My Husband is Full of Sh*t, Well Sort Of...

My husband had to go to the ER this a.m.  Sharp but transitory pains.  After a week of this he finally called the doctor. They told him to go to the Emergency Room.  This caused me to learn something, the difference between diverticulosis and diverticulitis. The first is very common, something like half of old people have -osis form of the problem, with that being "small, bulging sacs or pouches of the inner lining of the intestine." The uncommon thing is when these sacs become inflamed or infected and/or filled with ----.  You can fill in the blank.  Thank heavens this was found before the inflammation became an abcess, perforation or other nasty thing.

Oh, by the way, from my days doing science reference work at a university library, use Pub Med. when you are going to search for medical information on the web.  It is legit.  Too much of what is out there is inaccurate, incomplete or incoherent. 

I told him he ate too much meat.  I'm right.  I'm tired, too.

Today I was going to write about my plan for getting my own physical self back on track, but this thing with my husband took precedence.  So tomorrow, I will try again for a fun, upbeat or at least a catty and sharp tongued post.  But for today, I'm done.

Surfing Is Dangerous. No, not the kind with sharks!

Okay, I'm getting my gestalt going.  I am attuned to my über rubric. The flow and force is with me.  I'm letting go of having to have a very specific message, most likely political, that I must impart.  Nebulous messengers of the world unite.

No, really, all I've had this morning is coffee with 2% milk and a half a cup of oatmeal cooked with 1 cup of apple juice and served with a sploosh of milk.  No silly pills.  I swear.  Geesh, I miss the days when I could tap my little girl's nose, smile lovingly, and say things like, "Well, I see you swallowed a silly pill!" But I digress from my digression.

It all started when I opened my blogger.com dashboard and saw a comment from The Word Nerd about this blog-a-rama ding dong that is Nablopomo write-every-day-or-die thing we do to ourselves to when we pledge to blog every day.  On Nerd's blog there was a link to Shabby Blogs. I like the free resources handed out on Shabby Blogs.  I like the philosophy of exchange.  I need to do more of it. I also have to provide for myself down the line so I can't give everything away.   But I do give a lot of information away for free, whenever I can, because information flows toward freedom.   Maybe I will start a non-corporate blog that gives away progressive blog bling.  Oh please someone just lock me up now, I'm thinking of yet another blog & website!  This is a pathological addiction of mine.  I think I have good ideas and I follow up on them - for a while.  But this one sounds GOOD.  Oh, sigh...

I promptly got lost in all the pretty pretties to be found on blog and related sites such as the one linked in the Free Vintage Clip Art image  included to the side.  I still love Karen's Whimsy as the place to start for Victorian designs, though;  it is the prototype site for Grandma's homey clip art filtered through the brain of a creative woman.    I got lost in clip art for a while.

Then I found the link to Shape Collage!  I haven't been able to play with it much yet, because I'm writing on an old Mac ibook G4 that has seen far better days,  but I will and I'm not even a scrap-booker.  I just love "free"and I love old things,  and womens' culture,  and shaping my own images into an image is a recursion I just have to explore. 

But I also found useful info about putting specific advertising on blogs which is also something in which I'm very interested as my ethical sensibility is often offended by the corporatist and prowar advertising that is automatically thrown onto my site by major ad clicks.  Even BlogHer which I support had ads that I personally think are too "corporate."   Hmmm.  Maybe I should start my own ad serving business.  Oh dear.   Another idea....

Maybe I should start a site where I give away the ideas I know I will never have the time to develop.  Oh drat!  Did it again. 

I better sign off because surfing the internets and bloggy things is dangerous, just like thinking.   ;-p

Have a great day, what's left of it anyway, and don't forget to spend a little bit of time allowing your mind to wander.  It is relaxing. 

Smart Ass Education 101 - Responsibility to One's Self

I'm a smart ass. I married a smart ass. I gave birth to a smart ass. I think it is genetic. When I was young I kept my mouth shut in public, more or less, and only those who really knew me knew that I could have a wicked tongue occasionally backed up by a sharp sense of humor.

I suppose I'm pretty smart. I know those people around me are smart, and they wouldn't tolerate ignorance around them. But smart doesn't mean jack if you are trying to reach an audience. And why would I be writing if I did not have an audience in mind? I've been thinking a lot about persona, as you may be able to tell, but I've also been thinking about responsibility, and ethics... and having a place where I can rant as regular old me and not be stepping out of bounds of the blog, nor my online identity, nor my inner self.  

This blog is not anonymous.  I use a nom d' plume that is also a nom d' tweet.  If I had a name I liked better than the one I have, I might use it, but I don't.  If I had it all to do over... I'd change my name, study computer science or architecture... and....     That "and..." is why I didn't change my name.  If we attempt to edit our identity by actual editing it seems to me that we are attempting to lie.  I use "Nerthus" as a pseudonym because she is the proto-European Swamp Goddess.   I grew up in the boggy muck and clay of what is left of the swamp, fen and kame of the wetlands of Northeastern Indiana.  I also believe that associating oneself, if you are a woman, with a goddess helps bring the concept of the feminine divine and creation into personal understanding of the organization of the universe.  Male gods seem sterile to me.  Patriarchy does not inspire me to seek either within or without.  I'm nearly 100% European per my ancestry from what I can tell without genetic testing.  "Nerthus" encapsulates much that I am and with which I identify.  It isn't a lie. 


I own my actions and I am usually careful about what I say and do, not limited nor constrained, but careful.  This blog, that I am trying to power-boost this month by constant blogging (daily to me means constant,) will contain smart ass irreverence and more statements unsupported by links than my other blogs.  I do not want to have to research and document every single thing I say.  I can back up everything I write as nonfiction.  I have been shoving facts in my brain for close to 45 years and I know a lot.  I have been blessed with a life rich in experience and travel and education.   I'm not saying I won't share links; I'm not saying that I just want to spout bullshit.  I just want to write as though I was just sitting at a table, drinking coffee,  talking to other women who can relate to me in some way and engage in women's humor.  Maybe I remind you of your mother, daughter, sister, or friend.   I'm willing to talk to men, I've actually been VERY close, lol, to some men in my life, but I have a tendency to see guys as not really interested in just talking.  And that is what I'm doing here.  I'm just saying. 

Gonna Get This Blog Going!

Created this icon to motivate myself and gear up for 30 days of back-to-back blogging and posting every day of every week for a month. You can read about National Blog Posting Month and how it started out by clicking on the badge. That will take you to the NaBloPoMo site where you can find out about all the history and current incarnation of the event. 

Should be a good exercise. I've wanted to really get this regular old non-niche personal blog going for quite some time and the time seems right. I'm having nose surgery for a septum that is pushed way over to the left not allowing air to flow in the left while my right side takes in all the air and becomes too dry and causes all sorts of troubles. So on Friday the 10th I will be out of it, and probably on some pretty strong pain medication for a few days thereafter so my posts should I hope be somewhat amusing on those days.  Not promising they will any sense on that Friday or Saturday.  But blogging will certainly give me something to do while my freshly, and medically, broken nose heals. 

Just got the email today letting June participants know what the theme is.   It is "fan" as in the little whirly cooling thing or someone who follows a particular team or event zealously.  There is no requirement to use the theme unless you need it for inspiration.  I think there may be daily prompts too.  I will find out more as the event develops. 

Wish me luck and determination to successfully complete the challenge and become habituated to posting every day and improve my skills. 

Royal Wake Up of the "Swift Kick In the Butt" Type

I turned 54 this past week.  Until summer sessions starts my darlin' daughter is in the tornado country of the northernmost U.S. with her love-sigh-almost-engaged guy.  So she arranged birthday and mother's day celebrations together the week before she left.  That was nice but I found myself puppy-sitting on my birthday.  Sigh.  

I'm still babysitting the grandpuppy who is still in heat, the third week, when she is most fertile and receptive even though the "signs" are less obvious than last week.   I've always been a "rescue one from the pound" type person so I've never had an unneutered or unspade dog myself.  My hubby and daughter go for large purebred mastiffs. The pup has good bloodlines, looks gorgeous, and was an expensive dog purchased by someone two weeks before they gave her to my daughter when they got a job offer in another country.  So that is taking up some time.

My beautiful, big city living step daughter gave birth to our two beautiful grand daughters at the end of November.  That's taken up a bit of time too.  

I'm still job hunting as well.  I was let go from a position I'd been in for almost three years... two weeks before Christmas.  No warning.  No severance.  Welcome to a  "Right to Work" state.  I was not happy about that, at all because I enjoyed the position, but I was absolutely dismayed when I was denied unemployment compensation because my former boss had lied and said the things she knew she would have to say to deny me unemployment and keep her payments into the state unemployment comp pool at the lowest possible rate because she has never had to pay out any.  I appealed the decision and won the case. 

But the whole firing thing, quite frankly, sucked.  It drained energy from me because it hurt so much.  I had considered the owner a friend and mentor.  But when she tried to deny me what I was legally entitled to, even in a RTW state, it challenged my belief in the goodness of people.  And I had worked quite diligently to cultivate a blind eye to non-injurious and ill spirited intentions of people as I really do want to see the best in people. 

Maybe it all wouldn't have worn on me quite so heavily if the court hearings hadn't been just after the Tucson shootings and if I didn't live in Tucson and couldn't see the hospital where the survivors were taken from my home.  I had worked with one of the victims, gone to Sedona concerts with another, and had had several short peace and war exchanges with Gabby, my Representative.  All these folks, thank heavens, survived.  My husband was working with Gabe Zimmerman on a community project, his card was in my husband's jacket pocket.  All this ripped my heart out.  At the same time I was so heartened by the Tucson community. I participated in the evening vigil at the hospital on January 8th.  There were energies in the air in a way I had never experienced.  People were sending healing energies, prayers of a sort, to the survivors in the hospital.  The air was filled with a determined love.  A friend, my husband, and I just showed up but I knew at least one of the first candle lighters, one of the pastors was and is a friend.  It was all so very personal.  Everyone in Tucson seemed to feel that.  I waited in line all day with another dear friend to hear the President speak. Rainbows and puddles will never seem quite as generic as they did before he spoke. 

I felt I had to do something large and good with my life because I was alive and had the time and skills to do almost anything I set my mind on to accomplish.  I decided to start a green classified local newspaper of sorts that would bring local small businesses and local shoppers together.  I planned, and schemed, and put together a presentation and business plan to present to a mentor at a blogging conference I attended in March.  It was all going very well, although I kept getting more and more tired.   Psychic drain I thought.  I began to have second thoughts about the business venture. 

Then bin Laden was killed and I realized that my life since that horrible day when the towers fell and the Pentagon burned had been shaped by the terrorism of that day.  I realized the things I was doing when I heard on the TV about the attack: working on a Late-Boomer site, writing fun stuff that I just felt like writing for a humor and old Hollywood site run by a feminist, and researching for a book or three were the things I really felt passionately about before politics took over my life when we began fighting a war that nothing to do with fighting the people who attacked us.   I didn't lose my way, no, not at all.  But I was distracted by things that needed to be done.  As I've spoken of before in this blog, I'm looking forward to being done with "things that have to be done."  I started writing my Late Boomers site again and migrated many of the old site posts after I realized I wanted to do something that was good for society and gave me some joy.  I'm such a nerd.  Demography and cultural research are so much fun, and I have a post undergrad degree that taught me tons about both of them, so I'm even qualified to talk about them. 

I had started this site, Done Nesting,  to put up my personal writings that were not political or did not put forward a strong point of view on issues, but had not gotten very far on it.  Then my birthday arrived and with it came a trip to my primary care doctor for a pre-op ok for surgery. I'm going to have my nose broken and my septum repositioned so I, hopefully, can breathe normally.  When I got to the doctor's office the intern I spoke with told me I'm diabetic.  Bleepedy bleep bleep!!!  It does explain why I put on weight and can't get it off, it is more than the septum, apnea, and increased cortisol levels from those problems.  Well now, at least I can take the proper steps to get my weight and health under control. 

But after learning this life changing news, I realized I just want to write.  Everything has been pushing me back to writing.  This past week with it's birthday bad news crystallized what I need to do with this next stage in my life.  All my dissatisfaction, angst, and uncertainty goes away when I am writing.   Yes, I still need to find a job, and it is rather disheartening to have no one express interest, but I was terribly over-qualified for my last job so that is a bit of a quandary, but it doesn't matter.  Up until 9/11 I wrote copious amounts of stuff of all sorts: freelance articles, poetry, journals, letters, research results, lists.  It took facing my own mortality to kick me in the butt and make me see what I have to do in this next stage of life:  WRITE!

In spite of it all, ain't life grand?