Saturday, February 04, 2017

5093 Rigged election? Yes, but not the way Trump thinks.

Saturday, February 4, 2017

One of the biggest problems facing the world today is
overpopulation, and if the religious types want everything to
be according to their version of God's plan, well, perhaps
they should recognize that homosexuality might be part of
God's plan to stem overpopulation, the "natural" way.  A gentle
way.  The other ways are unthinkable. -- Me –


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Oh!  Oh! I forgot!  Don't know how I could have forgotten given all the talk of rigged elections and voter fraud! 

I voted on the appointed day at my assigned polling station, the local VFW.  The machines, two of them, were the kind that are the size of a refrigerator with the big vertical screen, and the curtains that swung open and closed.  The volunteer in charge of the machines checked my ticket and pointed to the one on the right.  I went in, and closed the curtain.  

The screen looked just like the sample ballot that had been mailed to me, and that I had studied before coming in.  Across the top was a long chart of candidates for federal offices, names down the left, and then party affiliations listed across the chart toward the right.  It was a touch screen, and you were to touch the check-box next to the candidates you wanted to vote for.   Then, below that, on the left, there was a box with the text of a proposal about allowing casinos other than Atlantic City, with yes/no boxes.  In the middle bottom was a box for some local office.  On the lower right was school board choices.  At the very bottom far right was the huge "cast votes" button.

So, I went down the top list, names and check boxes on the left, and made my selections.  The check boxes all lit up.  I ran down it again to check that all the correct ones were lit.  They were.  Remember, this thing was BIG, and I am only 4'8.5", so I had to look up for this part.

Then I moved down to eye level to the gambling part, read it through to make sure it said the same thing as was on the sample, and made my choice, and verified that the correct box lit.  Then my eyes moved right to the local part, made my choices, verified that they were lit.

Then my hand moved to below the school board to the "cast vote" button on the bottom far right, and I was about to press it when --- something told me to check the whole board again  ---

I am registered independent.  I rarely vote a straight ticket.  I do my research, and I scatter-shoot.  I have even on occasion voted third party.

Imagine my disbelief when I looked back up at the federal section, and discovered that ALL THE CHECK BOXES FOR DEMOCRATS WERE BLANK!!!!   All my votes for Democratic candidates were thrown away!  I quickly went through again and touched the boxes, and they turned on again, and I quickly hit the "cast vote" button on the lower right, watching to make sure they stayed on.

How many people had followed the top-left-down-right-right-bottom path without looking up again to check before hitting that red button?  How many Democratic votes were thrown away, and nobody noticed?

When I left the booth, I told the volunteer what had happened, and he refused to believe that I hadn't accidentally cleared those boxes myself somehow,  even though it was obvious that those boxes were too high for me to have brushed them accidentally.

I didn't pursue it further, because there's no way to prove what had happened.

So no, I have no faith in the results of the election, but not for the same reasons as Trump.  But there's nothing anyone can do about it, and at this point in my life, I don't have the energy to stir up a hornets' nest that is doomed to failure.

5092 Almost finished with chemo.

Saturday, February 4, 2017


We get heavier as we get older because there is a lot 
more information in our heads.
So I'm just really intelligent and my head can't store 
all that information, so it has to be stored other places.
That's my story and I’m sticking to it.

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Well, a major update.  I'm in the middle of my seventh round of chemotherapy, will start the eight and last on February 14th, and then on to the daily radiation.  I am tolerating the chemo so well that for the past two rounds we skipped the Neulasta (immune system stimulater) because I figured out that it was that shot that was causing me to feel so icky in week one of each round, and on every previous blood check my numbers were (to use the doctor's term) robust.  

Round five was interesting - I had an allergic reaction to one ingredient of the mix that resulted in itchy red hives all over my entire body.  Claritin quickly took care of that, so now I take one tiny Claritin every day.

They had told me that my hair would "thin" some, but I wouldn't go bald.  "Thin" turned out to be about 90% of my hair.  I have very little left on my head, and I'm pretty much bald in other interesting places.  The doctor was happy to hear that, actually, because he was beginning to worry that I was tolerating it TOO well.  I gave up on my hair and cut it to about two inches, and just slick it back with gel to cover the nearly bald spots.  Doesn't bother me at all.  I can tell it's trying to grow back, because there are short fine angel hairs that stick up here and there.

Yeah, the fatigue is building.  I don't want to go anywhere or do anything, but it's not so bad that I want to take naps.  Don't care to walk very far, for some reason my thighs rebel, so early in January I got a handicap parking placard, but that's when we started skipping the Neulasta, so I haven't had to use it yet.

There was a question as to why I was getting CMF, when there are newer treatments out there.  CMF has been around since at least the '90s.  It's OLD!  Well, when the oncologist told me he chose CMF because it wouldn't cause the side effects that the newer ones did, I got worried that I got CMF because of my age (frail little old lady that I am (NOT!)), and maybe he thought I couldn't handle anything more nasty, so I did some research.  There are clinical trials comparing CMF to other newer chemotherapies, and, in particular for what I have, triple negative breast cancer, it turns out that CMF works just as well as all the others, with fewer side effects.  Any differences in outcome were like 1% or less, which is negligible, really.

The biggest news is that Memorial Sloan Kettering has just in the past few months opened a cancer center only 7 miles from my home, an easy 13-minute drive.  The surgery and chemo was at a breast center a 40-minute drive away, which wasn't so terribly far when I'd make the trip two days in every three weeks (Daughter went with me only for the first cycle).  But daily?  For like seven weeks?  That's a trek.  So I'm looking into having the radiation (prone, must be prone) at Sloan Kettering.  We'll see.  I'll also be able to get second opinions there on other stuff, too, like the follow-on treatments.

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Politics.  I've been freaking out just like most of the world, but funniest thing, it wasn't until yesterday that I realized, "This is REAL!  It's not a comedy skit that'll be over in a few weeks!  This is IT!  It's not a joke!"   Well, it is a joke, but it's no longer funny.   Chemo didn't nauseate me but what's happening in Washington does.  Bannon?  Cheney redux, but with less political savvy and fewer brains.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/report-bannon-had-to-be-reminded-he-wasnt-the-president.html

(Does anyone know what happened to the Hatch Act, a 1939 federal law holding executive branch employees must "maintain a federal workforce that is free from partisan political influence or coercion"?)


I sort of was for Bernie, but I knew he'd never get the nomination.  I think the DNC realized that as soon as he was nominated the RNC would be screaming "Socialism!  Communism!", and the exact same people who voted for Trump would fall for it.  Bernie might have got even more popular votes than Hillary, but the electoral college fallout would have been the same.  Same people, in the same states. 

The website https://www.track-trump.com/ is updating daily on promises made, and actions taken over the first 100 days.  It's an excellent source for what's going on, presented without commentary.   

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Remember Matt and his dancing around the world?  At 0:14 in this video, Matt is dancing in Philadelphia, and if you look very quickly, you'll see a little girl in a striped dress on the left, directly in front of a guy in a grey-beige shirt, dancing up a storm.  That's my Nugget.  I don't know how Hercules (in the grey-beige shirt) knew Matt would be there, but, well, there they are.



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This is Tom Scott.  He mostly does science-oriented videos from fascinating places around the world, and I'm subscribed to his channel on YouTube.  He posted this one after the election.  And his fears are justified.  All over the internet, a certain group of people have become nastier.  Much much nastier.  It's like they think they have been given PERMISSION to be ... well, nasty.   And the one person who could tell them to knock it off, is ignoring the problem.  I despair.




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Several of the nurses have, after seeing the "age 72" on my records, remarked on my facial skin.  The left side of my face was torn up in a bicycle accident in my teens, and with age the scars are showing up now, finally, as a network of fine lines and pits.  The right side of my face is smooth.  I have the usual sagging along the jawline, but the nurses remark that "You have no wrinkles!"  

They'll ask if I moisturize, and I say no.  I'd hate to tell them why I think I have few wrinkles.

This is terrible to admit.  I rarely wash my face.  I don't wear makeup like foundation or blush, so it's not like I have to wash that off at night.  In a bath or shower I often forget my face - it gets washed as a side effect of washing my hair.  So, I guess, rather than moisturizing, I just don't wash the oil out.

I also won't exfoliate.  Jay had a theory that it was very bad to exfoliate, because your skin all over your body is naturally protected by a thin layer of dead skin cells, and if you remove that layer, the top layer of live cells die to reform the protective layer, and then the skin has to regenerate new cells to maintain skin thickness.  Cells generate by division, and any cell can split only so many times (look up "telomeres") and when it reaches that limit, the cell dies.  Exfoliation causes early cell death, so your facial skin will thin and age faster.  

Chemotherapy has affected my skin.  It seems to be thinner and saggier all over my body, probably because chemo will prevent regeneration (a good thing, I guess, as far as tumors go).  I've obviously lost some fat under my skin, even though I've lost only 2 or 3 pounds over the past seven months.  I'm hoping it will all go back to normal after this is over.

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Well, I hope to be better about posting.  I will try, anyway.  
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