I am gone until June 8th!
I am visiting family, neighbors and friends in Michigan for a week. Jay is guarding our house, awaiting my return. I fly out bright and early Friday June 1st and return late in the evening Friday June 8th. I am looking forward to seeing my parents and lots of other people.
June will have to start without me. Have a good time while I am gone!
And within me, along
with the garbage, faces, faces
and voices, so many
lives woven into mine,
such improbable quantities
of memory; so much already
forgotten, lost, pruned away—
yet the doves, the doves!
—from "Doves" by C. K. Williams
5/29/07:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY LINDA!
See you soon, hope you have a great day. Love, Cindy
Living itself, [is] a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.— E. B. White
5/28/07:
Back on October, on the 27th, I mentioned a book I had read by Eric Kandel about how memory is made and stored in the brain. Later in the year I read an interesting article in The New Yorker titled "Homer in India", by William Dalrymple. He talked about visiting India around 1990 and hearing stories about an interesting caste of wandering bhopas that sung epic poems. Later he was lucky enough to attend a remote fair that attracted people from all over to trade livestock during the day and listen to the singing of epic poems about their god at night. The recitations took place from 9:15PM until dawn, with the stories sung slowly forward through the course of the week. It was fascinating that illiterate people knew stories of such length, stories they memorized and could not alter because they were sacred. The bhopa singing at that fair told Dalrymple he did not know all the stories and he did not know if anyone any longer knew all the stories— he only knew seven nights worth.
In the article the author also mentions an Indian folklorist, Komal Kothari, who in the 1950s tried to collect and write down the stories. During this process he decided to teach a singer to read and write, to make the task easier. What Kothari found was that as the singer learned to read and write, he became less able to remember the songs, while the illiterate singers continued to remember hundreds of songs. Mr. Dalrymple contends "illiteracy seems an essential condition for preserving the performance of an oral epic. It was the ability of the bard to read, rather than changes in the tastes of his audience, that sounded the death knell for the oral tradition. Just as the blind can develop a heightened sense of hearing, smell, and touch to compensate for their loss of vision, so it seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not."
I have had the New Yorker article on my desk for months, awaiting my attention, so that I would write about it. Then last month Jay picked up a book at the library he enjoyed and wanted me to read— The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge MD. Yes, it too was quite interesting. There seems to be some cosmic thing going on, sending me information on brains, as if I needed some or something… This book is about neuroplasticity, and the pictures to the left and above link to some information about neuroplasticity. The whole idea is that the brain is able to change much, much more than we had thought. Different areas of the brain indeed tend to be responsbile for specific tasks, but as it turns out what tasks each area performs is not set in stone. Along these lines they have found that some functions can be regained by the affected area borrowing from or moving into an unaffected area of the brain. For instance, if a stroke affects a person's right arm, that arm can be immobilized so that the unaffected arm has to be used and new circuits formed in the brain. Similarly, he describes the phantom pain from amputated limbs being eliminated by using mirrors to fool the brain into thinking the remaining whole limb is the amputated one and rewiring the brain.
Now I know a lot more about brains, although it is still hard to tell! It is interesting though, don't you think?
It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his mind had no difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly, accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q.... But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance.... How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, "One perhaps." One in a generation.— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
5/27/07:
I did a little gardening yesterday, but my body was not quite ready. Today was mostly cloudy, so it was okay that my body made me stay inside. Instead of gardening it worked on coughing up, and out, all of its germs.
While I was outside yesterday afternoon I took photos of flowers at the back of the house and a friend buzzed by to get into the pictures. Click on my bleeding hearts to see.
I see the world through the eyes of a fly, a thousand facets of each moment at once.— Pessoa
5/25/07:
My cold is maybe a teeny bit better; certainly not gone. I did make it in to work for half the day Thursday. Today the chiropractor pushed and yanked on me, and I think he did me some good. I went to the chiropractor because my thigh pained me Wednesday night and then pricked with pain the last two days. There will be more to this story.
The weather has been warm and sunny. Mrs. Becker across the street said she was wondering why I was home but not out in the yard. So much to do…
The picture is of rain-dampened flowers near our front porch, taken the evening of 5/20/07. We like flowers.
And even when your hope is gone
Move along, move along just to make it through
Move along
— lyrics from "Move Along" by The All American Rejects
5/23/07:
Well, I am home sick with a respiratory virus which started late Saturday night. My voice is better today and I am hoping to make it to work at some point this week. I already had an appointment set with my doctor for Monday, she decided I have "the respiratory thing that is going around"— I think she is right.
I wrote on the 13th about side effects I had from naproxen prescribed for my new thigh pain— now I have figured out more. When I visited the doctor mid-April, she started me on prescription niacin in place of the over-the-counter niacin I had been taking because my cholesterol had gone up. In the midst of my thigh pain odyssey I returned to taking the over-the-counter niacin, to finish off the bottle I had. The pain disappeared, hmmm. I finished the bottle and returned to the prescription niacin— the pain immediately returned. I stopped all the niacin. The numbness in my thigh started when I was taking Lipitor and was already there when I started the niacin, but niacin can have the same muscle problems as the statins. My thigh is improved, and now I am waiting to see if all of the numbness will resolve, or not. My doctor kindly suggested I stop the niacin "for a month" and also suggested we think about trying "another statin". I told her I was not interested because all three I had tried left me in pain, the last one making it hard to walk. I'm not sure if she had forgotten that or if she thought it was no big deal.
My experience is that people (except doctors) who work in the medical field have less trust in drug companies and insurance companies than the general public does. Maybe I think this because I do not trust either entity and so project that onto others. At any rate, I have little trust in them. The drug companies make huge amounts of money off statin drugs and seem to be disappointed when governments take them off the market after
people die. If I had not had such severe problems with statins I probably would be on the statin bandwagon, and would not have looked into them so much. They are more controversial in the medical research field than one would suspect. Currently there is some concern that statins could possibly cause or contribute to development of Parkinson's because those patients have low LDL levels. There is nothing definitive yet, but it does seem to be a good thing to look into. My own experience with statins leads me to wonder how many people are put on statins, then later develop pains that are attributed to arthritis or even something more generalized like fibromyalgia. I don't like the cavalier attitude of medical providers, throwing one pill after another and not stopping to question whether or not their own prescribed treatments are causing later symptoms.
I have started a modified Ornish diet, as of yesterday. I am tracking and adjusting my fat intake to keep it under 30 grams a day. That is not easy. I say "modified" because I am still going to drink coffee and I intend to continue fish oil as I believe it is responsible for the nice increase in my "good" cholesterol, HDL.
Thank you for listening via your eyes to my whining. The pictures are of flowers around our front porch and both pictures link to the same website— a camera that specifically adjusts the picture for "slimming". :)
Many situations can be clarified by the passing of time.— Theodore Isaac Rubin
5/20/07:
I'd invite you to stop me if you've heard this before, but you can't…
Jay has a Mac, I have a PC. Some Mac owners are persnickety fussbudgets and love the precision of their chosen instrument, yet chafe at the pervasiveness of the PC. They usually do not let a chance to make a snide remark about PCs pass them by. Meanwhile I really don't care. I am familiar with PCs and therefore do not find Macs intuitive. My capacity to learn how to use multiple computer operating systems is limited— apparently limited to one. One it is. Nevertheless, I do take exception to disparaging remarks about this one thing I know about that I could care less about, because it is the one thing I know about. Over time Jay has learned to modulate his remarks so that occasionally we laugh about our predicament.
Jay brought my attention to the animated gif above, left yesterday, developed by "Calcasieu" on Fark.com. It has meaning for us, and for others.
Confusion is always the most honest response.— Marty Indik
5/19/07:
It has been nice weather here lately, but today it finally rained so our new transplants and baby vegetables got some refreshment. 
We went to the Lincoln Theatre in Mount Vernon this afternoon and saw some 2006 Oscar-nominated short animation films. We both liked "The Danish Poet" the best and you can see a small clip if you click on the picture to the right.
Our second choice was Maestro, which is available in its entirety on YouTube here
.
After that we headed to the Spring Wine Tasting at Rexville Grocery, enjoying several wines that we thought were usually good and a number of cheese samples- purchasing a creamy blue cheese and a British cheddar. On the drive home we discovered fields of iris. It was a very pleasant afternoon, full of Jay's good company.
The heron pic up above links to a local web cam— enjoy and happy weekend!
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.— Stephen B. Leacock
5/18/07:
I get my hair colored, highlighted, every six to nine months. I have gone to the same beautician, Keiko, since moving to Mount Vernon in 2003, following her from one beauty shop to the next. Keiko first cut my hair at a chain place, Hair Masters I think, then moved on to a couple local salons before making it to a salon in the town where she lives, La Conner. Now I drive there to benefit from her expertise, and she tells me she thinks she will stay there quite a while.
I got my hair cut and colored at the beginning of the month. I have always found the head full of foil wrappers amusing, and decided to photograph myself this time. What do you think? Amusing? Or not?
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.— Friedrich Nietzsche
5/16/07:
As I grew up, it seemed to me the United States was really into being perceived as "the" world leader in science and technology— you know, the space race and all. Because we presented ourselves as "superior", other countries envied, despised and wanted to be like us at the same time.
Times have changed. Although other countries still envy the wealth we have and despise us, I'm not sure any still want to be like us. Today we give the world endless opportunities to ponder our ignorance. We have turned in to a great, albeit scary, entertainer country, if there is such a thing.
The BBC carried a short story about evangelicals and global warming, mentioning Falwell's death and his contributions to this topic. Those crazy Europeans have developed an interest in understanding global warming and figuring out what can be done. You can get a flavor of this at My Carbon Footprint, where people go to calculate their personal impact on the environment. Guess it is a regular topic of general discussion over there.
I got the picture above from Amazon. If you click it you will be taken to a page of Jerry Falwell quotes, where you can read what he said, since I have nothing nice to say…
Billy Graham is the chief servant of Satan in America.— Jerry Falwell
5/13/07:
We continue to plan an addition to our house and have ordered a survey of our lot. I have been busy creating new flowerbeds and transplanting many of the perennials in construction's path. In the last week or so I have moved five daisies, four ferns, two hostas, four lungworts, two jacob's ladders, two coneflowers, one bleeding heart, one bee balm, and one columbine, at least. It is a lot of work.
I think I have mentioned before that the outer part of my left thigh has been numb since I was on Lipitor a year ago. I tried three statins for my high cholesterol, all of them caused muscle pain. I believe I have tolerated the numbness of my thigh quite well, but in the last month have begun experiencing tingling, throbbing and tearing pain as well. One evening I asked Jay to feel my thigh because to me it felt like someone was running a vibrator up and down it. He felt nothing. The pain is primarily at night, waking me up with what I can only describe as a fireworks, like the grand finale, of pain. I don't like it. My doctor was not definitive in his assessment of what was going on, but he did determine that the thigh in question has decreased sensitivity to hot and cold. He prescribed a large dose of naproxen (500 mg, a little more than 2 Aleve), to be taken twice a day. The intention was to see if decreasing inflamation improved the thigh. I have to say, all of my joints and muscles felt better, and my movements felt more fluid. My weird thigh stayed the same. Tuesday I stumbled once and fell once while working in the yard. I stumbled when I stepped on a large clod of sod and I fell (tipping over the wheelbarrow I had just filled!) while simply turning. I didn't think too much about it until I got up the next morning with the room spinning a bit and feeling dizzy. Hmmm, seems dizziness can be a side effect of naproxen. So much for that. Now I am massaging the thigh and waiting to see what happens next in this aging body.
The picture is of some thyme next to our front porch, currently flowering, and it links to a page about thyme!
Those combinations of events which give shape to the lives of people regardless of their intentions.— A. Pablo Iannone, from The Room with Closets
5/12/07:
It is Mother's Day tomorrow. My mom collects chicken things— knick knacks and such. I found the kitchen plaque to the left and had it personalized for my mom as "Chuckie's Kitchen". My mother was named after her maternal grandmother, Charlotte Ann. They called her grandmother "Tanny" for short and came up with something unique for my mom. Charlotte is the feminine form of Charles, so the family decided to call her "Chuck", and she goes by Chuckie still. My folks are Don and Chuck… Some folks pause when they hear the two "male" names of this couple, which always makes my mom chuckle.
We have a snowball bush we picked out because it was Jay's mother's favorite. It's timing is impeccable this year. Tomorrow we will drive up to Lynden, clean off Verna's headstone and leave some snowball bush flowers for her. It is an outing Jay and I enjoy every year, and tomorrow is supposed to be more lovely weather. Have a good day everyone.
The picture links to an interesting Eaton Rapids history page.
…there she was, in the very center of that great Cathedral space which was childhood; there she was from the very first. My first memory is of her lap…. Then I see her in her white dressing gown on the balcony…. It is perfectly true that she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four.
… these scenes… why do they survive undamaged year after year unless they are made of something comparatively permanent?— Virginia Woolf in Sketch of the Past (1953)
5/10/07:
President Bush toured the recent tornado devastation in Kansas, reassuring residents that people were praying for them and said he would try to help them. I heard his comments on the radio and to me the word "try" jumped out louder than his other words. Bush is just not a very reassuring man, he does not inspire confidence when he speaks. I scanned news sources, including the official White House website, for Bush's words but did not find his "I will try" bit, until I hit FOX News. Interesting.
News stories about New Orleans' recovery, or lack of recovery, in neighborhoods devastated by Katrina continue to pop up. Bush did indeed stick with the "trying" bit there. Maybe it's just me, but the impression I got from watching movies over the decades was that Americans don't "try", they "do". Like that one with Harrison Ford as the President flying on Air Force One, the one David Letterman said should have been titled "Kick Ass President". Guess George W. missed that movie experience, preferring to be out on the town, so to speak.
For some reason the picture of the hunter fallen asleep reminds me of our President… It links to a cool rainbow and tornado pic on a NASA site.
Woody Guthrie defined fascism as when the rich recruit the generals to keep them in control.— Pete Seeger
5/8/07:
I have read a couple of interesting articles recently and direct your attention to them, should you be interested.
There is a lot of information out there now about vitamin D. A recent article is available at City News or just put "vitamin D cancer" in Google search. It appears that one likely reason people living in higher latitudes experience a greater incidence of some cancers and other diseases is they have less sun exposure and therefore get less vitamin D. I have been taking 400 units of vitamin D in addition to the D in my calium supplement and multivitamin for several months. It has improved my fingernails, which had become brittle, flaky and prone to splitting lengthwise. So much for sunscreen…
Another item of interest is an article in The New York Times by Gina Kolata, summarizing a book she wrote about genes and dieting. It is very interesting; the Maxine cartoon to the left links to a summary I made of it.
Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.— Samuel McChord Crothers
5/6/07:
This is a long month already, what with there being two May 5ths this year.
Last year we had quite a few little violets pop up around the side flower bed and in the drive. They said they liked our little house and had decided to stop by for a while. This year they have dug themselves in to stay, proliferating in the flower beds, walkway and drive. I have welcomed them with open arms, placing some around the edge of the front porch flower pot I plant with a geranium each summer.
"Thank you for loving me."
"I'm not done."
5/5/07:
Last Saturday we spent the evening at La Conner's Maple Hall enjoying "Worry the Tune", a night of poetry & music featuring Irish National Poetry Prize winner Tony Curtis and fiddler Randal Bays. The evening's program started with fiddling and then went back and forth between poetry and music— quite enjoyable.
This was Tony's first trip to America and he had spent the last three weeks around La Conner, going to area schools and doing poetry workshops for the students. He gave a rich context to each poem before reading it by telling the story of what was happening in his life when he wrote it. He read several poems from his 2003 book What Darkness Covers and autographed the copy I bought. We were quite taken with the evening and Tony's poetry.
Now that I have come this far there is no
turning back.
And yet, what if there is nothing at the end
of the track?
… How were you to know the boats were here at all?
So, let me settle.
Cities have been built by men like you,
waiting for the boat home.
— from "The Boat" by Tony Curtis
5/4/07:
I work a schedule that allows me to have every other Friday off. I think the extra day off helps keep me sane, although others might think there is no help for me.
Today was one of the Fridays I have off this month. While being busy with my many little tasks (otherwise known as piddling around), I operated under the delusion that today was Cinco de Mayo. Who would've thought it was only Cuatro de Mayo? Jay was patient as I expressed surprise at the small turn out for Cinco de Mayo at the Mexican restaurant…
While spending the day being busy determining what day it was, I took time out to take a picture of the blue irises blooming near our front door. The close up links to one bigger picture. Enjoy…
Life is a flower of which love is the honey.— Victor Hugo
5/3/07:
When I went into the locker room at the gym Monday, I found the sign to the left posted on or above all of the benches. At first I laughed because I thought they had mistakenly used the word "bear" when they meant "bare". On closer inspection I realized they had purposefully chosen the word "bear" when they meant "bare". Weird. Yet another example of our culture's puritanical heritage, censoring even the word "bare".
But I do appreciate the warning and will keep a sharp eye out for those bench-sitting bears… wouldn't that be something to see at the gym!
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.— Orson Welles (1915 - 1985)
Jardot's World: May Edition, 2007
All pictures on my page link to somewhere... go ahead, click!
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