I put my back out of wack Saturday just standing in the cornor hanging a hat rack. Nothing too stressful, simply turned to walk away and felt as though someone had punched me in the small of my back. This happened to me the first time when i was 23 (can you believe it?) and on and off over the years only lately, say the last 14 years, with some regularity.
As usual I went to the quack-o-practor to have my back realigned. He off course has me lay on my stomach and proceeds to push on my back, over and over..ouch! So this time I ask if him if a massager works at all. He says a good massage does help relieve stress and tension, but I should focus on ice pack on my back for now.
I have had massages before, but never have owned a massage machine.
My dad had one that I always though was shaped like a ...Johnson, get your Johnsonville here. And when my in laws had both passed, i found this gizmo that looked like an electric razor, only it had a 10 foot cord, and instead of blades, it had this solid chromed piece, with two distinct points about 3 inches apart. I tried it as a neck massager, and figured it was not meant for that, because it seemed more desisned to fit the anatomy elsewhere....
So I am Kohl's (in case you don't know, its a department store, sells mostly clothes and some other stuff, small appliances for the kitchen) and at the check out is this cute little gizmo, and I have no idea what it is, I pick it up, and read the label...its a massager! I won't plug the brand, but its available everywhere.
It does seem to work, in some ways WAY better than others, so as they say...Say hello to my lil friend!
House Republican Leader John Boehner thinks he has the votes to pass legislation that will increase domestic oil exploration and production, but earlier this month Speaker Pelosi refused to allow the legislation to move forward to a vote before Congress takes its August recess:
“Just as some Democrats in both the House and the Senate are beginning to heed the American people’s calls for more American energy production, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has threatened to do something quite different. She’d rather “pack it up and go home.”
Two weeks later, Speaker Pelosi is still blocking the energy legislation but instead of sounding like a grade-schooler who threatens to take her ball and go home, her current rhetoric sounds more like Captain Queeg:
“I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,” she says impatiently when questioned. “I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy.”
“I respect the office that I hold,” she says. “And when you win the election, you win the majority, and what is the power of the speaker? To set the agenda, the power of recognition, and I am not giving the gavel away to anyone.”
When she became Speaker of the House, Pelosi published a Handbook entitled “A New Direction for America.” Page 29 of the online version of the Handbook states that, in the Pelosi House, “Bills should generally come to the floor under a procedure that allows open, full, and fair debate.” Speaker Pelosi has consistently emphasized her devotion to honesty, integrity and openness.
It’s fine with me if Speaker Pelosi wants to use partisan and Parliamentary tactics to promote the interests she supports but I’m tired of her false insistence that she’s devoted to openness. If she really wants to be the House equivalent of LBJ, the Master [manipulator] of the Senate, then she should go for it. But the truth is she’s not the least bit open when it comes to legislation she dislikes and it doesn’t matter to her how many citizens or Congressional representatives support it.
Nearly 15 years ago, our household moved from a congested suburban area of NE Sacramento county to the more rural area of Elk Grove. At the time, EG was a small unicorporated town, but soon developers bought all the land in the area from dairy farmers, who with the lure of a well funded retirement, took the cash. Some even preserved their homes in the bargain, only to find them surrounded by strip malls and tract homes. Eventually most of these holdouts moved, and almost immediately the farm house, many built in the 1880-1910 period, werre leveled and replaced with gas stations and commercial buildings. Our family saw what was coming, and so after 4 years, and seeing the dairy behind our house disappear into tract homes and a baseball park, we uprooted again, and moved to the definantly rural Wilton area. Today, there is a clear boundary (Grantline Road) that defines Elk Grove sprawl from Wilton. Elk Grove had a population of about 45,000 when we first moved there, today its over 139,000.
And so we lived in peaceful country life for nearly a decade. Then the sleepy nature of our community became different, as the remoteness we all treasure has become a calling card for criminally minded youth, knowing the police take forever to respond to "that hick farm town".
Last year our house was burglarized, and thousand of dollars in property taken. Six months later my brother in laws car, which he parks out front of the house nearer the county road, was stolen- although the CHP did find it in a ditch later. Cost him hundreds of dollars to get it fixed.
Now we come to Sunday morning. I got up, made coffee, and opened the blinds on the living room...yes I could see my brother in laws car, but something was different. As I went outside and walked towards his car, a sick feeling sank upon me as I realized he no longer had a rear window. I walked to his car, and a large cinderblock brick was in the back, shattered glass everywhere. The dents on his trunk attested to the window probably deflecting the brick once, and the final insult obilterating the window. Because he drives a Ford, the glass companys we have contacted all say Ford auto glass is very expensive. It looks like it will cost about $500 to replace. Honey and him are thinking of looking in some junk yards for a replacement...
My point is this trend coincides with the opening a a new subdivision about a quarter mile the other side of the divide between Wilton and Elk Grove. When the police took the report for our house, they said that crime in our area had gone up 300%. "Probably kids, teenagers" he said. I asked why, and the cop looked at me and said he didnt know why, but that his experience was they were likely teens in a gang that had taken root in the XXX subdivison.
This series of events has caused us to consider moving. But no where is safe from crime it seems. Not even Wilton.
"Vanity is the excessive belief in one's own ...attractiveness to others."
So what is the relationship between me and vanity? Pretty remote i would say. I am so insecure on this topic, it actually impacts my daily life. And surprisingly, I find I am not so alone. In talking about this with other women, I have found that many follow a routine similar to my own. Each work day I start getting ready for work, look at myself int he full length mirror, and invaribaly think what I am wearing is not what I want..I spedn usually a half hout every morning going thru this, changing tops, pants for jeans, jeans for skirts, skirts for slacks, sometimes ending up wearing the same clothes I started to wear. Then there are what shoes to wear...what a nightmare..
Last night honey plugged our video camera into the large plasma screen in the living room and played some video shot on our vacation...the screen shot above illustrates why i dont like other people taking candid photos of me, unless i know its coming. i am very self conscious bout my appearance...maybe too much so, probably because of the way my dad used to talk to me, maybe because my mother is seriously hugely obese, which runs on her side of the family...and contributes to my general health being so-so. Anyway, it was seeing the videos on my own last week that made me (again) start watching what I eat with renewed fervor, and exercising more...
I am speaking of the news that this page has had absolutely zero visitors since Sunday. In the past 48 hours, zip, zilch, nada...and of course i wonder why?
Is it because my Sunday post was nothing exciting, nothing droll enough to entice readers, or is it simply that Yahoo 360 has waned so completely from the mainstream social interaction it used to have. I don't know. Sometimes i think i actually don't care.
Maybe the rambling thoughts I express are so out of context to the average person that there simply is no audience. Maybe.
Certainly I have demonstrated the ability to communicate ideas, at least I thought I did. Yet I know of only a handful of regular readers, who periodically challenge what I believe is true: America is in a long decline from the land of educated persons, to making Idiocracy a way of life.
I wonder often if people are reading this particular blog or not...I know i have had over 10,000 hits on the Yahoo page, but then again i only made that page public a year or so ago...this page is pretty much public since i made it, and I think there have been 140 or so visitors, although the map thingy says not, so they must be repeat visits.
If you wonder about the music videos i post, many times they are just ones i fancy in the moment, although like i was saying at work today, you know you are old when all the really memorable songs you know are around 40 years old...bummer man.
I wonder if when some young tough guy walks by my car while I am sitting there if there is any recognition that I have done a lot of things, things that maybe he hasn't even though of, or perhaps hopefully will never experience. Assassination of a president, his brother, and a civil rights leader; watching almost live TV of men bouncing around on the moon; being invited to see a weather satellite launch over the Pacific; flying a long circuitous route to Europe from the west coast because Russia was the enemy; knowing that gasoline will always be there, and under 50 cents a gallon, and freaking out when it hits 75 cents a gallon (now that wasn’t that long ago either); making hot passionate love on a beach, losing your class ring, and having the police show up and tell you to get dressed and get off the beach, the beach is closed. So maybe that’s why I tend to relax listening to “older” music,,, it takes me back to those things I recognize now as some of the good things I have done. Hopefully there will be a time when I listen to Lenny Kravitz and have good memories as well…I know I have started…
The first time I heard this, I was laying on my bed in the summer heat, listening to the radio. Ah, the good old days, no AC, AM radio, no computers...well at least the songs were good...
The first time I heard this, I was laying on my bed in the summer heat, listening to the radio. Ah, the good old days, no AC, AM radio, no computers...well at least the songs were good...
I recently went to see my doctor, who had asked me to schedule an appointment to review some exams, and check up on my health in general. Of course when i got there he totally had forgot about why I was there, and so I had to refresh his memory...that said, when he asked if I had any concerns, I asked him why my boobs are getting bigger. At least that's my perspective, since I used to wear a B cup and now I have gone up a size. Maybe I was always wearing the wrong size, but it seems to me when i would try one on it was not a good fit, and now they are. This leads to a discussion about doing regular self exams (I do) and mammograms, which I will discuss in a minute.So, and this doctor is the only one i recall doing this to me, he gets the nurse, and then has me take off my top, so i am sitting there half naked, although i did keep my bra on. He had me lean forward, then back, lift my arms up, etc, then had me loosen my bra and lay back on the exam table, and he smashed me around, running his clinically cold hands over me, and finally announces what I already knew, that there were not suspect lumps. He then proceeds to review my medical record on the computer, and says "well, this is probably nothing to worry about, since this is fairly common for women of your age..." OK, here we go...He says that as i age, the muscles in your upper chest tend to decrease, so that essentially your boobs start losing lift, and seem bigger, because they droop. Crap! The dreaded droopy tit syndrome, or DTS.
The health plan recently started what they call walk-in mammography, so you can when ever the whim hits you just pop in, get half naked, and have some technician put your breasts in a medical vise and smash the heck out of them. My left one still hurts, and this was yesterday I went...I recently went to see my doctor, who had asked me to schedule an appointment to review some exams, and check up on my health in general. Of course when i got there he totally had forgot about why I was there, and so I had to refresh his memory...that said, when he asked if I had any concerns, I asked him why my boobs are getting bigger. At least that's my perspective, since I used to wear a B cup and now I have gone up a size. Maybe I was always wearing the wrong size, but it seems to me when i would try one on it was not a good fit, and now they are. This leads to a discussion about doing regular self exams (I do) and mammograms, which I will discuss in a minute. So, and this doctor is the only one i recall doing this to me, he gets the nurse, and then has me take off my top, so i am sitting there half naked, although i did keep my bra on. He had me lean forward, then back, lift my arms up, etc, while he smashed me around, and finally announces what I already knew, that there were not suspect lumps. He then proceeds to review my medical record on the computer, and says "well, this is probably nothing to worry about, since this is fairly common for women of your age..." OK, here we go...He says that as i age, the muscles in your upper chest tend to decrease, so that essentially your boobs start losing lift, and seem bigger, because they droop. Crap! The dreaded droopy tit syndrome, or DTS. The health plan recently started what they call walk-in mammography, so you can when ever the whim hits you just pop in, get half naked, and have some technician put your breasts in a medical vise and smash the heck out of them. My left one still hurts, and this was yesterday I went...
This next topic came to mind while driving home from work... Every once and awhile, i like to just put on page my thoughts...like why when some web pages (aka MySpace, Yahoo 360, etc) have the capacity for you to add people as friends, it seems so many people become obsessed with adding as many as possible, which is really insane, to me. In real life i have co-workers, random associations with other people related to work, and while friendly, I don't consider them friends per se. To me, that is someone who you enjoy spending time with, not forced to cohabitate a work space with. Maybe that’s just me, but in the real world my priorities are family, friends, co-workers and everyone else. I don’t dislike anyone in particular, but what's the point of saying you have 2000 friends on MySpace or something like it, when I seriously doubt that a person can recall that many.
If you sent one message a day to each, just to say hi, and you type very quickly, it would still take awhile, unless off course you cheated(like i do) and used a select all function and then checked a box to hide addresses from others, so each of the 2000 thought they were getting a unique message...My online friends are people I am interested in, and many are frequently in touch with me or vice-versa.
