentarily failed, my sense of smell rescued the situation.

Later, when I had turned the cooled pie filling into the double crust I rolled out and placed in the convection oven on the counter top, I again lost track of time, until, from upstairs where I was tending to other things, I could smell the fragrance of cherry pie wafting through the house, trundled hurriedly downstairs and removed it from the convection oven, browned to perfection, on the cusp of becoming too brown.

Later still, when I had put rice on the stove to cook, and turned up the heat to get the water to the boiling point, I forgot it too, as I was unloading groceries into the refrigerator, then recalled as I smelled rice-water boiling over onto the range, and fortunately was able to rescue that food item as well.

Curiously enough, the very same thing happened when the same day I had put a chicken thigh and drumstick on the stove to begin the process of preparing a chicken soup, with vegetables to be placed in the soup on standby while I waited for the water surrounding the chicken to heat up sufficiently to begin the process of skimming the scum off the top of the water, preparatory to adding parsnip, celery, onion, garlic clove, carrot and bay leaf, salt, pepper.  My nose alerted me to the need to act instantly when my memory went off time.

If the immediate memory is busy elsewhere, at least another faculty kicks in to attune me to the present.