5010 More rambles.

Friday, September 18, 2015

"Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth."

-- Lillian Hellman --

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A township truck came through last night spraying for mosquitoes.  I haven't seen that since the '50s.  There have been a lot of dead crows, evidence that some nasty disease (I forget) is getting spread.  They've found it in captured mosquitoes.

I forgot to cover my tomato plant, so I'll have to remember to wash the tomatoes well before eating them.  I don't know what they sprayed with, but the crickets don't seem to be affected, they were still singing loudly two hours later.  I also doubt that the spray penetrated as far as back yards.  It looked like it just came straight out of the spray pipe and fell on the road.  I'm sure it got nowhere near the pond out back, and I'm absolutely positive it didn't hit the marshy/swampy area two streets over.  Well, at least the township can claim they tried.


I personally won't notice any difference, because mosquitoes don't bite me.  They hover around me like they're looking for skin, then they give up and leave.  Those tiny black bitey bugs that form clouds around your head don't like me, either.  Pretty much nothing does except ticks.


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 I don't have an ad-blocker, so I get a lot of pop-up junk on the screen,  Even with an ad-blocker, I visit a lot of sites that would like me to subscribe or register, and they put up pop-up requests.  I used to not mind them, just closed them without reading them.


Remember when the "X" to close those little windows was always in the upper right corner?  Not any more.  Now you have to search for the darn things.  Some of the "X"s don't show up until you pass over them with the cursor, so it's a physical search.  Piss me off!  And there's one ad company out there that covers the text on the screen and doesn't even provide the "X".  The ad sits there covering text until it decides to leave.  Snopes.com uses that ad company, and I go to Snopes several times a day.


Even worse are the videos that start up with no encouragement.  I'll have five tabs open when suddenly sound starts up, and I have to scroll up and down through five tabs to find out where it's coming from.


I give up.  I guess I'm going to have to install an ad-blocker.  Any recommendations?


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A study has found that the higher your education level, the better your chances of recovering from brain injury with no disability.  (http://www.indianalawyerblog.com/2014/05/education_helps_protect_the_br.html)  Interesting article.

One theory is that the more mental exercise you get, the stronger your brain is.  The other, of course, is that the higher your educational level, the better able you will be to afford top-notch care.  Heh.


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Speaking of brains, back when Jay was getting all those MRIs, I always asked to look at them with the doctors, and they were always happy to accommodate me.  One day we were looking at one, and I observed, "You know, it's no wonder people think about sex so much.  There's a naked woman climbing right into the center of the brain."    The doctor looked at me, "What?  Where?"  I pointed to the structure in the middle, the thalamus is her head, the midbrain is her upper back, the pons is her rear end, and the medulla olongata is her right leg.  Her left leg is bent high up, stepping into the brain and raising and rounding her left haunch, her left arm reaches out to the left side.  He suddenly saw it clearly --- and here's the surprising part, he'd never noticed that before.  Turns out none of Jay's doctors had.  


This is a random scan from the internet, not Jay's.  See if you also see the lady.

3586 Strange brains

August 2, 2012

When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children,

endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority,

for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

-- Bertrand Russell --

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The following is a 10-minute video about a guy with Tourette's, Luke, who just wants a girlfriend.  Unfortunately, he's one of the 10% who has the problem with uncontrollable swearing.

[http://youtu.be/qZRgmFvYPrA]

The brain is a mysterious thing.   The Tourette's part of Luke's brain knows exactly which words are forbidden and will get the worst reaction and that's what it generates.  So I can't help wondering - if Luke had been raised in a society of anorexic, diabetic, truck drivers, would he be shouting "Cheesecake!", and "Sugar!" instead of "F--k you!" and "Bitch!"?

It reminds me a bit of Jay, when his brain decided to throw away the left side of the world, to the point where he was blind to the first half of double words.

I knew a guy with Tourette's once.  He didn't have the swearing thing, though.  He just twitched a lot and yipped and barked.  He and his wife were in Mensa.  We all liked him.  He was sweet.  We all strongly disliked his wife.  They'd got married just before they moved to the Poughkeepsie area and became active in the local group.  She was more than a bit of a slut, wandering off all the time with guys, and she'd yell at him, "You're barking again!  Stop it!" like she had no understanding of the syndrome or didn't care about how difficult it was for him to control it.  She eventually wandered off, within the first year, I think.  After she left, since he couldn't drive because of the twitching, one of us would pick him up for the dinners and games nights.

One evening I gave him a ride home after a dinner, and he started talking.  I'd never heard anything like it.  Words poured out of him.  What he was saying made sense in and of itself, but it just poured out so fast and had nothing to do with anything and segued into different topics at warp speed.  In spates between the deluge, he said that when he starts talking uncontrollably it means a seizure is coming on and if it did while he was in the car I shouldn't panic but just let it go, wait it out, and he's sorry if it scares me.  I responded that my late husband had seizures, and they don't bother me a bit.  When we arrived outside his apartment, I offered to sit with him until whatever happened had passed, but he said no, he was used to it and would be ok.

I never saw him again.  I often wondered what happened to him.
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1135 Old Dailies

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Whoop! I got up early enough to take stuff to the recycle center today. About 40 lbs of glass, a large bag of plastic, two grocery bags of newspaper, and two of "clean" paper. And an 18" stack of flattened corrugated boxes. I can move in the kitchen again.

I don't understand where all those boxes came from - one from the shredder, one from the new TV, a few book purchases from Amazon, but the rest? I don't know.

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Looking for a small spiral notebook to take to the museum yesterday, I found my Dailies from 1999 and 2000. I used to write down every evening what had happened that day. I'd done that for years. No philosophizing, no opinions, just a list of things done. At the bottom of each page I made a list of "to do"s for the next day. It worked well. I was always able to look back to see when orders were placed, forms mailed, items bought, errands run. Looking through them, I am amazed at how much I accomplished every day.

The Dailies were not kept after December 2000, because things got so hectic with Jay's illness that I lived by little slips of paper and file folders, and I spent very little time at home. Mostly I was in hospitals, on the phone, or on the road. And then after Jay died, I never got back to it. Maybe I should restart. It might get my tail in gear again.

The 2000 Daily has reminded me of how strange Jay was in 2000. I had forgotten.

In May 2000, he decided to cut back the raspberries spreading into the yard from the woods. I happened to glance outside and found that he was cutting everything, including good shrubs, young trees, flowers, everything. Like his mind said "Cut", and the governor was off.

Along about July he started changing lightbulbs. If you didn't keep him occupied with other stuff, if he got to loose ends, he'd start changing light bulbs. When we went to the store, he'd insist on buying more light bulbs. The bulbs weren't burned out - I'd retrieve them from the garbage - it's just like he'd forget to flip the light switch, decide the bulb was out, and replace it. That explains why I now have a few hundred light bulbs in the pantry. Funny how I'd forgotten that.

We used to go to garage sales on weekends. I'd drive and he'd navigate. Along about August he lost the ability to read maps. He could find streets on the map and trace the route to get there, but he couldn't apply it to the roads we were on. We'd come up to a "Y", and I'd ask "Which way?", and he couldn't figure it out. About this same time he could no longer read a calendar, or do the binary search required to find a word in the dictionary. And no matter where we went, even just up the road to the deli, he thought we had crossed the river.

In September, he lost doors and drawers. If they were closed, they became solid walls to him. He didn't know how to get to the other side of them, or in some cases, that there even was anything on the other side. If you opened them for him, he'd leave them open, even the shower stall door. He couldn't figure out how to keep the water in the shower stall.

In late September, he sometimes got lost in the house. If he was tired, he couldn't find the bedroom from the dining room. We didn't dare close bathroom doors.

It was in October that he woke me in the middle of the night to tell me that there was someone else in bed with us. I asked who, where, and he pointed to his left arm and whispered "There. That's his arm." He didn't recognize his left arm. He could move it, use the hand to pick things up, but didn't recognize it, which was very confusing to him. He kept hitting it, like he wanted it to go away.

By November he could no longer dress himself. He would dress his right side, but neglect the left, and of course his clothing wouldn't stay on, and he couldn't figure out why not. He looked so cute coming out to the kitchen for breakfast with his robe on his right side, the belt tied neatly around his waist, but the left side completely naked, and the left half of the robe dragging on the floor behind him. By December, however, he couldn't remember how to tie a knot, so the robe wouldn't stay on at all.

And yet, some parts of his mind were as sharp as ever. It was during this time that he completed work on the invention application (the one that was finally granted last fall), and his old workmates still depended on him for telephone consultation on highly technical matters.

Some things were lost, well, more like hidden, since his logical powers didn't work in the hidden areas, but what hadn't been lost was as good as ever.

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I read an ad for a toy that "flies as far as a football field". I'm wondering, just how far can a football field fly?
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