Living In the World, Not on It

This has been driving me crazy now for almost two weeks and you know I can't keep stuff bottled up inside. I left out names (the ones I know, anyway) but this is the letter I just finished to the doctor through Relay Health and I am sharing it with you, my readers, friends and support. Maybe you will avoid this kind of issue. Doctor, As I have not have any reasonable amount of sleep since two Thursdays ago when I last came to the office, I may be a little tactless. Not that I am ever anything but obvious about my feelings and opinions on things, but after witnessing yet another sunrise not due to my normal early morning habits but having been up all night... well. This all began in July. I called in with a message to the prescription to please call in for Ambien. We had just switched from my old insurance carrier to a new carrier and there was no time for me to get a paper script to submit to their mail order prescription service. The order went in and was, incorrectly, filled on t...

Bedbugs are all over the news -- and apparently, they're all over these 15 cities . Number one on the list? New York City -- SELF's home base! They've been found in office buildings (thankfully not ours!), hospitals, hotels, theaters and even the Empire State Building. And the bloodsuckers hide in mattresses , furniture, clothing ... blech. Is anyone else suddenly itchy ? But it's not just NYC that's being bitten -- bedbugs are a growing problem nationwide. According to the National Pest Management Association, bedbug-related calls to exterminators have jumped by 81 percent in the last 10 years and 57 percent over the last five years. The good news is that unless you have serious underlying health issues, the critters aren't likely to make you sick. Still, they gross us out. So we asked Missy Henriksen, Vice President of Public Affairs for the National Pest Management Association, where bedbugs hide and what we can do to steer clear. The top spots: IN HOTEL...

I spent this weekend in classes recertifying. When I first joined the squad on 10 March 2003, I had no certifications, no knowledge other than a lot of reading and was completely new to Emergency Medical Services. But it sounded amazing and neat and we'd moved into this area the previous October and I had a little too much time on my hands. The first night I rode, we went out on a "smell of smoke" standby and watched in the cold air as the firemen methodically put holes in the house to determine if there was a problem. After about 90 minutes, they gave up and had the heavy rescue guys come out to board it up. As we were released from that, we were called out for a bug on a kid's back. On the way, we were diverted to something else. It was exciting. So a month later I went to Chilton to get my first CPR/AED training. It was eight hours and fascinating. I learned a lot and realised that is the first of three levels of training that I could take. I love learning. In Octo...

From The Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into New Jersey: "Since 1969 Elizabeth-born Judy Blume has been the patron saint of the Awkward Years, otherwise known as puberty. Anyone who's grown up in America in the last 35 years has probably had a Judy Blume book on hand to explain something that parents often felt uneasy discussing. Judy Blume, born Judy Sussman in Elizabeth in 1938, could have been one of the characters she wrote about in her own books, as she acknowledged in 2004: "I was a small, shy, anxious child with eczema, as fearful as Sheila the Great, as imaginative as Sally J. Freeman." As a girl, she was an avid reader--but not of children's books. The reason: "I never found my kind of reality in children's books. No child was anything like me. No child thought the kinds of things I did, leading me to believe I definitely wasn't normal." But with all that working against her, how did Judy Blume become the undisputed queen of a...

Some people are good at this and some aren't. The good ones come in two kinds: completely heartless and brutal, and pleasant and laid back. There seems to be no middle ground. Most of the time, Option A is the common. Very few pleasant and laid back people make it to the final stages of this show. If the contestant was too pleasant, he or she had his or her guts ripped out. If the contestant was willing to take a bullet for someone else on his or her team, The Donald fired that person immediately. (In the real world, this does not happen. Certainly not if the person is innocent.) Lesson: nice people don't win. I don't think this is the right lesson to impart. I get that this has to be for television. I suppose people want to see this. I find it heartless and disgusting and we won't touch legal issues. However, it is a foregone conclusion that the contestants (celebrities or not) signed stacks of paperwork that would allow for this. It did not take a whole lot of thinkin...

I took this image in 2002 with my first digital camera. I stood outside, under a tiny overhang in the backdoor and clicked until I got not only this but one other image of lightning. Pretty neat! I love this stuff: For those of you who think reading in the bathroom is weird, just remember, these are all books with facts. The Uncle John Bathroom Reader Institute books are fun, loaded with interesting information and have different size bits to fit your time needs. And the tidbits are not always what you'd think. I read about how basketball came about. They clearly wrote if for the non-sports enthusiast, like me. So here is this one-pager: "HOW EN-LIGHTNING Zap! BRI member Kurt Stark requested these facts about lightning. Every second, there are 100 to 125 flashes of lightning somewhere on Earth. A lightning bolt can be anywhere between 200 feet and 20 miles long, but the average length, cloud-to-ground, is two to ten miles. Lightning speeds toward the Earth at an average of 200...