Am finally starting to feel human again. Still have a nagging, phlegmy cough, but only cough once or twice a day instead of every 30 to 60 seconds now. I just have to be very careful about what goes anywhere near my lungs. Drifting cigarette smoke from the neighbor, heavy smog, or cleaning fluid fumes are enough to send me on a coughing jag for several days. I'm becoming an asthmatic; Life goes on...


Interesting little exercise found here.

This is the result I got. I think it is fairly accurate:

Your Brain Usage Profile:

Auditory : 41%
Visual : 58%
Left : 68%
Right : 31%

Lynn, you are somewhat left-hemisphere dominant and show a preference for visual learning, although not extreme in either characteristic. You probably tend to do most things in moderation, but not always.

Your left-hemisphere dominance implies that your learning style is organized and structured, detail oriented and logical. Your visual preference, though, has you seeking stimulation and multiple data. Such an outlook can overwhelm structure and logic and create an almost continuous state of uncertainty and agitation. You may well suffer a feeling of continually trying to "catch up" with yourself.

Your tendency to be organized and logical and attend to details is reasonably well-established which should afford you success regardless of your chosen field of endeavor. You can "size up" situations and take in information rapidly. However, you must then subject that data to being classified and organized which causes you to "lose touch" with the immediacy of the problem.

Your logical and methodical nature hamper you in this regard though in the long run it may work to your advantage since you "learn from experience" and can go through the process more rapidly on subsequent occasions.

You remain predominantly functional in your orientation and practical. Abstraction and theory are secondary to application. In keeping with this, you focus on details until they manifest themselves in a unique pattern and only then work with the "larger whole."

With regards to your career choices, you have a mentality that would be good as a scientist, coach, athlete, design consultant, or an engineering technician. You can "see where you want to go" and even be able to "tell yourself," but find that you are "fighting yourself" at the darndest times.

Well, the month of June hasn't been a great month for our family this year. Mom has been having chronic shoulder pain in which she gets occasional cortisone shots for relief. She was lucky enough to have a new doctor who suggested doing an MRI to see what was causing the pain and discovered she has a torn rotator cuff on her right shoulder. She's now looking into surgery and other alternatives.

Stuart and Linda have been caring for Linda's mother for several years now in the battle with the last stages of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). Delores finally succomed to pneumonia this week and, after being hospitalized several times for lifesaving treatments, her family has said their last goodbyes and given instructions to remove her from life support and not resuscitate. Ever the "mom," Delores' heart gave out this morning while Stu and Linda were home feeding their animals. Delores is no longer suffering. She saved her family the agony of their decision and waited until she was alone to take her last breath. Delores was a vivacious woman with lots of personality. She was the matriarch of her large family and enjoyed every viable moment with them. Linda and Stu, my love goes out to both of you.

As for me, two weekends ago, while cleaning my shower with Fantastic spray cleaner, I got a lung full of fumes from it and my lungs were feeling like they'd had a chemical burn.

I figured I'd be okay in a few days, they just needed time to heal. During the week I started wheezing and my throat felt raw, and I started running a fever. Saturday morning I woke up struggling to breathe. My bronchial area felt like it was swollen shut and my throat was in flames. I sucked on some ice cubes to relieve my throat but that didn't help the breathing so I took a hot shower and inhaled warm steam for a while. That helped a little, but as soon as I got out of the shower I couldn't breathe again. Went to the corner Rite-Aid looking for an over-the-counter inhaler for asthma but the druggist said they didn't carry them and I should see a doctor. Told him I was new to the area and could he direct me to the nearest emergency clinic.

Drove myself to an emergency drop-in clinic in the neighborhood while wheezing and hyperventilating and getting lost several times. They ended up doing emergency respiratory treatment on me. I couldn't talk and felt like I was slowly suffocating. I coughed up a lot of phlegm and it seemed to clear my lungs. The doctor was unable to hear anything in my lungs after the treatment, whereas he could hear fluid in my lungs while I was wheezing. Because of the temperature I was running yesterday, he did a chest x-ray to eliminate it being pnumonia. The x-ray was very clear and my throat shows no signs of infection.

He thinks there is no secondary illness, just the reaction to the cleaning fumes. He prescribed an inhaler of albuterol that I'm to puff on 3 times every 4 hours.

Other then my throat and bronchial pipe still being extremely raw, I feel a whole lot better breathing wise.

The shocker: The doctor mentioned that my x-ray shows I have a borderline enlarged heart, not enough for immediate concern and treatment, and he's not sure it really is enlarged. He's sending the x-ray out to a radiologist for a second opinion. He says my lungs show no sign of any heart failure so he's not sure what's going on, but recommends I see an internist if the radiologists confirms that my heart is larger then normal.

My body is starting to recover. Just my joints ache now, not every cell in my body. The only way I can describe it is feeling as if every cell in my body had been disrupted momentarily from electric shock.

Have not had to use the albuterol for a few days now, still sucking mentholated cough drops though. My ribs are sore from all the coughing I've been doing.

It really sucks that after two years of increased physical activity and changed diet and slight weight loss, that the condition of my body is practically where I started 3 years ago when I was at the low point of my lung infection and anemia. Feels like I am starting all over again. My lungs have become extremely sensitive to anything and everything. Even the neighbor's cigarette smoke drifting into my bedroom window is enough to set me off on a coughing jag for a few days. The thing that really sucks bricks is that the albuterol has a side effect of increasing your heart rate and blood pressure, so it could be dangerous for me to be using.

Not sure what I'm going to do about the enlarged heart. Being unemployed, not having health insurance and being rejected by insurance companies for coverage due to my weight and being unable to improve my health via diet and exercise, doesn't leave me with many options. Guess it's time to consider the gastric bypass surgery, if my body is in any condition to survive the surgery and if I can find a way to pay for it. I really don't want to have to go through what I've watched my mother endure after she had her gastric bypass.

I made it up to the swimming pool yesterday morning for a short swim and it was wonderfully refreshing and revitalizing for my body. Wasn't able to do a lot without coughing, but did prove to myself that I was still able to do a few consecutive laps so I haven't lost as much progress as I thought.

Rest in peace, Mr. Reagan. You and my brother shared birthdays and I always thought of you on that day because of that. My heartfelt thoughts go out to Nancy and family as they deal with their loss and the nation's intrusion into their private grief. She must be feeling the double-edged sword of relief that the finale has come at last. I hope the outpouring of support from friends will comfort her and help her emerge from the lonely prison of Alzheimer's disease for her remaining years.

Will Paul Allen and Burt Rutan be the Howard Hughes of space travel? If their version of the Spruce Goose proves successful, we'll soon have business class space ships.

A concern I have is world security. Nations are so trigger-happy that a private launch could easily be miscommunicated and misinterpreted as an attack and provoke response. And, what about the security of the entire enterprise? Will private security be enough to protect missions from sabotage?

Historic Blast-off for First Private Spaceship

By Jim Gilchrist
06/05/04 1:22 PM PT

SpaceShipOne and the White Knight, are the unconventional designs of the California-based aerospace visionary Burt Rutan, who in partnership with the billionaire founder of Microsoft and space travel enthusiast Paul Allen, has invested between USD $20 million and $30 million USD in the project.

A small rocket plane will power into a steep climb over California's Mojave desert later this month and, all going well, fly into history as the first private manned space vehicle. The 25 foot-long SpaceShipOne, developed by the pioneering aerospace company Scaled Composites, will soar into sub-orbital space, 62 miles above the Earth, in a bid to be the first non-government built and sponsored piloted craft to leave the atmosphere.

The folding-wing rocket plane has already taken commercial space travel some 40 miles closer to reality -- on 13 May, piloted by Mike Melvill, it attained 211,400 feet, the highest altitude attained by a private aerospace program. Yesterday, Scaled Composites announced that on 21 June, weather permitting, the little plane will be carried to about 50,000 feet by its turbojet carrier aircraft, White Knight, before being released into a glide. Once the pilot (still to be named) fires its rocket motor, it will accelerate to Mach 3 in a vertical climb, then coast to a height of 62 miles before dropping back towards the Earth.

More of the story can be found here:

In the Gardens and Gardening community on Orkut, we've been discussing options for indoor gardening and one of the participants translated from a Japanese site, the instructions for creating moss balls. He says they're all the rage in Japan these days. They're quite easy to create and sound like they'd take just a little extra maintenance to maintain humidity. Think I'll give one a try next time I make a shopping run near the nursery to get the supplies.

Here's the website of the translated instructions along with several photos of examples of moss balls.

Moss balls 101

Moss ball #1

Moss ball #2

Moss ball #3

Moss ball #4