Monthly Archives: December 2010

God is not dead.

I’ve been trying to get a good recording of this song for a while.

My crappy recording setup means that I can only use something if I can record the entire song all the way through without any screw-ups… ever tried to do that?!  It’s hard.  And half the time when I do manage, I go back to edit and find I forgot to actually hit “record”, arg!

In any case.  I finally got a halfway decent recording of this one.  I’ve been working on it for weeks.  I hope you enjoy it, or, I at least hope it doesn’t hurt too much to listen to it.

I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day by yours truly
(Original artist: Casting Crowns)

Merry Christmas! :)

 

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Filed under Music & Songs

Plug your ears before opening…

I’ve been trying to get more serious about music lately so I’m trying to get a few songs recorded and uploaded.  Unfortunately I only have a built-in laptop mic, free editing software, and I can’t actually play any kind of accompaniment, so it’s a little weak.  If you’re not afraid to blow your eardrums I think the link below should play the latest one for you.

Beautiful Star of Bethlehem (Traditional)


 

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8 things I love about being snowed in…

I’m snowed in.  I don’t know what you picture when you think "snowed in", but since I can’t actually shovel snow, and since I have a front-wheel drive car and a gravel driveway, for me it means "hm, if I back out into that my car is probably gonna get stuck".  Right now it means about 10", give or take.

Most people don’t seem to like this, but most of the time I find it incredibly comforting… I’ve been rather depressed lately, though, so I’m breaking even about now.  In an effort to cheer myself up a bit more, here’s a list of things I love about being snowed in…

  1. This much snow provides natural insulation.

    It’s been insanely cold lately.  And I hate cold.  Cold makes my nerves scream, my joints ache, and even slightly cold temperatures cause all of my digits to freeze.  Cold is the main reason I left Ohio and swore I’d never come back here.  I moved no less than 4 times trying to find a place that was consistently warm, and once I found it I ended up having to move back to this place of torturous winters anyway, for financial reasons.

    In any case, it’s been cold, really cold, which has made me grumpy, really grumpy!  But snow, in sufficient quantities, provides my house with an extra layer of insulation, and with the added help the insane drafts cease and my stupid baseboard heaters can actually manage to heat the house to something resembling living conditions.

  2. Snow is beautiful, especially when it’s deep.
  3. It gives me an excuse to say "No".

    If I had my way, I would hibernate.  I would gather enough food for the winter, lock myself in, and come out sometime in the spring when all this nasty cold was gone and my pain levels returned to something I could manage.  Other people do not like that, though.

    Despite my uncanny knack for scaring some people away and creeping others out, I somehow still always find myself in positions that require me to socialize during the winter months.  

    It also doesn’t help that Christmas and Thanksgiving both fall during the time I would prefer to be hibernating.  There’s no way I’m gonna miss a chance, if at all possible, to go play with my nieces and nephews… I will brave all kinds of weather for that.

    But being snowed in gives me a real, solid, unavoidable excuse to back out of unnecessary trips and social events, and I love it.

  4. I can look out the window and dream of building snowmen.

    For as long as I’m snowed in, I have endless opportunities to look out the window and think "Wow, it’s so beautiful.  Maybe if I’m feeling better tomorrow I’ll throw on a coat and go play in it a bit."  That never happens, of cour

  5. Time slows down.
  6. Something about being snowed in always makes time seem to go just a bit slower.  There’s no "I guess I have to run to the store tomorrow" to take up your time.  There’s no "I have to get to the post office" (although I will have to try to make a trek to my mailbox at least, if I’m gonna get these packages to people in time for Christmas, ugh).  The list of things that have to get done gets cut to the things that you can do within your own home, and time seems to spread out a bit.

  7. No one’s encroaching on my schedule.
  8. I do not keep a normal schedule.  I require at least an average of 10 hours of sleep per night, and I live in a lot of pain.  I learned a long time ago that I have absolutely NO interest in laying in bed hurting, so I stay up until I can tell that I’m on the verge of exhaustion before I try to lay down.  Most nights this means I fall asleep immediately, but I don’t even try to lay down until the wee hours of the morning.  This puts me waking up in mid or late afternoon.

    As much as I would love to be above ‘peer pressure’ I just care too much about what others think.  I live in a farming community, which means that most others think I’m a lazy do-nothing slob for sleeping into the afternoon.  

    And so I have tried, and failed, many many times, to re-adjust my schedule, with absolutely no success.  If I go to bed early, I either lay there in pain for hours, or my body just takes the extra time for more sleep.  If I stay up all night, intending to go to bed at a normal time the next night, my body really rebels and I wake up 2 days later.   

    But when I’m snowed in, all bets are off.  I don’t have to care if someone’s hoping I’ll be at church on a Sunday morning, since I can’t get there anyway.  I won’t get weird looks from people if I wander into the grocery shore at 1am to start shopping, and I won’t have to deal random family members look at me in disgust after asking what time I got up today.

  9. I don’t feel guilty for not shoveling.
  10. As I mentioned before, I can’t shovel.  I used to torture myself by trying to shovel anyway, and I would manage to some extent, but not enough to really matter.  The last time I tried I’m pretty sure I nearly had a heart-attack, and I have a really bad habit of falling when I’m outside in snowy/icy conditions.  Since I’ve fallen indoors at least 6 times in the past two months, and since my arm has gotten so bad I can’t lift a jug of milk without fear of dropping it, it would be absolutely insane for me to try to shovel my walks.

    But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel guilty about it.  Every time someone comes to deliver a package or try to convert me to their insane cult I feel guilty about not having my sidewalk and porch shoveled and salted.  

    But when I’m snowed in, it’s impossible to even tell where my driveway is (my brother bought me some of those reflectors that you’re supposed to line your drive with, but I always forget to put them out before the ground freezes).  The cultists stay away, and usually so do the package delivery guys… so there’s no one to worry about.

  11. Snow tastes yummy.
  12. Okay,  you don’t have to be snowed in for that one.


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Filed under Humor, The Great Outdoors

Will you join me in giving $5 on the 5th?

I’ve been kicking this idea around for a few months now and decided last week it was time to do it, so please hear me out and see if you won’t join me.

If you’re like me, money’s tighter now than ever, and it’s harder and harder to give to people/charities like you used to.  I do not have much money that I can call "disposable income". But like most other people, I can find money once in a while for things like fast food, pop, and birthday gifts.  I don’t know about you, but most months I could give up a meal at Taco Bell or spend a little less on a birthday present, to scratch together $5 for something worthwhile.  

It’s easy to get in the mindset that says that what I have to give isn’t enough to bother with.   But the fact is, for a starving person, $5 may be another week of life (or more, if it goes to an organization that’s good at stretching dollars).

So, in the effort of joining together with others, to make our combined efforts count — even if it’s hard to feel that our little individual contributions are worth anything — I’m going to ask you to join me, once a month, in giving $5 (or $1, or more, whatever you can afford) to a charity of your choice, or to the charity that I’ve profiled, on the 5th of each month.  You don’t have to tell anyone *what* you can give, but I’d love to see a note from you saying that you’re going to try to give.  If you can’t do it every month, that’s okay, but I’d ask you to drop me a note here, and let me know if you’re going to try to join in.   That will let me (and others) know that our drops are going into a much larger bucket, one that might, hopefully, add up to a bucketful in the end.

If you tweet, please use the hashtag #5on5 to promote this to your followers.  You can also follow the new Facebook page: www.facebook.com/pages/5-on-5/182008281815475

For the first month’s charity I’m going to recommend Feeding America.  I picked this charity because I think it’s extremely important to remember that people are hungry all around us, not just in third world countries, and winter is especially harsh on families that can barely keep their bills paid, so food money is especially scarce.  I know I should probably stick to international charities, but I haven’t had time to fully vet any yet, and I have vetted Feeding America already.  If you’re outside of the US I would encourage you to give to a local organization that supports hungry people in your area.  

If you will join me in giving what you can this month, to this charity or any other, please drop me a line and let me know.  If you have any suggestions for next month’s charity, please let me know that as well.  I will post a new challenge on the 5th of each month.

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On a Day Like This, Oh Lord, Help Me!

(This is going to be realllly long.  It was just that kind of day.)

I started off my lovely day by not going to sleep.  I had it planned so I could get about 4 hours of sleep before I had to head to Cincinnati to meet a friend and then go to 2 different neurological test appointments.  My ability to do math once I pass the "too tired" stage is seriously impaired, and I ended with 2 hours of sleep time.

Seeing as how I’d not taken my regular meds, in hopes that the tests would go better as a result, I spent at least an hour of that time laying there, too sore to sleep.

So I slept for maybe an hour, then my Mom called to wake me up (thanks Mom), and after hearing "be careful, conditions are great for black ice", I discovered that my watch was dead.  

Now, I’m one of those people who never takes my watch off… I shower with it on, I swim with it on, I do dishes with it on, and I look at it at least every 5 minutes, just to make sure it’s still there.  I can’t tell left from right unless I look to see which hand my watch is on.  I need my watch.  I was running too late to do anything about it, though, so I just stuck it in my pocket, put a place-holder bracelet on that wrist, and headed for Cincy.

My trip there went fine.  The traffic wasn’t as bad as I expected, the black ice only showed up a bit on the back country roads, and everyone somehow managed to stop without hitting anything or anyone when those three deer ran right out in front of us in the middle of a suburbian city street.  

I was on my way to meet @K_Dad for the first time, for brunch at a little breakfasty restaurant.  Google had me go through 3 unnecessary school zones on the way to the restaurant, but I think I managed to get there relatively on time.  

K_Dad’s a great guy, btw.  (I already knew that, but it was fun to have it confirmed :).  I talked way too much, probably, but he’d have to expect that of me, right?

The meal was pretty great (though, what kind of breakfast joint doesn’t have tomato juice? and no, V8 will not do), thanks K_Dad!.

The remainder of my day was absolutely horrible.

I spent about 30 minutes driving around town trying to find a watch battery before I had to get to my first appointment.  No luck.  

I did manage to make it to my appointment on time, though.  Where I got the pleasure of being  tortured by a neurologist.  

And when I say tortured, I mean that the technician hooked me up to electrodes, and shocked me with every last bit of juice her machine was willing to give her.  She spent a considerably amount of time baffled by the fact that there was no response from my nerves, and repeated the shocking sequences over and over again, until she’d convinced herself that the lack of results was due to my screwed nerves and not her incompetence.  

She repeated this process with each nerve she was tasked with finding, until she’d found the ones she could and given up on the rest.  The neurologist on duty then sunk 4" needles straight into my muscles (oops, straight in was the goal, "was that a blood vessel? ack, you’re gushing!") and forced me to clench those muscles against the needles, so he could read the impulse output that the needles picked up.  I wimpered, I yelped, I groaned, I coughed, and I believe, for the first time in my 21 years of being tortured by neurologists, that I actually screamed at one point.  The arm they were testing, after all, started the day in excruciating pain, and the needles just put me over the edge.  At least I didn’t cry.

They should have been done with that test, but the neurologist, who was sitting in the room during the whole 1st round of torture, watching the technician, decided to try to find that pesky nerve one more time, and shocked me for a while again.  Thanks, man.  It’s my own fault,  though.  I was over-tired, and a bit giddy, and trying to recover from the shame of screaming, so I told him he could go ahead and double-check if he felt the need.  Surprisingly, he got the same results.

So they finally finished with that and walked out, leaving me to get dressed… erm, they’d pushed my chair out into the hall somewhere earlier to make room in the tiny exam room we were in.  My shirt was on that chair.  I had taken my gown off before I realized this, but they were a little quicker than I, and both came pushing my chair back through the door just in time to see me standing there in my sports bra.  Awkward.

So after dressing and trying to recover my dignity with jokes, I stood there schmoozing long enough to find out how bad the test results were.  Pretty darn bad.  Completely useless, actually.  All of that torture?  For absolutely nothing.  

So I strapped on a wrist brace and I rolled my dejected, tortured, incredibly sore self down a floor to the imaging department to wait for my MRI that was supposed to happen in a couple of hours. They decided to be nice and try to work my MRI in before their next appointment.

And by being nice, I mean, they decided to lead me, my chair, and my freshly-electrocuted arm to the other side of the UC campus: through 5 different buildings, across carpet, around obstacles, up ramps, through tunnels, over the river and through the woods to the MRI machine we go.  Thank God it was all indoors.  I didn’t make it, my leader had to push me up the last ramp or two.

When we got there I was informed that I’d be spending the next 45 minutes or so laying face-down, with my right arm stretched out in front of me, palm up.  The poor tech must have spent 20 minutes finding a way to get me positioned that way.  It turns out holding my arm palm-up was not a feat I could accomplish, so I was aided by a million foam pads, pillows, sheets, towels, and anything else non-metalic she could find.

My shoulder started screaming about 2 minutes in.  My entire hand was numb after 5 minutes.  She gave me some cheap ear plugs, so the machine wouldn’t deafen me, but they apparently haven’t heard of muzac at UC.  Oh, and that 45 minutes?  It was really an hour and a half.   And it was freezing in there.

At least they got some good images, and they were nice enough to provide me with my own copy.

MRI: AX FSE T1      MRI: COR FSE T1 

Hopefully these will be more useful than the conduction studies.

They sent an escort to help me make my way back to that imaging waiting room 5 buildings away, where I settled in with my laptop, loaded up on every med I could possibly take without overdosing or rendering myself unconscious, and settled in to wait on them to kick in.  I felt remarkably well once they did, all things considered, and decided to head home.

My tired self thought the ceiling tiles in the elevator would... on Twitpic I realized once I got on the road that I’d waited for rush hour.  And that black ice Mom warned me about had settled in.  I got some gas and headed out.  It took me 45 minutes to go 15 miles.  My head was starting to bob, so I decided to stop and eat.

Knowing my arm was not really functional, I opted against my beloved Skyline 3-way and headed to Steak’n’Shake, where I wouldn’t have to use a fork.  Little did I know that Steak’n’Shake hasn’t heard of the ADA.  Their handicapped entrance?  They’ve turned it into an emergency fire door.  I needed to use the restroom, and going to a different restaurant was no longer an option, so I grabbed my cane and made the trek around the building to the ‘main’ entrance, and somehow narrowly avoided falling on the unseen ice that was all over their sidewalk.

After a quick ‘talk’ with their manager, who really, honestly, didn’t give a flying flip about the ADA (Steak’n’Shake will be getting a letter once I’m rested), I settled in.  The waitress took one look at me and said "I can see you’ve had a bad day, I’ll just leave you alone, just let me know if you need anything".  Who knew Steak’n’Shake’s chili was actually good?  They had to cut my sandwich into 4 pieces so I could eat it left-handed, and put my drink in a to-go cup because their glasses were too heavy for me to move, but all in all it was a good meal.  This was not in keeping with my day from hell, so I decided to dump A1 steak sauce all over myself just for emphasis.  

I had a nice little power nap while I was waiting on my check (which is to say, I fell asleep while waiting on the waitress to come back and tell me how much I owed her).  Afterwards I felt well enough to get back on the road, and I somehow made it back to my car again without falling on that ice.

A few miles down the road my day got really good.  Traffic came to a complete stop, just past the only suitable detour around a huge stretch of st rt 28.  10 minutes later I came to an intersection with a not-so-convenient detour possibility and decided to take it.  2 miles later I found a semi jack-knifed across all 8 lanes of traffic at the four-way intersection that was my ticket to freedom… so back to the highway I went.  I spent the next 45 minutes or so at a dead stand still.  5 miles up the road something happened, I may never know what (according to this link there were at least 5 wrecks in that area alone), but it did finally get cleared…

By which time I’d written half of this blog post, from my laptop which was plugged into an adapter which was plugged into my cigarette lighter.  You’d be surprised how many random houses are broadcasting completely unprotected wifi.

After sitting there for 45 minutes I only made it another 15 miles down the road before my head started bobbing again, so I pulled off at a McD’s to finish this blog entry, figuring it would wake me up enough to make the last 20 mile stretch home.

I finished it, hit submit, and in keeping with my no-good very-bad day, lost the entire second half of the post.  I swear, it was better the first time around.  Why I stayed up to write this is beyond me, I think I’m just too tired at this point to tell myself to go lay down.

And people wonder why I don’t like to leave my house.

Here’s hoping you had a much better day than I, and Happy Hanukkah!

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Filed under Disability

Tam takes a trip to the doctor…

So, I’m packing for a trip to my neurologist tomorrow to have a couple of tests (read: a torture session followed by an MRI) to see if the neurologist can find the entrapment in my arm so we can hopefully do the surgery and I can stop taking these massive doses of NSAIDs (and hopefully I can regain more regular use of my arm, and lose a lot of pain in the process).

I’m also going to visit a new friend while I’m down there.

Here’s what I’m packing:

  • Directions
  • My mp3 player filled with my accompaniment tracks and some other music – because singing to myself at full volume while on the road is always entertaining to those around me
  • My laptop – because I’ll have at least a couple of hours to kill between appointments, and Cincy has free wifi
  • A myriad of pills – because I cut back my meds in hopes of exacerbating my arm so the entrapment will be easier to find tomorrow – I’m gonna need drugs badly the time the appointments are over.
  • A wheelchair, crutches, and two separate canes – okay I’m not really packing these, they’re are always in my car anyway
  • A wrist brace, a wrist cuff, a removable full-arm cast, a sling and a pain patch – because who knows to what degree I’ll be able to move my arm after the appointments.
  • 1.5 Gallons of water – because when you’re likely to need that much water in one outing, you want it to be filtered.
  • Several spin toys, a dreidel, a couple of Christmas ornaments, and some PromoBlox – gifts for the friend and bribes for the doctors/nurses (keep them happy when you’re livelihood depends on their decisions, also they may keep the torture to a minimum)
  • My camera – because uhm, I have no idea, I guess I just feel like I’m packing for a journey, and who doesn’t take their camera on a journey?
  • My Bible – because it goes with me everywhere, and if I’m not feeling horrible I may try to go to Bible study on the way home.

 

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