I Know It's March, But Here's What Happened in February.

No, it's not February, but I'm late composing my review of February.



February looks like the above picture. It's supposed to be cold here where I live, but usually around my brother's birthday, it's seventy degrees and stays that way until March comes. This year, we've had plenty of snow in January and February.



With February comes Valentine's Day, which was also my twelfth wedding anniversary this year!



We went out to dinner the minute he got home. I wore make up and heels and everything! *LOL* We try to go somewhere we don't eat all the time, so we chose Uno's. They were busy. The food was good. I kept having to ask for my other side dish, though. I ordered salmon, of course. I love salmon. I order it every chance I get. Doug had a steak that was very tender! He cut a few pieces and put them on my plate so I could try it.


(I thought this picture was fitting for an anniversary pic because I wore a gold locket on my wedding day, and we did the lace doilies on all of the tables.)


(And just because I'm a writer, I LOVE this picture! I hope when I do become a best seller, my book will somehow play into a proposal!)

We didn't go see a movie this year, like we usually do. We just ate and went home because we're old. Sad, really. And we've become addicted to a certain show that was airing on AMC in black and white. I won't say what show that is, but I'm sure you can figure it out. It's a guilty pleasure. I don't watch much television, so it's like a treat for us. Doug, he has shows he watches every week like clockwork, but me, I have one show I look forward to watching, and I'm about to quit watching it because "reality" television is ridiculous. But this new television series has garnered my attention, and the Trinity Cat even watches it with me!

So we went home. I changed into my fat clothes, poured myself some dessert, fat free chocolate milk, and Trinity climbed in my lap. We watched the show, then just hung out at home. Not the most exciting twelfth anniversary, but it was much better than the eleventh anniversary, where we were too sick to care that we had been married for eleven years, went to lunch because Doug had class, and went to bed as soon as we got home.

And my friends at book club got together and threw me a party, and I missed it!!! It was total pants that I missed it.



February brought with it Doug's new job, Christi's new car, my father-in-law's hospitalization for sepsis, and my second neurology appointment.

Doug is loving his new job. He's been there a month now.  His boss is very nice to him. One day, Doug somehow locked the keys in the car and his boss drove him all the way back to the cottage so he could get the spare key off of my massive keychain collection. Doug was going to treat his boss to lunch for doing such a nice thing, but the boss wouldn't let him, and instead treated Doug to lunch! How cool is this guy?

My father-in-law spiked a fever at the nursing home, which prompted them to send him to the hospital. I'll do my best to explain the hospitalization, but I'm rather confused about it myself. I didn't like my fnl's doctor. I won't go into that, but I didn't like him at all. My fnl met the criteria for sepsis, but I never got an explanation as to what that meant. I thought it meant that he had not been tested for it yet, but again, no explanation was given upon my request. My fnl was awake for almost seventy-two hours straight, so they gave him narcotics through IV, Lortab to be exact, and they gave him too much, which prompted them to thread a pacemaker wire through his central line. Then, they moved him to a regular room too soon. He ended up staying in the ICU again. Then, on the day of his release, my fnl spiked a fever and they had him in isolation, but they went ahead and released him anyway. I'm STILL confused. I guess he's doing okay now. *shrugs*


(I want one of these!)

February also brought my neurology appointment, which was rescheduled thrice before this time. They had me coming back on the 13th of December. Then, I got a card in the mail saying they had to move it to January 2nd, but I was visiting relatives until late, and couldn't get up at the crack of down to go, so I rescheduled it for the next available, which was February 28th.


(This is NOT one of my scans. I just thought it was fitting since I'm blogging about MRIs and neurology appointments.)

Thursday was the big day. The appointment did not go well to be completely honest. They pushed and pulled on my extremities and found that the weakness in my right arm and overall right side is progressive. The neurologist suggested an MRI to see where the damage is located. I'm going out of town with Ed and Jamilaih to Florida this weekend, and I was hoping the MRI would be scheduled after I got back because I have to use this coming week to prepare for the trip, but instead, I'm having an MRI Monday night at 7:15. *sighs* And after every MRI I've had, I experience severe flu like symptoms the next day to the point where all I can do is lie in bed. I can't even stand up on my own. So I'm going to lose a day this week. And what's worse, the next day, I have a nail appointment that I can't reschedule this week before I leave on Saturday, so I'm going to have to suck it up and go. I don't like going to anybody else. I've been seeing Wendy for three years now, and she's great. Thankfully, Christi's going to drive me because I have no business behind the wheel on Tuesday.She's been such a good friend. Glad we reconnected in October. I need lots of prayer concerning the MRI, my trip, and my progressing weakness in my right side. I'm a writer, and hopefully one day, a best selling author, but I need both hands and both arms to achieve this goal, and other goals I have, like one day going to med school.

Today is March 2nd, and it also happens to be the birthday of one of my characters, Paul H. I assigned it to that character in honor of my friend, Richard, and accidentally in honor of my friend's little boy, Austin! So here's to March!



Let's hope it's better than I expected!

Hope your February was great and your March is even greater!

Cheers!

Top Ten Myths About the Brain.

Top Ten Myths About the Brain

When it comes to this complex, mysterious, fascinating organ, what do—and don’t—we know?

By Laura Helmuth

1. We use only 10 percent of our brains.
This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion.

2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent.
We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people’s memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later.

3. It’s all downhill after 40 (or 50 or 60 or 70).
It’s true, some cognitive skills do decline as you get older. Children are better at learning new languages than adults—and never play a game of concentration against a 10-year-old unless you’re prepared to be humiliated. Young adults are faster than older adults to judge whether two objects are the same or different; they can more easily memorize a list of random words, and they are faster to count backward by sevens.

But plenty of mental skills improve with age. Vocabulary, for instance—older people know more words and understand subtle linguistic distinctions. Given a biographical sketch of a stranger, they’re better judges of character. They score higher on tests of social wisdom, such as how to settle a conflict. And people get better and better over time at regulating their own emotions and finding meaning in their lives.

4. We have five senses.
Sure, sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch are the big ones. But we have many other ways of sensing the world and our place in it. Proprioception is a sense of how our bodies are positioned. Nociception is a sense of pain. We also have a sense of balance—the inner ear is to this sense as the eye is to vision—as well as a sense of body temperature, acceleration and the passage of time.

5. Brains are like computers.
We speak of the brain’s processing speed, its storage capacity, its parallel circuits, inputs and outputs. The metaphor fails at pretty much every level: the brain doesn’t have a set memory capacity that is waiting to be filled up; it doesn’t perform computations in the way a computer does; and even basic visual perception isn’t a passive receiving of inputs because we actively interpret, anticipate and pay attention to different elements of the visual world.

6. The brain is hard-wired.
This is one of the most enduring legacies of the old “brains are electrical circuits” metaphor.

But one of the biggest discoveries in neuroscience in the past few decades is that the brain is remarkably plastic. In blind people, parts of the brain that normally process sight are instead devoted to hearing. Someone practicing a new skill, like learning to play the violin, “rewires” parts of the brain that are responsible for fine motor control. People with brain injuries can recruit other parts of the brain to compensate for the lost tissue.

7. A conk on the head can cause amnesia.
Next to babies switched at birth, this is a favorite trope of soap operas: Someone is in a tragic accident and wakes up in the hospital unable to recognize loved ones or remember his or her own name or history. (The only cure for this form of amnesia, of course, is another conk on the head.)

8. We know what will make us happy.
In some cases we haven’t a clue. We routinely overestimate how happy something will make us, whether it’s a birthday, free pizza, a new car, a victory for our favorite sports team or political candidate, winning the lottery or raising children. Money does make people happier, but only to a point—poor people are less happy than the middle class, but the middle class are just as happy as the rich. We overestimate the pleasures of solitude and leisure and underestimate how much happiness we get from social relationships.

9. We see the world as it is.
We are not passive recipients of external information that enters our brain through our sensory organs. Instead, we actively search for patterns (like a Dalmatian dog that suddenly appears in a field of black and white dots), turn ambiguous scenes into ones that fit our expectations (it’s a vase; it’s a face) and completely miss details we aren’t expecting. In one famous psychology experiment, about half of all viewers told to count the number of times a group of people pass a basketball do not notice that a guy in a gorilla suit is hulking around among the ball-throwers.

10. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most overinterpreted research in the history of sciencepurports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women. Eminent neuroscientists once claimed that head size, spinal ganglia or brain stem structures were responsible for women’s inability to think creatively, vote logically or practice medicine. Today the theories are a bit more sophisticated: men supposedly have more specialized brain hemispheres, women more elaborate emotion circuits. Though there are some differences (minor and uncorrelated with any particular ability) between male and female brains, the main problem with looking for correlations with behavior is that sex differences in cognition are massively exaggerated.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Top-Ten-Myths-About-the-Brain.html?c=y&page=2

Wedding Facts...(Continued from Yesterday's Anniversary Edition)

We were married at Pea Ridge United Methodist Church at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 14th, 2001, with Reverend Gary Stackpole officiating.

Doug was a nervous wreck until he was standing at the altar. I had been through this before, so I was calm, cool, and collected UNTIL I got to the altar.

It was a rainy, gray, overcast day, but around 55 degrees. Nobody could decorate the car for the rain. Doug's uncle, Bill Sommerville, threw a streamer on the back. The only reason it stuck was because of the rain water that had collected on the trunk.

I wanted a tiara and for my hair to be down. Doug wanted me to have a veil and for my hair to be up. These were the only two things he requested, so I obliged.

I had originally planned on carrying a lit candle down the aisle, but my candle holder broke, so I decided I wasn't going to carry anything. A friend of mine couldn't stand the thought of me walking down the aisle with no flowers, so she went to Michael's and selected six red roses, and that's the only reason I had a bouquet.

It was a very small wedding. Five people sat on the bride's side, and only two were my relatives, where as forty people were on the groom's side. Most of them, aside from Doug's family, were choir members. They had choir practice after the wedding. Doug and I were choir members, but were exempt from practice that night.

My gloves were covering a very large bruise on my left forearm. I was in the hospital a few days prior to the wedding, and sustained the bruise from the IV. The gloves were a last minute decision, but if you looked close enough, the purple bruise did show through the matte material.

Our wedding ceremony was entire forty minutes long. I walked in to "My Heart Will Go On," instead of the traditional wedding march. A lady in the choir sang the theme from Romeo and Juliet. She also sang the Lord's Prayer. Doug's father was his best man, and my brother's girlfriend of almost eight years was my maid of honor. They wed on June 9th, that same year.

Doug and I paid for everything except for the photographer, the tuxedo rentals, the bouquet, and Doug's mother's dress. In 2001, a small wedding cost a total of $16,000.00 and we did everything, including the dress, the cake, the food, the decorations, for $2,000.00. We didn't buy everything at once. We shopped over the course of three months. Doug's dad bought the red heart shaped cookies, and Doug opted a red velvet groom's cake. (He takes being a southerner seriously.) We garnished the tables with cinnamon hearts wrapped in tulle and bubbles, and there was a large heart shaped candle, alternating red or pink on each table. We also had lace doilies and used Doug's paternal grandmother's china to serve food from at the reception. Someone asked if they were supposed to throw the red candy hearts at us.

I threatened to get the marriage annulled if Doug smashed the cake in my face. Doug didn't find that as funny as I did. *lol*

Doug was true to his word and didn't smash the cake in my face. (On a side note, I look like my mother here. The older I get, the more my father's DNA is kicking my mother's DNA in the face.) We toasted with Welch's sparkling red grape juice. We ran out of punch before we did food, which according to the bible was the worst thing that could happen at a wedding.

It had stopped raining, but was still damp out. We had guests blow bubbles instead of throwing rice. I still have that dress, and it still fits. Guests from left to right are Nancy Harmon, Betty Jo Kimble (who lost her husband, George, recently), and my mnl, Ruth Ann Townsend.

Doug insisted we have a dance. I can't dance, no seriously. Several guests stayed and helped with the clean up, Doug and I even stayed and helped until his parents insisted we leave. I can't seem to leave a mess behind...

That's pretty much it. Thanks for attending!