I was blessed with two father-in-laws.
They were very different: Bob always looked at the bright side of life and Joe—not so much.
Joe did have some wisdom, and he provided me with one of my favorite quotes that is applicable for Rich and I today.
Joe told me once,
We’re waiting for a couple of phone calls, and we need to be patient because, as much as we’d like to, we can’t make the phone ring.
I love Harry Smith’s voice almost as much as I like his stories.
His voice is soothing and feels like a homecoming.
His stories make a person smile.
What’s a better than that combination?
Here’s today’s story about a bookmobile in northern Idaho.
Long live books! Real books!
And long live Harry Smith. 🙂
As I was perusing candies at my local store yesterday, I decided to buy some M&Ms.
Why? Rich likes them and I don’t like them as much so hopefully I won’t eat as many…
Apparently I haven’t shopped for them in a while because I had no idea of the plethora of flavors now available!
I counted at least nine flavors and that doesn’t include seasonal flavors!
One of the first things I studied in Business 101 over 30 years ago was the Product Life Cycle.
Each product that gets to a point where it is sold goes through a common time line from introduction, to growth, to maturity, and then decline.
That’s why my favorite toothpaste keeps disappearing every few years. The manufacturers decide that sales have declined so they re-introduce a slightly modified toothpaste that then goes through it’s own product life cycle.
So, back to M&Ms.
I’m not sure what’s happening. Either the original M&Ms has a very long maturity time span or the introduction of other flavors of M&Ms help original M&Ms cycle back to the growth phase.
Here are the current M&M flavors NOT counting season flavors like Candy Corn and Gingerbread and Cherry Cordial and Red Velvet and…
Original Milk Chocolate
Dark Chocolate Peanut
Almond
Dark Chocolate
Peanut 
Peanut Butter
Pretzel
Mint Dark Chocolate
Mega 3X Milk Chocolate
Have you heard about peeple yet?
If you haven’t, you will. Soon. Very, very soon!
It’s the scariest thing I’ve heard about since . . . well . . . a long, long time!
It’s basically Yelp! for people.
Yelp! publishes crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses and promotes social networking.
Created by two women from southern California, the peeple concept helped them raise $8 million from venture capitalists.
As an app, peeple will allow people, real people, to rate other people using a scale from 1 to 5. And there will be a place for the rater to make comments about the people they rate.
Seriously, all they need to rate and berate or praise you is your phone number.
You need a Facebook account to rate others, but, and this is the big BUT, the others they rate do not need to give permission to be rated.
So say I know my child’s teacher’s cell phone number, and the teacher had the audacity to ‘give’ my kid a bad grade (regardless of the fact that my child didn’t do any homework). I can get on peeple and, using the teacher’s cell phone number, rate him/her a 1 out of 5 and lambaste him/her for the poor grade.
The teacher finds out about the rating and comments when he/she gets a text from peeple with the rating and the comments; I’m guessing the text message is what’s considered the ‘inbox’.
Negative comments sit unpublished in the person’s inbox for 48 hours which “gives both parties the opportunity to work out any disputes. If their dispute can’t be resolved by then, the comment will go live.”
Here’s a quote directly from the forthepeople.com Web site:
The peeple app allows us to better choose who we hire, do business with, date, become our neighbours, roommates, landlords/tenants, and teach our children. There are endless reasons as to why we would want this reference check for the people around us.
The irony behind their ‘reason’ for creating the app is in direct opposition to one of the founder’s VERY recent post on Facebook where she wants to prevent people from posting on their page. Apparently what’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander…
It’s not out yet, but peeple sounds just super scary. There’s lots more to their original business plan that I haven’t covered here that make it even more frightening!
Maybe its just me, but it sounds like letting bazillions of Donald Trumps out into the social media clouds where they can belittle, lie about, and bully others…
And here we go…
Thirty-one non stop days of All About Breasts for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
While I’m glad that so many women’s (and men’s because men can get breast cancer, too) lives are saved by the focus on all things pink this month, I wish that as much attention was put on the leading cause of women’s deaths: heart disease.
While 1 in 31 American women dies from breast cancer each year, 1 in 3 dies of heart disease.
Have you seen this yet?
I truly think that a dog knows our hearts!
Thanks to Pam for sharing it on Facebook.
Over the last three weeks I’ve had a bit of a health scare. Everything’s fine, but it’s been an ‘interesting’ time…
During early September, I experienced what is called ‘gross hematuria’. You can Google it if you really want to know what it is, but, in a nut shell, it’s one bodily fluid that IS NOT supposed to exit your body coming out with another bodily fluid that IS supposed to exit your body.
I had it once before almost a year and a half ago, and at that time I attributed it to a new medication I was taking because it was listed as an uncommon side effect. I had the requisite testing and nothing was revealed. Eventually the side affects disappeared and all was well, so I attributed it to the medication that didn’t agree with me.
But I’m not on that medication now, so I was a bit surprised and bummed when gross hematuria happened again.
I went to see my family doctor who diagnosed a probable urinary tract infection. I had never had one before, so I was a bit surprised.
I was placed on antibiotics for a week, but I got a call a few days later (after test results came in) and was told, “Lo and behold–you don’t have a UTI.”
Kidney stones were suspected, but I didn’t have any of the normal symptoms associated with them–the INTENSE pain, nausea, fever, etc… (If you’ve ever experienced or talked with someone who has had them, you know how awful they are!)
I figured that the stones weren’t quite mobile yet, and I didn’t really want to have another MRI to determine what was going on because how much could change in 18 months. Besides, the gross hematuria wasn’t THAT bad…
However, I had some other symptoms that were a bit worrisome. So I asked our wonderful friends Dean and Lil, a gynecologist and nurse, if I needed to see a specialist.
Dean said, “Yes.” He said that if men have gross hematuria once, they need a full urinary tract workup. If women have it twice, they need to.
While that was bad news for me because this was my second episode, I did giggle a bit to myself because, once again, something that involves penises is much more important than whatever a woman has. 🙂
(I’m sure there is some anatomical and/or biological reason for the single vs double reasoning, but it still made me giggle…)
Long story short…
I went to see a specialist, and I am fine.
I do not have anything visible in my kidneys, and, most importantly, because it’s what I thought I had, I do not have bladder cancer.
He tested this and tested that. He looked up into this and looked around at that.
Everything came back negative. (D = True Negative)
I learned a lot throughout this month. For example, I didn’t realize that bladder cancer is so prevalent.
Men are about 3 to 4 times more likely to get bladder cancer during their lifetime than women. Overall, the chance men will develop this cancer during their life is about 1 in 26. For women, the chance is about 1 in 90.
I also learned that bladder cancer is often caused by exposure to chemicals including smoke (I was around a lot of second hand smoke for twenty years, but then again–haven’t we all been around it.) and arsenic (The water where I lived for 30 years had lots of arsenic in it.)
The good news for me was that if I had bladder cancer, it wasn’t really my fault. I couldn’t help the fact that my parents smoked, and I couldn’t help the fact that the water had arsenic.
Sounds stupid, but I’ve always felt that my health issues since my bicycle fall were my fault because I should have not fallen or I should have launched myself off of my bike so that I landed on lawn instead of asphalt.
Regardless, I was so very, very relieved when the doctor told me that he saw no tumors in my bladder.
But that relief only lasted a few seconds, because then he said in an accusing tone, “But you have LOTS of gallstones!”
Gallstones are usually caused by high cholesterol which is often caused by a diet too high in fat. That’s partially true for me because I’m not the healthiest eater, but endocrine changes to my body after my bicycle fall also contribute to my high cholesterol. So the gallstones ARE my fault.
That being said, I’m still so relieved that I ONLY have gallstones and (fingers crossed–so far) they aren’t bothering me a bit. 🙂
I found this interesting information on CNN as Pope Francis visits the US.
I had no idea that the numbers were so high (except for president and vice president).
I just finished reading Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed.
The book is a 2012 memoir describing her 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995 as a journey of self-discovery. Her mother had just died, and Cheryl was struggling with her life in her mid twenties. She decided to hike the PCT to shed her grief and atone for years of destructive behavior.
The book is well written, but I don’t think I’m alone among readers who struggled to read it all the way through.
Cheryl makes a lot of mistakes, and some of those mistakes she makes over and over again.
But in reading her journey through the 1,100 miles, readers get to know more about her and understand why she makes those mistakes.
Here’s a quick three minute video of the PCT:
And, for me, here are the best lines from the book:
Cheryl remember talking with an astrologer before the hike, and they were talking about her father.
The astrologer asks if her father, who was in the military, was wounded.
“Perhaps not literally. But he has something in common with some of those men. He was deeply wounded. He was damaged. His damage has infected his life and it infected you.”
“Wounded?” was all I could manage.
“Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place. ”
…
“The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.”
Very true, not just of fathers but of mothers…
And I love this quote because so often we automatically say NO to things that perhaps we should be saying YES to.
What if YES was the right answer instead of NO.
And the last sentence of the book, summed it all up.
How wild it was, to let it be.
I love how Mike Rowe’s mind works.
Y’all know him. He’s the Dirty Jobs guy–the first reality show ever! And now he’s on CNN with Somebody’s Got to Do It.
I follow him on Facebook, and while he doesn’t post things all that often, when he does they are usually doozies.
Yesterday’s post was no exception.
Someone asked him to comment on this week’s controversy about The View hosts vs Nurse/Miss America contestant.
If you haven’t heard about it, here’s the gist…
One of The View‘s hosts criticized a Miss America contestant who was dressed in her work scrubs and gave a monologue about why she loved being a nurse. The host said she was basically just reading her work emails. Another The View host added insult to injury by asking “why is she wearing a doctor’s stethoscope?”
Here’s part of Mike’s Rowe’s take on what happened after the show aired:
The fallout was fast, furious, and utterly predictable.
– The twitter-verse exploded with righteous indignation.
– #nursesunite was immediately announced.
– Facebook exploded with righteous indignation.
– An apology was offered, but not universally accepted.
– Two advertisers left the show.
– Additional apologies were offered.
– Three more advertisers left.
– Thousands are now demanding the offending hosts be fired.
– Nurses are getting some fantastic and long overdue publicity.
And that’s a very accurate and succinct report of exactly what happened.
And below is why I love the way Mike Rowe’s mind works.
He cuts to the honest-to-goodness raw truth of the matter and tells it like it is…
This is how PR works in 2015. Thanks to social media, America now has the ability to express her outrage instantly, in 140 characters or fewer. With the press of a few buttons, we can summon lightening bolts from on high, and call for the destruction of anyone who dares offend us.
Unfortunately, this technology has come at a time when the whole country is just waiting to be offended. A flag, a comment, a candidate, a stupid joke…the slightest of slights are all fair game, and ripe for umbrage. The Offended are now a daily part of the 24 hour news cycle – a cycle driven by hashtags and hurt feelings and a thousand different agendas. Thus, a silly comment during a silly show becomes an opportunity for nurses to unite. And that opportunity becomes headline news.
And I agree… 100%.
