For an adult with memory problems (dementia) we’re trying these “You Paint It” kits. The one shown is a collection of forest animals, and they also have dogs and cats, some sort of horse-like characters, and emoji figurines.
If you’re into puzzles and games of math and logic, The Riddler looks like it will be a good book when it comes out.
Apparently 3M, which many people think of as a nice company, has known about the dangers of PFOA and PFOS — which is used to make Teflon and other products — for a long time. Per this story, “Internal studies and other documents show that 3M knew by the 1970s that PFOA and PFOS were toxic and accumulating in people's blood.”
I can’t do most of these yoga poses right now (because of the whole colectomy surgery thing), but here’s a nice list of 12 yin yoga poses to awaken dormant energy and stuff.
Straight out of high school in Illinois I made the decision to go to a college in Kentucky. In high school I had never known anyone with a southern accent, so it was really neat to hear everyone talk. (I had also never seen a revival tent, but that’s a story for another time.)
One guy at school — I think his name was Joe — came from Tennessee. He would later become famous for loudly chasing his roommate down our dorm hallway with a baseball bat at 2am because he thought the roommate was too loud when he came back in after a night out.
Joe’s accent was so thick I could barely understand what he was saying, and one day in something of a Seinfeld skit I ended up going to the shopping mall with him just because I would nod my head “yes” and say things like “uh-huh” when I didn’t understand him. Fortunately this was before he attacked his roommate with the bat, and his roommate had a sweet 1950s car that we borrowed, so it was a fun ride, even if I didn’t understand most of it.
Now I think there’s at least a slight chance that Joe might be my new neighbor. He looks like him, and I can’t understand a word he says. But this time I’m being careful not to agree to anything.
espn.com has a good article about Josh McCown and ‘brain training’. (It’s a good article, I only wish it was a little more specific.)
This slide on “Mast cell-associated disease-specific pain syndromes” comes from doctors Tania Dempsey and Lawrence Afrin. I don’t remember exactly where I saw it, but it was probably on The Mastocytosis Society Facebook page.
My red pencil is one of my favorite possessions. When I get it out it means that I’ve just edited a print version of something and now it’s time to type up the corrections. It also means that I’m getting close to releasing a final version of whatever book I’m working on, which is also a good thing.
Last night I watched an episode of Father Brown where Mrs. McCarthy was judgmental about something her god-daughter did. (She was the girl’s godmother.) In my mind I thought, “Wow, she sure is judgmental and intrusive in the girl’s life.”
Then this morning I woke up and saw some photos on Facebook involving one of my young relatives that made my skin crawl. When I saw the photos I realized I didn’t know them at all, and I hated what they were doing. I wanted to grab them by the ear and yank them out of those pictures.
So it turns out that giving unconditional love is really hard when you see people you care about doing things that you think are really stupid.
I saw these Talk Nerdy To Me socks in a store window recently. For more information, it looks like they have them here on Amazon.
Probably the most important lesson I learned from aimlessly wandering around Alaska and the Lower 48 for five years is that if you treat complete strangers as long-lost brothers and sisters that you’re meeting for the first time, the world magically becomes a better place.
When I met my mom, Sister #2 and her husband in New Mexico in 2017, I brought my mom a bunch of junk food. The Twinkies didn’t make much of an impact on her, but when Sister #2 gave her a chocolate cupcake, my mom’s approximate words were, “OMG, this is the best thing I have ever eaten in my entire life.”
From this CNN article, “Older people with higher-than-average blood pressure have more markers of brain disease than their average-pressure peers, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Neurology ... researchers saw increased signs of areas of dead tissue caused by a block in the blood supply to the brain, when looking at postmortem tissue under a microscope. Autopsied brains also revealed that higher-than-average blood pressure is associated with one marker of Alzheimer's disease.”
Today a person did something that upset me. For a few moments it really bothered me and I thought, “Wow, this person is being a real jerk.” Then I remembered the phrase, “Every obnoxious act is a cry for help,” and I realized that this was this other person’s way of saying that they were hurting, and it helped me calm down in regards to them.
As a brief update, I’m home from the hospital following my surgery last week. I’m not back to writing any software or books, but hopefully I’ll start getting back to work next week.
“She had been born with a face that would let her get her way
He saw that face and he lost all control
All control”
A thing I love about Bob Seger is that his lyrics and the enthusiasm of his music remind me of being a much younger man, maybe the end of the teenage years and the beginning of the 20s. These lyrics in particular are from his song Hollywood Nights.
Two thoughts of the day:
Nobody owes you anything. I’m often surprised to hear people tell stories about how they’re butthurt because they feel like someone owes them something. (Typically they think friends and family members should owe them something.)
The only time you really lose is when you don’t try. A lot of people have interesting ideas, but never do anything with them. I think I lost nine games as a baseball pitcher in high school, but I won a lot more games than that, and it would have been a much bigger loss if I thought, “Gosh, I could be a great pitcher if only someone gave me a chance.”
Note: I’ve disabled comments and the contact form on this website until after I recover from my next surgery.
When I began reading the book, Never Bet Against Occam, I told my doctors that it was like reading my biography. At the very least it read like the biography of my last few years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses, trying to find out why I kept getting very sick and passing out, and why my lab results were jumping around like a rabbit, first showing signs of one illness and then another.
I just noticed that another reviewer wrote, “The book was like a romance novel that I could not put down!” I won’t call it a romance novel, but I know that once I started reading it, I didn’t put it down either. I was smiling at the stories I related to, and also wondered, “Why don’t my doctors know about mastocytosis and mast cell activation disease?”
For more information, here’s a link to Never Bet Against Occam on Amazon.com.
This “What’s in a mast cell?” slide by Tiffany Blackden implies that mast cells contain over 100 different molecules that a) protect the body, but b) also cause inflammation.
