@OtterB - The school does not offer the FluMist (or at least doesn't say so), but I'll talk to his pediatrician and see if I can get it that way - thanks for the idea!
We're currently trying to decide whether or not to get our sons the H1N1 vaccine - their school having just sent a form that allows them to get it at school. I'm as pro-vaccine as they come, but both boys are healthy little buggers (9 & 11), and #1 son is needle-phobic, so getting poked is rather more traumatic for him than most kids. I find myself reluctant to add two more needle sticks to his set for the year, when his pediatrician just told him he was done with vaccines until college. We don't generally bother with seasonal flu vaccines, and thus far neither child has ever gotten more than a very mild case of the flu.
Decisions, decisions.
I had personal experience of someone who went down on a three-strikes law in Georgia. It seemed very odd to me. Dude was an opportunistic thief. He had no job skills worth squat and was not at all bright, so he was chronically broke and didn't have any compunctions about appropriating anything that wasn't nailed down. Some job skills training and a little assistance getting on his feet would have done everyone a lot more good than locking him up for life. Neither he nor his wife seemed to have any clue how to manage in the work world, and lurched into petty crime more from trying to survive and lack of clues than real criminal intent. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she were also locked up for life now for basically the same pattern.
Jordan & Mackenzie - those being the names of my teacher's children. Could be two boys, two girls, or one of each.
I lived in utter terror of leaving my baby in the car when I was a new Mom. We had just moved to AZ, and I am (at best) a "forget my own head if it wasn't attached" sort of person. The important thing to me about getting through people's heads that it isn't a matter of parental caring or parental smarts, is that there are things you can do if you realize you are vulnerable.
In my case, I made a habit - before the baby was even born - of making a circuit of the car and checking the backseat from all angles before locking up and leaving. I did it every time, whether I had the baby or not. I still do it now, and the baby in question is 10.
Because I knew, without question, that if I didn't have an automatic habit of checking, it might be me on the 6pm news, sobbing in a grocery store parking lot.
The story is astonishing. My heart goes out to all those parents, and doubly so to Balfour. Tikkun olam indeed.
While not BoA or any other large corp, I did spend a month doing collections for a somewhat smaller company. What I found really interesting was that in several instances I was reprimanded for being too nice to the people I was calling - even when I was getting a good return rate. I was strongly encouraged to treat every customer with a debt over ninety days old as a deliberate deadbeat who had money and just wasn't willing to cough it up.
After a month I told my boss that if he made me do collections calls again (not what I had been hired on for), I'd quit on the spot.
Not at my house, they don't. I had to coax hard to get people here to simply stay awake until midnight (and only succeeded with five out of seven).
Ahh, old familiar grounds here. I used to work in a neuropharmacology lab. Our MSDS files read like something out of an ED's nightmare. LSD, cocaine, PCP, digitoxin, picrotoxin, barbiturates - you name the dangerous, sometimes voluntarily used substance, we had it (and the five metric tonnes of required paperwork to go with it).
And just to add to the fun, the protocol we were working with required the mixing of these substances with DMSO. Whee! From ingested to contact poisons in one easy step.
The MSDS's could be entertaining. The MSDS for sucose was good - nothing like five pages of warnings attached to a 100g can of something you can buy in 5 lb. lots at the grocery store - but it was not quite as good as the one that got sent us for books. (Hazards: Impact, falling, paper cuts)
Rose Milk hand cream instantly takes me back to my grandmother's house. Her whole house had that distinctive background scent.
Lilac has mixed memories for me, on the good side, spring and trips to the park, on the bad side, a time in life when I was deeply unhappy.
Sandlewood - college and a close friend who loved it.
Cinnamon - baking with grandma.
White Ginger (plumeria) - the early years of my marriage, when we had a plumeria growing in our backyard.
Love's Baby Soft - sweeps me right back to middle school, when about half the girls wore it. Which means I deeply loathe the scent, since middle school was a miserable place for me.
Baby Powder + Brill Cream + Menthol = my grandfather's scent. Whereas Old Spice is associated with my father so strongly I had to ask my husband not to wear it, even though I like the scent.
Dead voters on the rolls would be the registration vs. voting thing again. I'm 99% certain my dead MIL is still on the Tennessee voting rolls. My FIL certainly hasn't gotten around to removing her. But she's definitely not going to be showing up to vote. Nor is her presence there evidence of fraud by the Democrats, even though she was one.
* My bo - six feet of perfect Osage Orange wood, custom-made for me. It looks like a toothpick bo, weighs like a real weapon - plus beautiful and with an absolute satin finish. It's the only karate gear I own that's not cheap student crap.
* My wedding ring. I love tri-color jewelry, and after my old wedding ring had to be cut off, my husband hunted high and low in secret to find the perfect ring - a plain band with rings of rose gold, white gold and yellow, in satin finish, separated by thin shiny grooves. I have no idea where he found it, and I love it utterly.
*My cuff bracelet - another tri-color jewelry present from my husband - a silver cuff with a howling wolf in rose gold.
*My piano -though as much as I love it, I may not keep this one. It was my grandfather's piano, a Steinway living room grand (Model L). It's a far better piano than I could afford - but also somewhat better than I can afford to take care of the way it deserves to be. Plus, in all honesty, Steinways in general and this piano in particular, don't fit my playing terribly well. So I'm at least considering letting my piano pass to someone who can love and care for it as it deserves, and getting myself something smaller with a lighter action.
Oh dear, the emotional vampire site is sort of deeply alarming. Though it does explain why some of my family relations are so very difficult to deal with.
Is it just me, or is McCain releasing his records for a limited time to a limited set of people while not allowing any photos or other recording seem more suspicious than simply sitting on them? It's the difference between a kid refusing to let his Mom into his room at all (which may be privacy issues), and standing outside the room and popping the door open for a split second - "See, the floor is clean and the bed is made." The second is much more likely to mean there's something in the room he specifically doesn't want Mom to see.
Adding to the chorus. Here's to getting home and being not bored in nice, healthy back-to-regular-life type ways. As opposed to exciting, ambulance and hospital involving ways.
I would amend to "I have no prudence, and am very likely stupid - with a deathwish."
I can't even try to compete with the wonderfully technicolor purple prose that's been flying by.
However, a few years ago I lived in a small town that seemed to have only one writer of advertising blurbs - one cursed with a completely tone-deaf ear for unintentional meanings.
"You are not a number. You are not a disease. You are not at our hospital."
"Let (local newspaper) take you to the cleaners!" (For a collaboration between said paper and the local dry-cleaners.)
And of course, the just simply wrong.
"For a rememberable dining experience!"
Dad:
1. The key is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you have it made.
2. Pick your goal first. With a goal, what you have to do becomes self-evident.
Mom:
1. It's better to be happy than right. (Unfortunately she has given this advice by negative demonstration, rather than by verbal communication.)
2. Marry the person you love, not the person your parents love.
Marilee @54
No, I hadn't. I can well understand why someone in those circumstances would choose not to carry anything that couldn't be dropped. Though I find myself pondering the difficulties of young mothers who do have neurological injuries or other conditions that increase the odds of falling.
Marilee@50: "I was taught to drop what I'm holding, no matter how important..."
Yes, and no.
The worst spill I've had in my life occurred while I was a young mother and carrying a tiny infant. I would not take back the instincts that kept my newborn safe even if a conveniently placed concrete block hadn't saved me from a crushed foot.
Though I will say the child-protective instincts would probably kick in regardless of training, and in my experience they seem remarkably astute. When the same kid was 22 months old and I was seven months pregnant, I turned my ankle on a curb and went down while carrying the sprog on my hip. I came up on the other side having somehow managed to set my toddler securely on his feet while turning a complete front shoulder roll to protect my belly. I was shaken up and thoroughly scraped (gravel parking lot) with a sprained ankle, but both toddler and fetus were entirely undamaged.
And I'll be damned if I can even figure out exactly what I did - let alone attempt to duplicate the manuever.
Tai Chi is frequently recommended as a fall preventative in the elderly. I believe there's at least one study showing some effectiveness.
There's a huge difference between a situation where you can reasonably expect to take a tumble (fighting, dancing), and just walking around minding your own business. I did a nice backward rollout in the middle of a karate bout a couple of weeks ago (It is very impressive to the 15-year-old boys, isn't it?), but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have saved myself from my broken wrist several years ago from tripping backwards and catching myself with my hand. Not to mention the tight quarters indoors. There's a good chance that a back shoulder-roll would have put me through the plate-glass door behind me.
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| 2009 | 8 |
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| 2007 | 19 |
| 2006 | 23 |
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