Completion

Well, we've done it: We've finally finished Deathly Hallows. So, all of you people who have been so kind to my son and me as we lagged behind the rest of the world while scrupulously avoiding magazine articles and websites and conversations, thank you for your patience. You may now speak freely. And yes, I'd love to discuss with anyone who is still interested!

Once we actually started the book, it took less than a month reading one, two, sometimes three chapters a day. Sadly, Harry Potter reading is no longer a thrice weekly official subject at our homeschool. Even though I brightly suggested starting over again...

We can now safely join in the anticipation of the upcoming Tales of Beedle the Bard(and know what we are anticipating - I'm especially coveting the Collector's Edition)and look at news on the upcoming movies (despite the delay of #6 - grrrr) without fear of being spoiled. Upon finishing, we quickly logged onto JKRowling.com - a favorite that we'd been missing for some time, as well as Mugglenet and The Leaky Cauldron so we could catch up.

What a relief!

Summer Fun is Over

Summer is officially over at my house. School has started (well, attempted to start - the only reason I'm posting right now is that my son fell asleep on the couch during our first French review...) Anyway, I had intended to post about our trip to Denver for the International New Age Trade Show soon after we got back, but yeah, that didn't happen. Better late than never I always say.

Besides ordering more products for my still non-functioning online store (because more stuff to sell is more important than being able to sell it, right?), we visited some touristy type things like Pike's Peak and the zoo. I'd post a picture from Pike's Peak if we hadn't left the camera in the car. Oh, but we've got plenty of zoo pictures - because everyone needs more of those... Here's one now:



Why do we feel compelled to take these pictures?!! On another note, we saw this little guy roaming around right next to the wolf's 'enclosure.' Run away little rabbit!




All right, here's some typical better Colorado pictures. One from Boulder Falls:




And another from the Denver Botanical Gardens:



All in all we had fun when we weren't in our closet motel room. Seriously, we were trying to save money, but come on - a whole room/suitcase area/bathroom setup that could easily fit into my son's bedroom? Well, we did save a lot of money, and I guess it was clean at least.

OK, I better go wake up my son now and torture him some more with "Quelle heure est-il?"

Addled

That's how I'm feeling at the moment. I'm guessing it's stemming from a combination of Levaquin and Toradol, both of which say "may cause dizziness" on the label. So, why do a blog post while feeling woozy? Why not? Since this is medication induced, let's talk about why I'm in this predicament.

An outside observer might think that I enjoy going to the doctor. I certainly spent enough time there as a child. Not for anything serious, of course, usually just bad hay fever leading to lovely things like bronchitis. Nowadays, though, it's just a string of one doctor visit after the other, all different kinds of specialists. Lots of fun medical tests. (Insert sarcastic laugh here.) Why, just this past summer I've had an IVP (a type of x-ray of the kidneys), a cystoscopy (avoid this one at all costs if they ever suggest it to you), a colonoscopy, and an abdominal CT (because don't we just love drinking barium.) Up next is a HIDA scan and a sonogram. Apparently, the cause of abdominal pain can be hard to figure out. I'm glad I have insurance.

So, I've dealt with pain before. I have a recurring kidney stone problem due to my body's apparent inability to balance vitamin D, calcium and all those other nice things without outside intervention. So the good old parathyroid says, hey, we need more calcium in the blood, let's get it from those bones, they don't need it. Well, let me tell you, bone pain is not a nice thing. But it stays away as long as I maintain supplements. Kidney stones are not a walk in the park either; luckily mine are usually small and pass easily.

But I have another source of pain lurking in my past. Endometriosis. I had a total hysterectomy and bilateral oopherectomy 10 years ago because of it. I though I was cured, I thought I was safe. Five years ago, I had unexplained abdominal pain. Once the gastroenterologist couldn't find anything serious, he suggested that it was the endometriosis. Surely not, I thought. My gynecologist at the time concurred. Preposterous! he said - it was all cleaned out in 1998. Luckily, my pain improved.

Fast forward a couple of years. It's now the Fall of 2006, and I have symptoms of too much estrogen. You know, weight gain, sore, lumpy breasts... My dosage of estrogen has not changed in 8 years, why would this be happening? Maybe it's because you're getting older says my endocrinologist. We'll just lower your dose. The gynecologist orders an obligatory mammogram (since those are so much fun), which is normal of course. Oh, maybe you should cut out caffeine. OK, I say (as I grumble to myself that one soda a day is not just a whole heck of a lot to begin with.) But without the caffeine dependency and with the lower estrogen dose, I do feel better. I just can't skip breakfast anymore. Turns out you need food to have energy in the morning.

So, just over a year later in early 2008, I start having pain again and I need a bigger bra cup size. Have I gained any weight? No, not really, just a few pounds. Not enough to explain needing bigger everything. Bra, underwear, jeans (two whole sizes bigger for those). I've worn the same size underwear for my whole adult life - even when I've weighed more than I do now. So why does it suddenly seem like they got sent through the shrink ray?! Complicating matters is an increase of kidney stones. But, with additional medications, they get under control. So why is this other stuff getting worse?

Off I go to the urologist when the pain becomes unbearable. Maybe there's a stone stuck in there after all. Nope, she says after checking me out thoroughly, you should go see a gastroenterologist, do you have one? Well, I guess I do, even if it has been five years. At this point, I'm thinking, I want to check EVERYTHING out, so I make an appointment with my new gynecologist also (the old one retired.) So, the gastroenterologist orders all the usual tests (see above) but asks me about endometriosis. He's satisfied when I tell him I have a gynecologist appointment. Of course all his tests are negative (well, I haven't had the HIDA scan yet, but I'm going to assume), and I'm wondering what the heck is going on.

I haven't read anything about endometriosis in 10 years. Why would I need to, I was cured, right? But after discussing this whole mess with my mom, I looked at a book and some websites on Thursday. I had no idea that hysterectomy was not a cure. I knew that surgery to laser it all off pre-hysterectomy wasn't, it would just grow back. But I had been told that this surgery was the penultimate. Anything small that they missed would die off, and of course, they would do their best to not miss anything. Well, that's all wrong. I think this article tells it the most succinctly. The most likely reason (it seems to me) I'm having high estrogen symptoms is that there is endo growing in there still, and it's producing it's own estrogen. The gynecologist agreed that it was pretty likely this was what was going on (my appointment was yesterday.) But the only way to know for sure is another laparoscopy (I've had two previously - a really long time ago.) She wants to rule out a couple of things first (hence the levaquin and upcoming sonogram), but more than likely there's a surgery in my future. I guess we'll see once and for all, soon enough.

Neglected

That's how my blog feels. It hasn't been updated in a while, and I've had several posts floating around in my head for over a month - they haven't even made it to draft stage. I have pictures to show, stories to tell, and thoughts I've pondered to muse about. That list of books we're reading in homeschool on the right over there is probably three months old. His summer reading isn't even worth the time to put up over there; he goes through a new book every day or two. (We keep running out of books for him!) Heck, I finished two of the books I say I'm reading long ago (only two of them though, the Dreamweaver book, not so much - still working on that enormous thing), and I've read another couple besides.

So, here's my pledge: Over the next week, I'll try to post as many of those posts that are in my head as possible. AND, I'll update the books section and any other thingies/buttons I've stuck over there and have long forgotten about. Deal?

School's Out for Summer

So this post is a little late. We've been done with school for a week and a half already. My goal was to have everything completed by the end of May, and we finished a week late only because we spent that time at my parent's house when my grandfather became very ill suddenly, and ultimately passed away.

Our last few weeks consisted of cramming as much French instruction in as we could stand in order to finish the book. It seems that those textbooks get more in depth and difficult as you get towards the end. Who'd-a thunk? We also did the final three tests for math in the last week (that should have been done starting three weeks earlier...ahem). We finished all of our science and history for the year about the middle of May, so that helped with trying to get the other subjects finished. But we did decide to postpone a library skills unit until next year, as I hadn't realized how long it would actually take when I stuck it into the syllabus.

I feel so much relief that we'll have a real summer vacation this year. Last year we only had about six weeks break before we started up again. We're actually taking a trip this summer, next week to be exact. We'll be heading to Colorado for some fun and a little business, too. We're going to check out INATS to look for some new products to have on hand once I finish building our website. For the first time in about four years, I am actively working on the site, and I am really excited. I'll let y'all know how it's coming. I may start a separate blog to update on the business stuff, but I'm still mulling all that over.

The Rising Cost of Food

Something interesting has happened during our recent forays to the grocery store. The prices of most basic foodstuffs have increased by 50%, and in some cases 100%. We don't buy just a whole lot of prepackaged goodies, usually we buy the basic building block ingredients and create our own goodies (cookies and the like), so we don't often encounter sudden higher prices. I guess I should have seen it coming when milk prices went up a while back. According to the news, this is happening all over the world and wreaking havoc on the lives of just about everyone.

Now, I'm not going to go into a political/ecological rant about the whole thing, that's not the purpose of this particular post. I just wanted to point out an unexpected personal consequence of higher prices: it has become easier to justify buying organic products. They are no longer much more expensive than non-organic; they're just a little bit more. My first encounter with this was at the eggs. Normally, a dozen regular, factory-produced, grade A, large, white eggs would cost me $1.29. They've been this price for I don't know how long. So I am astonished when one day, out of the blue, they're $1.99. What?! So, this causes me to look around at the other eggs I usually ignore. In the top of the egg case, there's a nice carton of brown, organic, hand-gathered eggs from free-roaming chickens for $2.19. I normally wouldn't feel OK with spending almost twice as much for the nice eggs, being on a tight budget and all. But now they're actually a viable option at only 20 cents more. I found this theme repeated throughout the store with the butter, cheese, etc. In some cases the organic and/or locally grown option was exactly the same price as the 'regular' stuff with the new inflated prices.

So, I'm wondering if this is going on in other parts of the country as well. If other shoppers are as attentive and actually start choosing the 'better' options, couldn't that translate to a boost for our own economy? Especially our local ones? I think the main reason people don't buy these types of items more often is that they are cost prohibitive for most of us. If suddenly they're not so outrageous, maybe things can improve as an unintentional consequence of recession/inflation. Or do I just need to get my rose-colored glasses adjusted?

The Irony of the Spheres

First, let me explain. I was browsing through the homeschool section of a Christian bookstore because, other than used (which can be extremely difficult to find in good shape), the only real place to buy our Saxon homeschool math text is at one of these stores. Gut-wrenching, I know.

So, as I was browsing, I spotted a series of creation science texts, and my curiosity was piqued. There's a whole line of these on individual science subjects. I picked up the one on astronomy as it purported to be authored by a real astronomer. I'm pretty sure it was this one.Now, I must confess that my only real scientific education has come from watching innumerable TV shows like "The Universe," which I guess may be more than a lot of people, but still, I'm no scholar. I skimmed through the book and found some pretty good astronomy information, but it was of course based in creationism which I found intriguing. I've always wondered how they explain things. As a child growing up in a Christian home, I reconciled the ideas of creation with the Big Bang by deciding that we didn't know how long a "day" was according to God. Apparently, according to the astronomy book, this is a common wayof explaining things among some Christians, but it's wrong. It went on to show that the original Hebrew for "day" that is used in the creation passages means specifically 24 hours. Again, I'm not a Hebrew scholar either, so I have to take the author's word for it.

While explaining astronomy from a biblical, the universe was created in 6 literal days point of view, the author spent quite some time explaining what's wrong with the other points of view. One of the points that stuck with me and will require me to do some actual in-depth research and thinking was two-fold. Apparently, scientists use the problem with the distance of stars from us and the time it takes for light to reach earth as evidence that the earth was NOT created 6000 years ago. The author states that this is not a problem because we are dealing with supernatural explanations, e.g. God, anyway, and he could have set things up any way he wanted (I believe this is also the explanation for dinosaur fossils.) He then goes on to say that scientists have their own problem of a similar nature regarding distance and heat. He says that if the Big Bang were true, then there should be pockets of space that are warmer or colder than each other, since warmer and colder areas would have resulted from the current Big Bang model and that since the universe's expansion happened so fast, there would have been insufficient time for the temperature to even out. Now, call me ignorant, go ahead it's OK, especially if you're an astronomer, but it seems to me that if the universe has been around for billions of years, then there has been ample time for the temperature of the universe to even out.

OK, back to the irony title of this post. We hold a discussion group on Friday nights at my house, and I thought it would be interesting to discuss some of this, especially as some regulars know more about science and astronomy than I do. Of course I didn't want to pay full price for the book or give the author his portion of the proceeds, so I looked on Amazon for a used copy. Imagine my surprise when I typed "astronomy creation science"into the search box under books and came up with 666 results. I just had to laugh and, of course, share. I guess as books are added and subtracted the results number may change in future, but today it's funny!