A REMINDER

Though I no longer post here, my current blog (June, 2020 -> current) can be found HERE The other blog I will be keeping here is My Nissen Fundoplication Experience Please update your RSS feed or bookmarks. Thank you :).

Moving Day!

I was planning to wait until Jan. 1st to move all of my blogs from blogger over to my Weebly site. Meanwhile, I have been frozen from blogging. By my own brain. Having to do things twice, or copy/paste, or decide which site to post what every time I wanted to blog. For the last 4 years, 2 months, and 1 day my brain just stops - or freezes when it is overwhelmed. And apparently all of this change has overwhelmed it because I have been unable to blog after the first few times caused a chaotic response (the "warning sign")... (Yes, I know, "but you seem so normal!" lol!)

So I decided that December 17th is as good a day as any to just do it. From now on, ALL of my blogging will be done at my new site. I will not be using blogger at all, and will eventually take the blogs down, once I get them archived.

I seriously need to be blogging. For a couple of months now I approach both sites with fear and trepidation, literally, and simply can't think of what to post when I log in to either site (even though my mind is full of posts until I sit at the computer!).

Thanks for your patience. Once the logjam is gone from between my ears, the river should start flowing again! :)

Nuggets of Truth

(Just a reminder that this blog will be moving to its new home at the end of this year.)

Yesterday's message at church contained quite a few "YES!" nuggets of truth; I just want to share a few of them here:
~*~*~*~*~
What do we do when we see something that is out of our price range?
Most of us go home & wished we had the money to buy whatever it is.
We say we want it, but in reality it isn’t enough of a priority to make the sacrifice to obtain it.
Too often the kingdom of heaven & our relationship with God are treated the same way.
We hear a sermon that challenges us, we are confronted with the Word of God, but we tell ourselves that we don’t have what it takes to obtain it.
That is a lie.
We do have what it takes, but the hard truth is: we don’t want it as bad as we claim.
We are unwilling to make the changes necessary to obtain the kingdom of heaven.
Because of our love for this world, we miss out on the greatest gift there is.
Ultimately, that will lead to us missing out on eternity.
~*~*~*~*~
You must be persistent.
You don’t have to convince God of anything because He is the one who loves you enough to give you His all.
Still, you must be persistent because there is a spiritual battle going on.
Jesus is on the winning side.
He has already paid the price for your soul.
His power & forces are unbeatable.
The devil is on the losing side.
His mission is to steal, kill, & destroy.
You are his target.
He will do everything he can to get you to exchange the priceless treasure of Jesus for the worthless things of this world.
He wants you to kick back, relax, neglect the gifts of God, & live your life for self.
He’ll make the treasures of this world look more appealing than the treasures of heaven.
The cost of all this will be your soul.
The day of judgment will come & you will have to give an account for your life.
He’ll try to distract you from that truth so that you will neglect the treasure that God has given you.
Don’t let him be successful.
Pay attention.
Know the Word of God so that you will not be deceived.
James 1:22 says “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.”
Be honest with yourself.
Are you here to merely listen to the word?
Or, do you take what you have heard & do it?
Do you do what the Word of God tells you to do?
If you don’t do what God tells you to do, you are deceiving yourself.
~*~*~*~*~
I am thankful for a pastor who doesn't water down the truth, who doesn't just scratch people's itching ears with what they want to hear, and that proclaims the truth in love.

Lewy Body Dementia - 2nd Leading Cause of Dementia!

(Just a reminder that this blog will be moving to its new home at the end of this year.)

This is an article that was recently posted as a news story. October being LBD Awareness month, I wanted to write about this disease. As my mother's guardian - and daughter - I have a special interest in LBD. She lives in a nursing home just around the corner from me (actually it's a few corners but only a 4 minute drive...1/2 mile as the crow flies). There is no way I could care for her at home, but the professionals are doing a beautiful job with her, meeting needs that I could not meet, and giving her a much higher quality of life than she could otherwise expect. (She does come to my home quite often, loves to play with our critters, play the piano, help out in the kitchen, enjoy time with her great-grandson, etc...plus when I'm running errands I can swing by to pick her up so we can spend the time together, although we're nearing the end of her ability to do that unfortunately.)

Anyway, this article just touches the tip of the iceberg. One statement that is particularly important thought, is this one: "Winston [Jaron Winston, M.D., a geriatric psychiatrist] says because the disease takes awhile to show itself, often doctors won't realize the patient may be suffering from LBD until the patients are treated with Alzheimer's medications that tend to make the LBD symptoms worse."

In some cases the wrong medication can be lethal. As it nearly was for my mother. I can't stress enough that, unless and until you can find a "lewy-savvy" doctor for your loved one, you WILL NEED to be their advocate. A proper diagnosis is ESSENTIAL, and most physicians are not familiar with LBD yet, in spite of its prevalence. To many, "dementia is dementia is dementia, and it's all Alzheimer's." Given that an LBD victim can live many years with this disease (unless a wrong diagnosis and improper treatment shorten their lives), it is imperative that appropriate treatment is provided.

In my mother's case, in spite of the improper treatment by one hospital, the correct diagnosis and treatment helped her actually regain much of her cognition and all of her former personality. Once she once again was herself, she has been able to enjoy her life within each moment, and the misery and living hell that she had been existing in was a thing of the past - bad memories that she doesn't even have anymore. With her hallucinations and delusions under control with the right (delicate!) mix of meds, and her personality back, even with the memory issues, even with her "bad days" where her cognition is lower and confusion reigns (LBD is like a roller coaster of improvements and decline, unlike the steady decline of other dementias) - I have gotten my mother back. These 4 years are a blessing that I would not have had without the proper diagnosis, medication regimen, and care.

For more information about Lewy Body Dementia please visit the Lewy Body Dementia Association website. If you have a loved one with LBD, or suspect that they do, please familiarize yourself with this disease. Yes, it is fatal; but there is help for them!

The Plan.

Lovin' Weebly!

Just had to get that out of my system.

In a nutshell, I'll be using Weebly from now on. For everything. I will be blogging there exclusively starting the first of the year. Between now and then I will be working on saving my blogs to PDF files, some of which will be available for downloading should anyone want them. This blog, probably not, since there isn't really any reference information here, very few links (which are old, if there are!), and nothing anyone would probably need to look back on. The new site will simplify things for me, and save time, in so many ways!

My Cheap'n'Easy Lowcarb Living blog will be available as a PDF file, and I will spend some time between now and the end of the year copying/pasting the recipes to the new blog over there.

My Nissen Fundoplication blog will be made into a PDF file and available for download after Dec. 1st. That will be my 2-year anniversary of the surgery, and I really don't have much more to add anymore. Anything that needs discussing will be addressed in the Nissen Fundoplication group on Facebook.

As for the VitaInVia blog, it is young yet, with not that many posts; I plan to copy/paste each post to the new blog at Weebly.

As for everything else:

I will make/download a backup of my google voice account, and then delete that. Shame, really, since I love my phone number there, and have used it a LOT. But I also have a Skype number, and Skype will do most of the things that GV does for me so it will just be a matter of getting used to using it instead.

I have already deleted all of my uploaded youtube videos; I already have copies of them. I'll keep the account just so I can still access playlists (mostly stuff for my grandson) and subscriptions...at least, unless/until google decides I need a + account to even do that.

Forgot the I use the google reader for my rss feeds. But feed readers are a dime a dozen; soon all of my RSS subscriptions will be taken to another reader too.

All that will be left after the 1st of the year (2013), is my android phone. The contract expires in the spring. And then that will also be gone.

All of this is causing some inconvenience of course. And it seems that most people probably don't want to give up the ease of using one service for everything, the convenience. There aren't many people I don't think that really care if they are forced to join one service just to use another, or that have the privacy concerns that I do. This is a different world, and a different internet than the one I used before there even WAS a world wide web. (Ahhh, the simplicity of gopher, relay chats, ftp, fidonet...!) Then it was about sharing, disseminating information, providing; now it is about profiting, taking, stealing even. And I have to say that I just don't trust it - or those who seek to control it...or me...

Enough of all that, though. Onward to better things - like simplicity :).

Owned by Google Part II

I've discussed this all with my husband to make sure I wasn't just being paranoid and reactive. And he doesn't think I am...so working on a plan to de-Google my life...

The easiest changes will be with my YouTube account (still really ticked about that, how DARE they hide my videos until I join Google+?!?) and here. I will simply delete my YouTube videos and my account. That's not such a big deal, there are plenty of other places to host vlogs and videos, if I decide I want to continue posting them. Not really into it anymore, my excitement about vlogging has been squashed, but if eventually... And I can move all of my blogs (Blogger being another Google property) easily to WordPress, apparently - at least from what I've read. If I lose the photos - which is the only problem I think? - it's not that big of a deal. Then I can delete this account as well. (There are people who also post vlogs at WP, I've read, if I ever think I might want to try that again!)

My contract for my android (Google's o/s) phone is almost up. And there are a couple of linux/ubuntu-based tablets out there, but more in the pipes for release within the next year. Instead of a smart phone, I can get a cheap cell phone service and a linux-based tablet to do the same things I can do now with my Droid - for less money! (I currently use Ubuntu on my own computer.)

I don't use the Google search engine, but do have a Google Voice number I have used for a few years. That will be tough to give up but I will. For the things I use my GV number for now (mostly anyone that isn't a personal friend or family, who all have my cell #), I'll just use my Skype number. Not a big deal. At least unless Google decides to buy Skype too...

This is all doable. It will take time. But I will phase Google out of my life. Everything they have of mine already (conversations, videos, these blogs, etc.) I'm sure they won't delete - when one has such a complete dossier on people that makes money for one, one doesn't give that up. But I will do what I can do, and lesson learned: Keep my online information and social life spread across various sources. In addition, I am working on minimizing it drastically...more on that in another post.

I just want to say once again: When a company does something and does it well, they have earned the right to prosper. And I don't hate Google for who they are or what they've grown into. What I hate is that I got myself into a position where a company could try to force me to do something I didn't want to do, just so I could do something I did want to do. Even though the easy way would have been to just keep the Google+ account I didn't want, I choose not to be assimilated.

But I Don't WANT To Be Owned By Google!

Everybody who knows me, knows that I believe in business, I believe in success, I believe that capitalism is the key to a strong economy. I cheer on successful businesses, and love to see them grow and prosper and make lots of money for the brilliant minds that brought them to where they are, for the stockholders, and to provide jobs for those who choose to work for them.

But not at my expense. And to Google I am a commodity. I would become THEIR commodity if I continued to graze in their pastures like the rest of their sheep.

Yes, I have an android smart phone. When my contract runs out in the spring, I will no longer have to use Google's o/s. In fact, I am not planning to use a smart phone at all. I want a dumb phone. And a tablet. Linux-based. Which will be fine for what I plan to use it for.

Yes, I have a GMail account. That too, will be history in the spring, since the only reason I have it (but don't use it) is because my phone requires it. (Requires it...key phrase.)

There is a plethora of search engines to be found, some even better than Google. And those are where I go when I do a search.

And obviously I don't use the Chrome browser.

I've been working on breaking Google's grip on my online life for a while. And now, finally, the reason I am writing about this tonight:

If you have followed this blog, you know that I have been wanting for vlog for a long time. And, of course, YouTube is THE place to put up vlogs. Last week I finally started, and excitedly posted my first 3 vlogs on 3 different days. It was strange that I had to make some changes on my YouTube account before I could upload the first one, and stranger yet that I started getting notices of people adding me to their circles on Google+ since I have steadfastly refused to join or use that service. I guess I didn't understand what YouTube was asking of me but I was so stoked about finally making and posting some vlogs that I just agreed to whatever I was agreeing to.

But once I realized that I now had the Google+ account, I deleted it - it definitely isn't something I want! Then tonight I went to upload my 4th vlog, and I can't! In fact, it appears that all of my former videos aren't viewable on my channel anymore - in fact it appears I don't even HAVE a channel anymore - since I deleted my Google+ account!

NOW I AM TICKED! I will make sure I have all of my YouTube videos on my external hard drive that I use for archiving and backups, and then I'm taking them all off YouTube. I have been a long-time YouTube user but I won't be a YouTube/Google property.

I will find somewhere else to vlog. If it's even worth the trouble; I'm not so sure it is anymore. I'm fed up.

NO, Google, you cannot own me OR my "online life"!