The Left Side of the Moon

Can You Hear Me Now?

When I got my first cell phone, it wasn't really my cell phone, it belonged to Blackstone and me. We shared a cell phone. Can you imagine? We only really used it when we were out for the day, or if one of us was traveling, so we could keep in touch. This was way back in like 1997 or something.

When we were in college, we spoke on the phone about once a week. We even started emailing at one point. The kind of emailing where you had to call and ask if the other person had received it because the concept was so new and so foreign, we had no idea what we were doing. Our freshman year, we even wrote letters. Can you imagine college kids doing that today? It's a lost art form in my opinion. I still have those letters in a box somewhere. I get emotional every time I see them. Blackstone is really a gifted writer. And the fact that he took that time to hand write me a letter every week, that was true love.

Fast forward to text messaging. It took me a while to get Blackstone on board with that one. The guy spends a great deal of time in the woods in the middle of nowhere with no cell service and I had to fight with him to get him to text me. And once I convinced him, if I texted him too many times in a row he would often call me and ask what I wanted because he didn't want to keep typing. But this was still in the days before smart phones, so text messaging meant using the number pad on your phone. Remember that?

My first smart phone was a Droid and that was only a couple of years ago. I'm slowing becoming a Mac convert though, and now I have an iPhone. I honestly think there are pros and cons to both and you should consider what kind of user you are in making your decision. Even though I'm now on the iPhone, I still use Google for my email, calendar and all my contacts. I have no intention of switching that over to Apple. I'm happy with it where it is.

I love my smart phone. I'm not a gamer. I don't get Angry Birds, but it does come in handy when my kids are antsy. I do love me some Words With Friends, I have to admit. I have my Kindle App too, which is great when I'm sitting through practices or in a waiting room. I am slightly addicted to FB. Twitter annoyed me way back in the early days with all its crashing and I've only started poking around in my account recently.

Oh smart phone how do I love thee, let me count the ways: Evernote, Dolphin, Camera, iCloud, iTunes, Pandora, Shazam, Yelp, iPeriod, Flixster.

I don't know how Blackstone and I survived before we had shared Google Calendars with accounts on our phones and synced to Outlook. I know we did and I know it wasn't pleasant. Please don't make me ever go back there again. In fact, I'd really like to phase Outlook out of the picture. SHHHhhh! Don't tell him. I think he might have heart palpitations.

I have been considering how computers, smart phones and social media have changed the way I communicate with people. It makes it so much easier to stay connected with those of you I care about who are all over the country. It has also fragmented the way we communicate in crazy ways. When I had sinus surgery my sister was shocked that I hadn't told her. In my mind I had. I posted it on FB. One step, easy. Now I don't need to call everyone who might be concerned and tell them I was having surgery, except for my in-laws, which is frustrating. I don't want to have to take the time to call people and tell them these things. I just want to post it and be done with it. But my sister had decided her FB addiction hadn't gotten out of control, so she had quit cold turkey, so I should have called her too, but I forgot.

Any given day, I might start a conversation on FB, pick it up with someone via text message and finish it with a phone call. Or maybe it starts in Words With Friends and bleeds over to email and then gets followed up by a text. I expect that when I sit down with my friends that they have all the backstory because they've been reading my FB posts. I mean, I don't really want to have to start from the beginning do I?

Of course, it's not all unicorns and rainbows. Instead of heart felt words on the page Blackstone's chosen form of communication with me is voice recognition. I hate voice recognition. I'm sure one day I'll love it, but right now, I hate it because I get messages like this:

O n konriko lied and told they can be on the swim team.

Followed By:

Okay let's try again. Y m c a a called and said to sign connor and cool up for the swim team. Cool we shouldn't be an otter pup and connor will be otter youth.

I get messages from him like this all the time and have to text back:

Who the hell is Karla?

That would be our older son.

Voice recognition is not making my life easier. I now need to solve a puzzle every time I read one of Blackstone's texts. Someone really needs to get on that.

50 Shades of Oh My!

I love it when there's hype over a new book, especially if it's not just a book but a series. I love to read and while I certainly have a core group of friends that love to read, it's refreshing to see even the non-readers caught up in the book hype.

I especially enjoyed the Hunger Games because it was the first series that I loved that I could share with one of my kids. They're really kind of young for Twilight and they're boys. Trouble did enjoy Harry Potter, but more the movies than the books. So naturally when I heard all the hype about 50 Shades of Grey, I jumped on the band wagon.

But I have to admit, I don't get it.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like the series, but lets be honest here, it's little more than porn. I read trash all the time, so this is right up my alley. And I like my trash not to parade as some romance novel. What I don't understand is how it seems to be taking the book club world by storm. I've read penthouse letters that were equivalent to a chapter in one of these novels.

I've read the first two books and I'm sure I'll tear my way through the third one in the next week. I'm also sure there are husbands and boyfriends all over the U.S. that are loving this book without even realizing it, well the side effects of it anyway. Really, I think women should add more smut to the their book repertoire on a regular basis. We spend so much time at our careers, raising our kids, taking care of the house, sex can become the last thing on our minds, which doesn't tend to do much for the libido. Men can get turned on at the drop of a hat, but with sex being a more mental activity for women, I think putting our heads in the game a little more often is way more beneficial than some women realize.

I talked with Curls about it some (even though we're not supposed to talk about the books ahead of time, but we didn't really discuss the book, more the phenomenon surrounding the books) and she suggests that it's the Kindles and the Nooks that are firing the craze. Women can read these books without the shame of having the title and cover of a smut book revealed for all to see. And I suppose she's right and it has something to do with the timing and so many electronic devices. But with that logic, women could also be reading Penthouse Forum regularly under the secrecy of their electronic reader and I haven't seen anyone posting about that on FB.

I think you also have to be careful about that idea of the e-reader keeping your reading private. It may be to the casual observer, but there's also never been a more complete record of your reading proclivities. We also can fail to anticipate how this could come cropping up to surprise us at times.

I recently purchased my two boys Kindle Fires for their birthdays. I had mixed feelings about it and considered a number of options, but it's really the best tablet for the money on the market. Now what I really wish Amazon would do is allow you to create child accounts under your own. Maybe they'll get there at some point, but right now you either need to tie your kid's Kindle to your account or setup their own Amazon account which is going to need to have a credit card tied to it. I had planned that I would setup accounts for my kids and knew I'd want a pre-paid credit card tied to their accounts. I already have email addresses setup for them, even though they don't know how to use them yet. The step that I missed, which I knew but just forgot about when I ordered them, is that I should have specified not to have them come tied to my account.

Why is this such an issue?

Because they had access to all my books. ALL my books.

Maybe you're comfortable giving your kids access to all your reading material, but I'm not. If you have 50 Shades of Grey on there, you may want to reconsider your answer.

It was quick and easy to fix and now their Kindles are setup with their own accounts. The stinky flip side to this is that I have a prime account and I wish they could access the free videos that I never watch, but they can't because they are on their own accounts. I had to make a choice: free videos or potentially scar them for life and provide them with a way too early and vivid an introduction to sex via mom's smutty reading material. All they really want to do is play games anyway.

Supernatural Crush

I posted at www.ifyoubelongedhere.com again. Polly's keeping me on a schedule. My plan was never to forego my blog for what is now the collaborative. I'm still not decided I'm going to let that happen, but blogging just hasn't been something I'm getting to lately. And seeing we're taking the kids to Disney for a week at the end of the month, I don't see it getting better any time soon.

 

Holiday Post

I haven't been showing my blog too much love lately. I posted over at www.ifyoubelongedhere.com again.

Notice

I posted over at www.ifyoubelongedhere.com. Go check it out. And comment of course.

Halloween Pics

Princess Leia, Jedi Knight, and two Swampfires

 

 

Happy Halloween!

Hoppy Squeeky But

Honestly, I know I'm not the only person in the world to make mistakes. I recognize that I am an intelligent woman and that I'm only human, but I don't like to admit it. And I certainly don't want anyone else to see it.

Mostly, my work, my writing is on the web. Nothing is ever permanent. You make a mistake, one person or a few see it, it gets noticed, and you fix it. No big deal. It goes away like it never happened. And this being a personal blog, well, I tend to worry about that even less. I mean, I run spell check on these things, but spell check doesn't pick up on the words that you skipped or that you typed "here" instead of "hear". I was an English teacher. I know the difference. I often see the difference when someone else wishes I wouldn't.

It doesn't mean I won't make the same mistake as I'm typing along as quickly as my fingers will go, listening to my children fight in the living room, wondering if I'll be able to get this posted tonight, knowing I'm pushing bed time and my luck. Typos happen. Sometimes I get around to fixing them before I post. Sometimes after I post. Sometimes never.

At work, I try to be more careful. But often I'm just as rushed, getting interrupted, trying to accomplish as many tasks in one day as possible. The typos still happen at work. And everyone loves to point out a typo to an English teacher. It's not so bad in an email, something sort of off the cuff to another co-worker. Like an email I sent last week asking if the Buy List was ready to be run. An email I send every month. Except this time, I titled it "But List". Yes, it could have been much worse. I didn't call it the "Butt List". Of course, I got the snarky email back asking what the But List was. I don't blame them. It was funny. It was just funny at my expense, which is just not so funny for me.

Graphics are always worse. You can't spell check in a graphics program. If I'm putting a lot of text in a graphic, I'll often spell check it first in Word. I'm not, despite the English degree, the world's best speller. I've always considered it a weakness I've had to overcome. Writing on the board when I was teaching could be nerve wracking. Students always love to see their teacher make a mistake. And there's no spell check on a chalk board. And you can't always plan what you'll be writing up there during a brain storming session. But over the years, all the reading and the writing, and the conscious effort to get better, it has made a difference. Still, I'm not perfect.

So last year when I designed the yearly calendar of the boys that I give as Christmas gifts every year, a task which takes no less than four hours of searching through photos, image editing and optimization, background selection and caption writing, one of the captions read, "Hoppy Birthday". A silly and forgivable mistake. But one which now exists in print, memorialized in a calendar that is the result of four hours of strain on my back and eyes. It's just such a kick in the teeth.

Print media is unforgivable. There is no do-over. No taking it back. No hiding it from everyone else's eyes.

My boss quit. His last day is Friday. I'm gunning for his position. I'm not sure if they'll give it to me or not. His leaving has spurred a frenzy of training in our department. Certain troubleshooting he does for programs, servers, printers and computers that no one else knows how to do. It's been busy. We're planning a going away party for him Wednesday. He would have received his five year plaque at the Christmas party, so we had an Almost Five Year plaque made up. It reads something like, "Thank you for your hard work and dedication deserting us."

My boss has been keeping a list of some of our CEO's favorite sayings:

• "We need a bigger boat."
•  "It's a marketing issue."
• "It takes a short time to get from here to here."
• "First to Market"

There are others. Most don't make sense out of context. So we had a beer stein made up with all of these quotes. I did the graphic work. And I did it with a spelling error.

    "The squeeky wheel"

And there's no taking it back. Here I am, trying to make a good impression, and now everyone's calling me Squeaky. I can make up a number of excuses. I spent much time making sure everything was within print margins. It's all done in different fonts, different sizes. Graphically it came out great. Except for the little kick in the teeth.

One of the owners pointed it out. I'm slightly mortified. I have an English degree. I should be above silly little spelling errors. To be completely honest, I'm not sure if it was a typo or a spelling error. But that doesn't really matter, does it?

Trick-Or-Treat

Halloween was awesome this year. It was perfect trick-or-treat weather. Pretty warm, windy with spooky clouds moving swiftly across the full moon. We did double duty while trick-or-treating, we were also passing out our Scouting for Food Bags. So we'll be driving that same route to pick up canned goods Saturday morning. At least, LT and I will be picking up canned goods. Blackstone has some seminar and Trouble has Saturday school. Yes, Saturday school. It's part of our Title 1 program. Kids with below grade level reading or math skills are invited to attend for extra school time. This is about the third time Trouble's been invited and the second time he's attended. He doesn't mind too much. He reads below grade level. We work with him. I probably don't do it as much as I should, because it's painful. For both of us. I think Trouble would enjoy a root canal more. I know I would. They give you really good pain killers for that. And people are nice to you. They bring you milk shakes and soup, things you don't have to chew. Nobody's nice to you when you're teaching your kid to read. Nobody feels bad. Nobody gives you pain killers and milk shakes. Teaching Trouble to read requires a Vicodin or Xanax chaser.

I first really started pushing the issue when he hit October in his kindergarten year. Up to that point, I just figured he was a little immature, still young, I didn't want to push too hard if he wasn't ready. Well, at some point, one of us had to decide he was ready, and it was getting obvious it wasn't going to be him. He was five-and-a-half and I was trying to teach him five letters at a time. He would not, could not do it. I knew he wasn't brain addled. I tried flash cards, games, jello, pretzels, bribery, yelling, all to no avail. He smashed a glass pumpkin on the kitchen floor out of spite. He was miserable. I was miserable. He hadn't learned any letters.

It has gotten better. Sometimes he can read me a whole chapter of Captain Underpants without any screaming at all. Sometimes.

But, back to Halloween. The boys were both dressed as Swampfire from Ben Ten. I was Princess Leia and Blackstone was a Jedi. I've never been a princess for Halloween before. I guess every girl needs to do that once. Princesses are okay, I just prefer mine to be able to kick some ass. Blackstone is still disappointed I didn't get the gold bikini. I like sexy Halloween costumes fine, I just couldn't see taking the boys trick-or-treating in a bikini. It can be damn cold in October. I'll try to get some pictures up here. That's more coordination than I'm capable of right now. It means actually locating the camera.

Blackstone kept lamenting what a fabulous night it would be to spend at the clubs. Everyone dressed slutty, completely uninhibited. Yeah, I remember those days. They were fun. Now I dress in a chaste, polyester white gown and come home with four gallon bags full of candy. I'm trying to convince myself that this is more fun. I'm losing that battle at the moment. I'd prefer to whoop it up in club in a gold bikini. Well, there's a part of me that would.

Trouble has survived his pumpkin carving accident. He stabbed himself several inches deep with a steak knife after missing the pumpkin. He is so lucky he didn't do any nerve or tendon damage. A he's been telling people, "The pumpkin won."

So all's well that ends well. Time to get my little monsters to bed.

To Flu Shot or Not to Flu Shot

This is my pediatrician's stance on the flu shot.

The flu season and the unusual occurrence of so much flu illness in the summer has brought a lot of issues to the forefront. Pandemic preparation, health dept. preparation, and the media blitz while necessary and helpful, they create a level of anxiety that is not always so helpful.

I want you to know how grateful I am to have patients who maintain their focus and realistically evaluate their risk and alternatives. I will have the flu vaccine in the next 10 days and the H1N1 when it is released for anyone in a high risk group especially those with a chronic medical condition.

I just want to share some observations that relate to flu and viruses in general to help you make a decision, I hope, about getting the vaccines for your children. While all viruses are obviously infectious I think it is likely that because they are DNA/RNA they can be released out of our own cell structure under certain stresses. Herpes viruses like cold sores release sporadically. Chronic mono becomes active disease like chronic fatigue syndrome when the EBV virus is activated. Different stresses seem to activate and even cause new viruses. Getting chilled causes some to catch a cold .Sleeplessness decreases our immune strength, etc. In the past viruses seemed to have a season of increased activity, indicating weather plays one part in allowing a virus to take hold. Chicken pox and hand, foot and mouth disease used to be spring viruses. Diarrheal disease was mostly in the summer; cold and flu viruses were mostly winter viruses. With weather patterns changing things are shifting and flu appeared more this spring and summer than usual. I think we probably had H1N1 as early as April and May before reports of spread from Mexico. Certainly the flu-like symptoms of cases then were similar to those seem later.Viruses do tend to change or mutate. However, they still follow the trend that the elderly, the very young, those with a chronic medical condition are more susceptible to complications.  Because H1N1 was primarily a summer virus it might be too soon for it to mutate or do whatever it needs to do to become more active in the winter also. This is just a guess, but it doesn’t matter because there will be some other strain we still have to deal with anyway. People not in a high risk and even those who are but maintain a healthy lifestyle and diet weather the flu better. Adding the right homeopathic remedy adds to the success rate greatly.

I know it’s a small number but some people who get the flu vaccine get a bad reaction. This actually follows the homeopathic principal-if the vaccine is too strong or concentrated for some they get flu symptoms. Some of these reactions have been very significant with a downturn in a patient’s health for some time. Again this is a small percentage but I’m just uncomfortable recommending something when I can’t predict who it might affect adversely. If there were no other alternative it would be different.

With these latest outbreaks of regular and H1N1 flu, homeopathy has been just as effective as in the past. So, I feel homeopathy is still a viable safer alternative. Just like the standard flu vaccine not being perfect, neither is homeopathy, but at least it doesn’t cause any problems and it still works very well most of the time. I heard a tv interview with a man from the village in Mexico targeted as the epicenter of the original spread.  He reported arm, back leg bone pain 6 weeks after the onset. These are some of the symptoms of the remedy Eupatorium and indeed that helped a lot of patients this summer along with other remedies, such as China, Phytolacca, Gelsemium and Mercurious Vivus.

Oscillococcinum is a homeopathic remedy made from a patient who had the flu-the same idea as the regular vaccine but made homeopathically. So, you could proactively give it or Influenzinum(another brand of the same idea)1/wk or every other week at the beginning of the season and maybe 2/wk if there is a lot of exposure like at school or day care. Some people feel given 2/day during a case of the flu it helps get rid of it as well. Also keep on hand the above remedies. They can be used to treat according to the specific symptoms (see attachment).If you know from me if there is a remedy that seems to be helping the most with current active cases you can help prevent them by using those remedies in a 200c 1-2/wk.Remember Oscillococcinum dose is 15-20 pellets not the whole vial and remedies can be obtained at your health food store or  NE Homeopathic at 1-800-551-3611. 

Hope this is helpful---Dr.K

I can't see chasing something down that I'm still not sure about.  I am giving the whole family Oscillococcinum once a week.

Explaining God to my Kids

I had the following conversation in the car with my boys the other day. Hopefully, I haven't said anything to offend here. And obviously, this isn't word for word. My memory isn't that good and it's paraphrased.

LT: How old is God? Is he one hundred?

Me: God is much older than that. At least thousands of years old. Nobody knows how old God is. He made the world. He was here before anything else.

LT: Is God alive?

Me: No. God is not alive and he's not dead. He's not a person. He's just God.

T: But God was alive once, right?

Me: No. God was never alive. Jesus was alive. He was God's son.

LT: Oh, so God is Jesus's son?

Me: No. Jesus is God's son.

LT: Is there only one God?

Me: Yes and no. Most people you know will tell you there's one God because they're Christian. But there are many different types of religions and some people believe there is more than one God. Most of those religions are older, but some people still believe in different gods. The Greeks and Romans believed there were all different gods - a sun god, moon god, god of love, god of war. They had gods for everything. And the American Indians believe in lots of different gods too.

    T, do you know what we call a religion that only believes in one God?

T: No.

Me: That's monotheism. And religions that believe in more than one god are called polytheistic. So there's monotheism, and polytheism. Most people that we know are Christians and the are monotheistic. And Christianity is made up of different religions too. Most people we know are Catholic or Protestant, but there is also Judaism and Islam. Catholics and Protestant are similar in what they believe. Jewish people also believe in God, but they do not believe that Jesus was God's son. People who believe in Islam are called Muslim. They believe in one God too, they call him Allah, and they believe in the Bible, but they also have another holy book called the Koran.

    And these are just the Christian religions. There are all different kinds of religions - Buddhism, Hindu and many others.

LT: So there's lots of gods?

Me: Most people we know believe in one God, and they will get angry if you say there is more than one.

T: Why will they get angry?

Me: Because people want to think that what they believe is right. Lots of religious people think that their religion is best and that everyone else should go to their church. Not everyone, but lots of people. So you have to be very careful what you say about God, religion and church around other people, especially people you don't know very well.

    This is why Mommy doesn't like religion very much. Churches do lots of great things, like soup kitchens where they feed people who are poor and don't have a home, they raise money for people who are sick. But they do some bad things too. Sometimes they're mean to people who don't believe what they do. And sometimes they even convince people to go to war and kill people who don't believe in their religion. Many, many people have died because of religion. I think we should be able to have all the good parts of the church without all of the bad parts.

T: I never knew that.

He has an excuse. He's only eight.

Don't you wish you had time to prepare for these huge, existential conversations with your kids? I mean, it's not like I haven't given this topic some serious thought, and have some historical and religious knowledge to explain this. But I would have done some reading the night before if I'd known I was going to give a twenty minute lecture on God and religion the following day.