Last weekend was the first Special Olympics ballroom dance competition. It was put together by Easter Seals ARC, Fort Wayne Dancesport, and Special Olympics Indiana, and they were paired with experienced, non-handicapped dancers who had volunteered and practiced with the clients. They had a lot of fun and did well. After everyone got their awards/medals, they sounded like cowboys clanking around. Some of the clients also teared up.

Pictures are on Facebook.

FW Dancesport also had its first amateur dance competition; the Special Olympics were just the first part of it. It continued on to Sunday. I took pictures at the whole thing at their request and shot over 2,000 of them. Two new 8 GB compact flash cards helped with that. So too did Canon's build quality on their 85/1.8 lens, which I had dropped on the pavement the night before. (I also dropped it again today, which really sucks, but the sharpness and autofocus are just as dead on as before. Since it's still under warranty, I'll send it in to Canon for calibration anyway.)

My mind was no longer working well Saturday night so I couldn't dance myself as much as I would have liked. Oh well. Just need more practice. =)

The madman in Libya says Obama is a Muslim. Granted, he is a madman. Settled down a bit after Reagan's planes missed him but killed his daughter. Settled down a lot more after Bush became President and with the invasion of Iraq.

Oooohh. Ought to change that to "lunatic" instead to coincide with Islam's crescent moon flags. ;)

Mark Levin was playing this last night. Obama is such a pear.

I despise the term "pop" and call soda "soda." Even with the mentally handicapped; they still understand what I mean anyway.

Linguistically, though, I noticed this weekend how the people here call soda "pop" whenever possible, even individual cans. We don't where I'm from. It's much more a count or mass noun. "Do you want a soda?" is fine when there's a range of options. When there's only one, though, it's frequently "Do you want a Pepsi?," "I put your Sprite in the refrigerator," or "Whose root beer is this?" without a generic use of "soda" on top of that.

Maybe it's just northeastern efficiency?

Much like its church practice, the LCMS website has been infected by a SQL injection worm. Heh.

21

Hehehehe. Thanks, tutal

I've never been to a church voters meeting where the congregation clapped after each person gave their report. Redeemer rocks. If I did that in Owego they'd probably think I was mocking them and out of order. Might be worth a try. ;)

My home circuit is getting a vicar in June. We have eight congregations, with three vacancies, including my home church. Chances are Pastor Werly will be his supervisor, since he's the vacancy pastor for two of them. He's good. I just wonder what tests this guy will find there. That and which sem he'll come from.

Oh, and can churches submit to have someone from St. Catharine's instead? ;)

One of my uncles (an aunt's husband) has died, from lung cancer, which was new-found and had gone pretty far, and I think also from the chemotherapy which they had just tried to start. I.e., it weakened him immediately and then the cancer kicked him while he was down.

The reason I can't go home for it is that I now have three jobs. And I'm tired because of that and could certainly stand to go home, just for the break! In addition to ESArc (not bad; overnight sleep and they've been paying an awake rate for any additional hours I take) and Securitas (vomit), I now also work at Picture People at the mall.

It's fun, but hard in that I have to learn to be outgoing in a new setting. Mostly showing people their pictures after they've been taken and selling them stuff. However, I have gotten to take pictures too, and in my very first sitting, got a wonderful one of a 6 month old baby girl looking down at her open baptismal Bible (NT) from her Godparents, wearing accompanying dress. We pressed it open to somewhere in John (words crisp in the picture), she managed not to drool or anything in it. ;) The others loved it; had me get a model release from mom and will put it up on the wall at some point. Also, one of the managers, who was uploading that day, said she could tell I was a photographer because I framed my shots rather than having lots of white backdrop cloth around the subject that she would have to chop off.

The Picture People kind of comes at a loss for me. My hours at BFG have now sorted themselves out to Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings (Tuesday and Friday are out due to my dance class), and Arc has been M-R overnight all along. So it would otherwise leave me with three day weekends, every weekend. Picture People hits me there, plus a morning or two during the week. But Arc overtime is worth plenty more, or I could have had the option to go home this weekend or to rest on other ones. But I chose this, to learn more about taking pictures and posing people, etc.

I'm a little cranky, because I'm not responsible enough yet to just go to bed on time. And, while I'm great at back rubs, there is no one to rub mine. =(

I got to sing this time with the choir for the Tre Ore on Good Friday. This time, because last year I was verboten. ;) Kantor let me practice with them last year after service, because I needed that, but there was no way I could have handled it, since I can't sing. At least not yet.

I've spent the past year with the choir at Redeemer, when I make it on time. At first, Kantor wanted me to come get him about 10 minutes early from Petersen's excellent adult forum, before choir practice, to do matching with him, but my internal clock runs 5 minutes behind reality and I'm incapable on a personal level of fixing that. So he said doing it after church would be fine, and that's what we've tried to do since, after his visitors and exclusive of meetings, Collegeum, etc. This also let me warm up some, I guess.

(He also told me very early on to be quiet during church. =) Sigh, my mouth sucks for anything but eating. This is one more of those disadvantages of not growing up in church.)

The organ, and the higher pitch of the women in the choir, is a bit of an overload for me on matching, so I try to sit closer to Colin or Paul in that second row in the loft. Matt was there before, who is great, but was a pain in the butt for me because he would jump back and forth on which part he was singing, just to amuse himself.

Lately I had been getting better. Even before lately (Christmas time?) Kantor said that I surprise him each time, and had every time all along, though inconsistently. I wonder if it's anything like learning a language; we were told by some German students in a class in college that immersion takes about two months before the language "clicks" and things make sense. This has been longer, but not immersion or even daily activity either. By the way, ancient Greek vowels used to be differentiated partly by pitch; too bad we don't know what those pitches were. This was part of the acute, grave, and circumflex aspect on vowels too; that only switched to being stress-based later.

The month practicing for Good Friday/Easter was after service, so no matching, and no personal attention from Kantor, but I could hear some of it. I did develop a cold right at the end (which I still have now), and got these horse-pill strength cough drops at Walmart. Every two hours as needed, they say. So I figured since we were practicing 11:30-12 before the Tre Ore, then wouldn't sing until 12:15, I could pop one of them in. It about numbed my untrained vocal cords<G>. Recovered some, got through it, I guess. I'm still keeping relatively quiet, trying to hear more and match that on my level. After the choir part was all done (first hour), I had another cough drop, but was more used to it and wasn't affected as much. I did feel kind of rough afterwards, but made it. Same goes for Easter.

This Sunday, Kantor and I squeezed in matching after service, even though he had a busy afternoon ahead. Before, he was matching me, partly to see where I was but more to have me just go up and understand the difference between each note. It's interesting; if I'm doing it blind, there's a particular scale I tend toward (I forget, also forget how consistent that is), whole notes and half notes appropriately, but if I could see the keys on that piano, I was able to up by half notes alone, even from the beginning. Weird visual component. Anyway, this Sunday, he had me match him (rushing?). Blotched the first note while he corrected me (needed to go higher as usual). But after that was settled I got each one of the few he played. He asked when I learned that. I don't know, it's just been getting better lately, and I can hear/sense it.

By the way, I also typically do better after Communion. Is that from the liquid being drunk (not that I don't use the water fountain before service), the alcohol (I told Kantor I ought to drink before church to test that ;)), or God's good and gracious Spirit?

People who set the thermostat to 75 degrees in the winter are pathetic.

Many of them crank the air conditioner down to 65 in the summer, too, while wearing even less.

Does Eliot Spitzer Owe NY Sales Tax For His Use Of Internet "Services"? by the FReeper "an amused spectator"

He pastes from a New York taxation website:

Purchases outside New York State with subsequent use in New York State — You may also owe state and local sales or use tax if you are a resident of New York State at the time you purchase any of the following outside New York State:

property you bring into New York State for use in New York State;

a service performed on property outside New York State, and you bring that property into New York State for use here; or

a service (such as an information service) you bring into New York State for use here.

Emphasis added. Bwahahahahahaha!!!

Even if that slimy villain gets some kind of deal where he resigns his governorship in exchange for not being prosecuted (why? - indict, prosecute, and impeach; he has nothing to offer), I hope he then gets prosecuted for using the state police to intimidate his political enemies. Not even one year in to his first term. After years of false accusations, slander, and intimidation as attorney general. Don't kid yourself about other news; a significant portion of yesterday's big DOW jump came from Wall Street's relief that he's going down.

Yesterday, navygirl85 made a spectacle of herself.

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fatherdmj has posted music videos a few times. Here are three of my favorites. The Tea Party ought to have been 'enough said,' but they were Canadian and got little promotion here<G>. father_turtle stands a good chance for exposure, though, having stradled the Niagara River.



This was the first time I heard them, on The Edge in Buffalo:





By the way, a five pound turkey breast in the pressure cooker for half an hour rocks. Except I had it under full pressure on the order of 35-38 minutes. The cartilage and ligaments failed and the rib cage collapsed, but the meat was so tender and succulent. =) And left me hella sleepy. Goodnight.

I can't see. Well, I can, except not with my left eye, except I can see through it too. I'm trying to figure it out, which is why that last sentence suchs<G>. My left eye's rods and cones appear to be very excited at the moment, which is making it hard for them to receive light normally at the moment. It's in a C pattern, which is expanding. It's partly a perception problem too; my brain is integrating the signals from both eyes, so it's screwing up what I'm getting from my right eye too. There is enough to function, but I wouldn't want to drive like this, not lacking half my peripheral vision.

I don't know what caused it, and I think this is the third time it's happened: one years ago and the other last summer while at work. It strikes me as being the same pattern as that last one, he expanding "C" of excitation. This time I perceived it coming on. It started as a few lines, a narrow band that was filled with line-style static (black and white, with a hint of color) right in the middle, and I only knew that the rest of it was there. There seemed to be an additional defect across this line, like what was below was shifted one degree over. The line itself dulled things, like the shine of the border of an object being a little grayed out right there.

I think that the "C" expanded like a firebreak. It got thicker while it expanded, but over time, like before, the middle of it became clear with no further excitation, just some dullness. It's like it had burned itself out behind that line, and could only expand. Meanwhile, the neurons in my eye seem tired out from it. I can see, but they're still recovering. And while I wrote this post, the C has expanded beyond where I can see it. I can see better now, but am still getting back the peripheral vision. Yeah yeah, I'll have to get it checked out sometime. =)

As long as I'm talking about vision, I've come to a conclusion on why sometimes one eye sees things with a blue tint while the other has a nicer, more brown tone... yet which eye is doing it changes. Now that I've been playing with photography, I realized that this behavior is white balance. The blue is the effect of one eye being balanced for a hotter color temperature than is actually present. (Blue is hotter; consider blue giant stars versus red giants. But the reddish tone is aesthetically "warmer," go figure.) I don't know why it lags, and the blue tint is invariably in the eye closer to the main light source. This does explain why when I was little, and outside in the sun, when I came inside my dad's bookstore, everything was bright green until my eyes adjusted. Fluorescent lights are actually heavily green. So, it wasn't just that my eyes were washed out from the brightness and adjusting to dimmer light, but they also still needed to accomodate the new lighting's temperature and the needed white balance.

(Fluorescent's green tone is why a lot of pictures taken under them come out as ugly, and why women aren't going to be so happy with the end to tungsten lights Congress idiotically mandated for 2012. Idiotic because those green low-wattage fluorescent bulbs are filled with mercury, a dangerous pollutant if they break, and their manufacturing process is correspondingly filthy. Though I use them too and my electric bill averages $16 a month. That's also from not having a TV and having the gas heat included in my rent...)

Now that I can see again, I'm going to go get some shut eye. ;)

I need a Valentine tomorrow. Any volunteers? =)

Last night I cooked. My smoke alarm did not go off. (Don't assume the opposite is normally the case; it's very rare that it goes off at all from my cooking!) But it was almost time to leave for work, so I took the chicken breasts I was baking out of the oven in a hurry, tossed what I was to eat that night in something I could take with me, put the rest away and hurried out.

As soon as I got out in the hallway, that smoke alarm went off. Never my own, in my apartment, but only that single one, outside my door, and not any of the others in the hallway or up or downstairs. I ran from the painful sound and put my things in my car. Then I had a suspicion I hadn't locked my door, so I went back in and found that that was true. Meanwhile the alarm was still screaming, and I could hear the occupants across the hallway from me stirring. I bolted back to my car and left. (I did clock in late. Tonight too in the snow. Blah.)

Do smoke alarms trigger on a gradient too and not just an absolute parts per million threshold? Though there's still no reason for my cooking to have done that. Nothing burned, there weren't even grease or oil fumes available to come off a hot pan. Weird. And so cruel to my neighbors. =)

In the morning my building was still there.

Over the weekend I found a blog by a blind, autistic (Asperger's), 21-year-old Dutch girl who is currently committed to a psychiatric hospital due to suicidal tendencies in the fall of 2007.

Astrid is very intelligent. Her blog is in English and she writes very well. This journal goes back to 2002. It's open; she uses her own name and probably very few friends-only posts. Posts on the frontpage include the topics:

• Levels of privilages in leaving the ward, with whom and for how long.
  
  
• Treatment plan discussions where the staff talk about her rather than to her.
  
  

  My main problem with having a functional assessment of my inappropriate behavior, besides the unlikelihood that it happens carefully on a busy ward, is that it’s a very passive process for the person with the problem behavior: I’m not supposed to participate actively in the process. And the doctor’s conclusions may’ve been right - as far as she could draw any conclusions about the cause/function of my behavior, I agreed with her -, but she never asked me.

• A time out policy, even though she's voluntarily committed there.
  
  

  ... theoretically, a low-stimulation environment could do me well in soem cases of overload. But this is not what causes the majority of my meltdowns these days: mostly, it’s my own thoughts that overwhelm me. And in this case, I’d like to call the “quiet room” a low-distraction environment - which is likely to work contraproductively.

• The assumptions of the police when she was or will again be out walking.
  
  
• Thoughts about Expressing Emotions

  Since being on the psychiatric ward, I’ve been accused of throwing objects for fun, or being funny about serious issues such as suicidal ideation, because I had a smile on my face when coming to the nurse. And today, I laughed a short while after a fellow patient had told us he has cancer. In none of these cases did I feel happy or did I see any fun in what was happening or what I was thinking about. It gets me thinking about the way I express emotions.

• Doctors' treatment of physicial illness when a patient has a psychiatric background.
  
  
• The involuntary medicating of a psychotic girl in her ward.

Astrid's Journal. I added it as a feed too if anyone's interested. astrids_journal

Although this article in the New York Times doesn't say it, this is the front of my dad's bookstore, with Riverow in the reflection.

Owego is in the second half of the first page of the article.

Merlin Lessler lives across the street. I haven't read any of his books or articles; maybe I'll fix that sometime when other interests don't compete. ;) Can't quite remember if I've ridden in the back of the ambulance when he was driving either. I think while he was training, but immediately after he had to take a break for a while. He is in Company Two's with me. Too bad I'm not there to get him to log a protest vote for Thompson, since McCain is going to win New York anyway.

“Across the street, there was a Hillary sign on the lawn last week,” Mr. Lessler said. “Now there’s an Obama sign.”

Across the street. He's at the corner, so this means either Ross Street (and an elderly friend, retired school teacher), or Front Street and my (mom's) home. My mom is away right now, tending my aunt and uncle's new house in Florida while contractors work. They live in Chile still and my uncle is close to retiring from Oxy. My mom does not put up political signs in her lawn: it's nobody's business who she's voting for. So if it's our yard, these are my sister's signs. Maybe she's switched away from the Beast?

O'Hara's. The bar in the same building as the Parkview Restaurant. They make my tummy happy on St. Patrick's Day. =) He shouldn't feel so powerless. Sure, New York's Electors will be Democrats as usual this year. But Spitzer's corruption is enough of a scandal to make him a one-term governor. Maybe that one can be picked up in 2010.

Skin test shows if you're late or early riser
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor [London Telegraph]

A simple skin test could reveal if someone who hates getting up is lazy, or whether their body clock is badly out of step with that of other people.

...

Today, a study confirms the emerging view that almost every cell in the body also contains a clock and, in particular, shows that skin cells can be tested to reveal if a person has a genetic propensity to like lie-ins, burn the midnight oil or get up at the crack of dawn.

Prof Steve Brown and his colleagues at the Chronobiology and Sleep Research Group, University of Zurich, found that the brain's hypothalamus acts as a central clock for the body, but does so by synchronising all the individual cells, which have their own clocks.

...

You can read more at the article proper, or if that disappears, someone posted it in full on FreeRepublic.

Almost every cell in my body. No wonder I'm tired today. I mean, it's not like I stayed up too late to cause it. ;) If this is true, I wonder how it works on a structural level? On a molecular level? Cells in the heart act as pacemakers by leaking ions at a particular rate until they depolarize themselves and those around them, cascading into a heartbeat. I have heard (or at least heard it speculated) that neurons can act as pacemakers too in the same way, as seen in the mind's affinity for rhythm (the beats in music really aren't hard to follow) or in the extra effort to stop or modify a repeated movement (too many box steps in dancing!).

If the hypothalamus is acting as a time server, what is the messenger, and how does it cross the plasma membrane? What machinery is keeping the time in the cell, and more importantly, what thresholds does it cross to effect results that actually matter to life?

I just found out that today is the 50th anniversary of Legos, or at least of the Lego patent. I love them, as my blog's title says. (urukite came up with it...)

Legos fostered my imagination to such heights that I remained in it for years. ;) Ancient memories of those Duplo-size blocks, on the back porch or at the old babysitter Mom Hart's. (Or however that was spelled. When I was little I assumed it was Heart as a title.) The toy du jour at daycare in elementary school, where our clique was able to get our own room for our battles. I would build in the evening, preparing for war the next day. And there were the first few legomen, with one as the leader, around whom a society and a family coalesced. Dorian values?--read Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick. =) A little latter a history was developed, with each new set, and tied to that same character too.

I wonder how much it would betray or reveal about me now to tell about that story, about the things I want and value and my mindset. How much was foreshadowed? And how much would certain elements distract from the real substance and focus? Shrug. Sets have changed so much since then that I would be hard pressed to adopt in any more. Star Wars legos have the stigma of an entire world attached and are completely incompatible with mine.

Lego had its day today. Here's their birthday news, with a 50 year old set they released again: Town Plan. Check out the pictures under "more views." The company owner is on the current box, and was on the original one 50 years ago as a little boy. It's a family business. =)

Dear Mary,

Tonight, after wonderful music and singing at the Bach Collegium's oratorio concert, I went and had a medium rare center-cut sirloin with Kantor Reuning et al. at the Gas House.

=D

endersgame3: "its a small, small lcms lutheran world"

Yeah, but the conundrum is that every LCMS family that has lots of little Lutheran babies only serves to make that world smaller. ;)

There was an episode of The Boondocks on tonight that included a hillarious spoof of both Ann Coulter and race-baiters. It turns out Adult Swim has the episode up on their site, and did before tonight too, which was its premier.

The S-Word

Just so you know, they don't hold back on language. I can't watch it on the laptop I'm using at the moment either (no volume control and lousy internal speakers), so I'm just saving it for later.

I was feeling a little wired tonight. I set myself off-balance over the weekend. But maybe I can sleep now. Thursday and Friday will be long days, taking the Pediatric Advanced Life Support class. It's something to have studied for beforehand. As leoetiquette said earlier, about something else, '... one more thing to be behind in.' The big things to study for it or already know are pharmacology, heart rhythms, and treatment algorithms. I rock on cardiology, can eagerly find a sinus rhythm with bigeminy of PACs (premature atrial complexes) when others don't (granted, this isn't something we're going to treat<G>). I need to work on my drugs, especially because kids can have different doses. And the algorithms too. Though it did help that the previous edition ACLS book was one of my favorites. That class will be next month.

navygirl85 insists she's going to take PALS this Thursday and Friday too, having missed the neonatal resuscitation provider class last week due to reasons that ought to be her own friends-only post. I don't see how, though, since she's not an ALS provider that I know of. Starting IVs doesn't count. In the NRP class last week, there were various nurses, and more in the afternoon who only needed that testing part to refresh. But I was the only ALS provider, an EMT-Critical Care from New York. Which meant I was the only one who could intubate, give medications on standing orders, and start an IV in the umbillical vein without having to wait for permission. In short, it meant that when my group was practicing skills in scenarios at the end, I was the one who was acting like a doctor. Take that, nurses.

It will be good to sit next to a friend. Hope she makes it.

To encourage Anthea to post some more of her daily pictures.



Last night ESArc had a 'moonlight dinner cruise' party. I made it to the last hour and a half after working at BF Goodrich 12 hours and then relaxing for a bit. I had fun, but certainly didn't look like this. =)



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