Furever Friends Anthology
Proud to be part of this anthology, a large book of many different stories, all romance,
intended to help shelters deal with an influx of pets. Here's the information:
Furever Friends
A Collection of Stories
Coming from Wycked Minds Publishing
Releasing November 30th! Get yours now, and let's help our furry, feathered, and scaled friends affected by the hurricanes that tore through the Southeast!
🐶🐱🦎🦜
When disaster strikes, not only humans are affected. Our four-legged companions are as well. Sadly, many get left behind, and rescues and shelters scramble to save them before it's too late.
This anthology is packed full of stories about animals who have been rescued and given a second chance at life! Each story is uniquely different as is each author.
All proceeds for this anthology go to Best Friends, a non-profit animal rescue that has mobilized to help animal shelters in the Southeast that have been affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
https://books2read.com/ForeverFriendsAntho
🐶🐱🦎🦜
#comingsoon #preorder #bookpreorder #charityanthology #charityanthologies #hurricanesheleneandmilton #disasterrelief #recoveryeffort #fundraisers #romanceanthologies #romancecollections #fureverfriends #helpourfurryfeatheredscaledfriends
#bestfriendsrescue
#operationfureverfriends #helene #milton
school reform
Brooks, David. (2024, Nov. 14).
How the Ivy League Broke America.
The Atlantic. Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation/680392/.
The above article was given to me for free, for some reason; usually
Atlantic articles are behind a paywall.
In my opinion school reform is a necessity and this article addresses the problem squarely. It is clear that education has failed and that the system has set up a distrust of the educated people that we were counting on. Need I say more? The article is good in identifying the problem and giving some concrete solutions. It's a start.
This is a topic that is close to my heart, having worked in academia most of my life. I now find that my special-education kids, the remaining ones, are underserved or failed by the modern schools, and it's not really the schools' fault. Teachers are the saints they've always been. Something (besides the pandemic) has gone wrong, very wrong, and we need help.
Labels: school reform
whoa
I've been uncharacteristically silent about the stunning election results, and this will probably be the last and only thing I'll say about them. In general, although most of my friends are wailing and gnashing their teeth, I don't feel like jumping in.
Yes I'm disappointed and angry about the results. I'm angry at my fellow countrymen for betraying democracy and the free world for whatever reasons they had. My guess is 1) racism and sexism (just didn't want a woman boss), 2) blaming Biden/Harris for big inflation during difficult times, and 3) endless wars that seem to be our responsibility. Actually strike off #3, people don't care about Ukraine or Gaza. But make #1 into two reasons, as they're both good enough for her to lose the South & Appalachia.
There is one winner, and that is the system itself, which worked well; all the votes were counted fairly, the dems didn't shout "cheating cheating!" or run for their lawyers; people counted votes as they were supposed to. All of this to me just shows that he was a big liar to claim the 2020 one was "rigged" as there was never any evidence of that. His attacks on the counting system, not to mention the courts and the post office, were all unfounded.
October
October is synonymous with good, playoff baseball. But baseball has a serious problem. It's overextended. It needs to bring back October.
Here's a fact about the North: sometime in late October, the weather turns. By Halloween, it's always cold, windy, snowy, below freezing. There is some variation: sometimes it turns early (the 20th), sometimes late (the 25th), but it always turns. You don't really want to be outside after it turns, at least, you don't want to stand around, outside, or sit. If you're trick-or-treating, you'll survive, because you have a couple of extra layers. But you might be cold and miserable when you get home.
Here's baseball's problem: we're in the playoffs now, but we've just started. Somebody will win spots in the NL and AL playoffs this weekend, and we should be ready for the World Series in what, about ten days? That's too long! Once it's cold, we're busy. We have to plastic up the windows, shovel snow, get antifreeze in the cars, etc. It's too late!
We can watch baseball NOW. Playoffs, more playoffs, we're good. It's good baseball and these are good teams. I can also follow even if I don't watch. The weather is right: cool, orange leaves everywhere, fresh air; it's nice outside. Once it turns, forget it.
Baseball needs to maximize the World Series, not marginalize it. Maximizing it means making it OVER before it turns. We should be doing the World Series now. We should give the World Series its ten days and make them all good, not November days.
There are several ways to do it: make a shorter season; squeeze up the wild-card games (making it best of three was good), squeeze up the division playoffs (make them best of three?), cut with the days off between games, etc. Every day helps. You need ten for a seven-day series and
all need to be before it turns. I don't want to watch it in the snow. Even if I'm a faithful Cleveland fan.
Missouri kills an innocent man
When DNA testing came out, a professor in Chicago turned his students loose on the 19 people on Illinois' Death Row, and said, use the new DNA testing to review these cases. It took a while, and the number of people on Death Row changed over the years. But within a few years
13 of them had been proven innocent.
This points out a big problem with our justice system. The jurors do the best they can; so do the police; everyone does their jobs. But big people at the top, who are often elected, have a vested interest in securing "justice" by making sure someone dies for every murder. If these 13 didn't kill the people they were charged with killing, who did? Well, somebody else, obviously, and it appears they got away with it.
It is pretty easy to force a confession. You just make someone suffer enough, and you make them believe thier life will be over
now if they don't say what you want. You can even make them believe that their life is as good as over already, if they don't say what you want. So they said it. You got it on tape. And their life is as good as over.
That doesn't make it right. We're talking about poor, defenseless black men here for the most part, people who don't necessarily know at the moment that their defense attorney is worthless and not on their side. Or, they're unable to
do anything about it.
Let's talk about Khalifah for just a minute. It didn't help that he became Muslim; that adds to the suspicion that what they really wanted to do was kill a Muslim. But he was a typical case in some ways. There was no credible evidence to convict him, outside of a forced confession. When the facts came in, his blood and DNA weren't on the scene. Everyone admitted that the defense attorney was worthless and/or not on his side. Even the families of the victims had asked that he not be killed. But high-up political people needed to prove they were tough. It doesn't matter that no evidence shows that capital punishment deters crime, either. It's posing.
So they kill an innocent man. They are no better than the people they rail on against in their campaigns.
Sad story
Now that I've made public my new cochlear implants, I've had an outpouring of good wishes but also curiosity: what went wrong? How can we avert this? How could good hearing go down the drain? This is my story. I'll leave the details of the cochlear implants themselves for later.
In my opinion there are several possible culprits, and there's no rejecting the idea that it could be a combination of them. I'll list them out. 1) altitude/pressure issues. 2) six cups of coffee a day for forty years. 3) meds that disrupt the balance, or that I'm allergic to (very possible given my allergenic history).
My first dizzy spell was in Texas; that rules out altitude but not pressure entirely. In New Mexico, however, dizzy spells came on fast and furiously. I knew I needed an EMT; one was in Las Cruces (~130 mi. of desert, 7 mo. wait); one was in Roswell (130 miles of even more barren country, 5 mo. wait). I took Roswell. When I got there he said 1) it's Maniere's disease, which is really more of a condition, a condition of ruined hearing from inner ears full of fluid (and possibly other things). 2) Your inner ear is an organ, like your kidney, extremely complex, and its entire job is to separate out sodium and potassium from a stream that comes through it. Obviously it's malfunctioning. Too much sodium can make it malfunction. 3) What we do is prescribe a diuretic (prevents your body from retaining water) and a strict low-sodium diet. We do that because it works.
when he talked about retaining water, I thought of the coffee, and he said yes, there is a correspondence between too much coffee and Maniere's. It is also indisputable that pressure/altitude can play a role. He was less sure about the med thing but didn't discount it. When I got home I found one of my meds actually was sodium axoproponapthaminapramisol (last part made up) and I rejected it. It was
made of sodium. Since then, since doing what he wanted (it took a while to get the hang of low-sodium), it has been better - fewer dizzy spells. Several meds, I noticed, tended to cause dizzy spells. When I cut back on coffee I needed something for ADD: dizzy spells from those meds. I eventually quit all meds except the diuretic itself, and just live with ADD; I have three cups of coffee a day, and I'm retired. But in general, fewer dizzy spells.
The dizzy spells were in a sense a symptom of full inner ears. Why were they full? It could be a combination of things. Going from 9000 to 3300 feet every day certainly didn't help. I never really had a sodium-rich diet but all diets are sodium-rich until you make a conscious effert to make them low sodium. Severe cutback on fried, processed, salty food has really helped. The diuretic has helped but it has its own consequences.
Why do I say I'm not sorry? You can say
you never should have moved to 9000 feet but it was fantastic, wonderful being up there in the clouds and I am not sorry I did it. You can say
you should never have taken all those meds but we generally have faith in meds and it's a rare case when people are allergic to them or they do what they could have done to me. I will say this though. When there is a "possible side effect" of dizzy spells that meand
someone somewhere reported that as a side effect, yet no clinical trials have verified it. Well, if someone can have dizzy spells as a result of meds, everyone can. It's a reason to be vigilant, not to reject meds altogether.
Finally there's the coffee. Keep in mind that
that's how I treated my ADD for all those years. No coffee, I would have been on the street, Iswear. So don't tell me
you shouldn't have drunk all that coffee...of course I shouldn't have, but it's over now, and I can't undrink it.
As I look back a key would have been vigilance. From the first dizzy spell if someone had said 1) watch out; 2) way less sodium; or 3) get thee to online ENT,things might have been different. Nowadays when all this information is on the surface, we hardly imagine a world where I just sat and waited for an ENT, not knowing what elseto do. That was my downfall. If I knew the above I'd-a-been vigilant from the first turn and that's why I recommend: study up, see how delicate things are. Your hearing is your natural inheritance and you don't want to go through what I went through.
Another debate bites the dust
OK, during the debate I was door-dashing. It was a wild night out on the dash but that's another story. The main reason I don't watch the debates is because it makes me feel like when the guy who raped your daughter tries to sell you a Bible. You say, someone keep me from popping this guy one, or I'll end up in jail. I don't want to break the things around me in anger that they even let him speak or run for office.
Look at the bright side: half of the US will take better care of their pets. I think it's shameless to be such a fear-monger but basically when white America sees their towns become browner they become more afraid, and that's what's happening. Demographics are changing and people feel powerless about it. I'm convinced that that's what's behind the illegalization of abortion too, although that affects all races and is a little more indirect. White Americans are afraid. That's his base. Last time he called all the Mexican immigrants rapists, and
actually won the election, in some sense. He was the only rapist in the room.
The other good thing is that if the US can clearly see the choice they can clearly make the choice. Seeing exactly what we've got here has got to be good, and we have to have faith that people can choose wisely. There is no more important time than now.
