A smile for Terry

This is the same bird I posted on January 1st from a different angle. Isn't he a cutie pie!

She was fascinated with the hibiscus; I was fascinated with her

This is a drawing of my daughter by my dear friend Joey Reed. What a sweetheart you are. I can't wait till she sees it tonight. Yay!

it's fractalicious!

my best friend is a magnificent beast

My beautiful Manx with one ear half torn off from his fightin' youth. Now he's my snuggle baby.

I wonder if he is still homeless...

I sketched this from a photograph of a homeless man I saw online. I do wonder if he is still homeless. I'd like to think somehow he has a home and that he has some family. I wish I knew who took that picture.

finally

I told someone a while back that I would post a sketch. Here is a sketch of a man whose face was in a book which was about to be dropped in a garbage can until I saw his face and snatched it out so I could sketch him. His name is George Kennan, it said, but I still don't know who he is. But he sure did need to be sketched. I need to touch him up more but oh, what a gloriously square head he has.

the satisfying whole

"There is something in each of us that demands completeness. An unfinished building, a partially drawn design, an interrupted game, a broken pattern in a woven fabric, a theme cut short in the middle--each of these produces an unsatisfied feeling. There are, to be sure, fragments of rare beauty and significance, but always, as we look upon them, we feel that there is something lacking. We feel this lack very keenly--and sometimes very sorrowfully--when a delicate bit of china or glassware is shattered by some carelessness of ours. What was the perfect whole now lies broken on the floor. We pick up the three or four pieces and pathetically fit them to their former shape--vainly imagining a restored completeness. And then, growing more practical, we begin to wonder how the treasured article can be repaired. We are searching for the satisfying whole."

No one goes through life unscathed. Everyone experiences loss and pains throughout the entirety of life. It is never outgrown though often we become callous to it. We search to fix the broken in our lives, we agonize over loss and try to recreate something that life never gave absolute permanence to. We search for that feeling of wholeness again. What is it, the satisfying whole?

(I have no idea who wrote the quoted paragraph but I really like it. It is like a writing lesson the way it uses the word "completeness" at the beginning and the word "whole" in the last sentence. It does make me long for something, obviously, but the writing is very satisfying because the paragraph itself is so complete. I just had to post it.)

mail call!

It's not every day you find one of these waiting on you to pick up your mail, at least not in my neighborhood.

diagnosis

I had hoped I could write this in a brief, emotionless paragraph. I managed kind of okay with the emotion but not so well with brevity because I would forget part of a sentence and get confused, find myself writing in circles, unable to copy from sources because when I look up I forget what I was just looking at. I've been trying to write this for days. After I've whittled it down you won't see the circles it. I hope.

Multiple Sclerosis: no fun
Partial Seizures: pretty nifty
Optic Neuritis: I've lost some color vision & have blurry vision as well, which makes me uncertain about every image I post and makes photography pretty difficult.

A nurse came to my house the day before yesterday to teach me how to give myself injections so I could begin treatment with a medication called Rebif for MS. This won't cure it or undo any damage the disease has already done but it will hopefully slow the progression of it and the time between relapses. I will be giving them to myself, three times a week for the rest of my life (or till I can't give them to myself, I guess? I don't know). She said I'd feel pretty miserable for about the first three months of injections. So far I just feel tired.

So that's the diagnosis. This stuff below is from the net and the Rebif pamphlets with pictures of shiny, happy people living comfortably with their disease. Some folks with MS might get a chuckle out of that “comfortably” part. Heh. (Turns out, the "shiny, happy people" pamphlets had the most helpful information.) Darn it, now I've got that song in my head. Well, they were shiny, it was a glossy looking picture. ;-)

Multiple Sclerosis is a neurodegenerative autoimmune disease. Normally, the immune system helps fight viruses and things like bacteria. In an autoimmune disease, something causes the immune system to attack the body itself. With MS, where the body attacks itself is its own nervous system.

The nervous system is made up of nerve cells that send signals to each other. Each cell is covered with a protective coating called myelin. It acts like insulation on an electrical wire, lets these signals pass between nerve cells at high speeds. This is how nerve impulses from our body reach the brain and how the brain sends signals to muscles. Kind of like a relay system. With MS, for some reason, the immune system attacks the myelin sheaths and strips it off. This is called "demyelination." This leads to a breakdown in that signal function which leads to disability.

Multiple Sclerosis is unpredictable and incurable. It's mild in some people and severe in others. It affects no two people alike. You don't know when a relapse will occur, how long it will last, what it will consist of or the amount of damage that will take place during that time, in other words, the outcome of any given relapse.

But nowadays, we are lucky, we can give ourselves these injections and slow the process down. "Don’t worry, be happy…laa….ladadadadadada……….ladadadadadada……….ladadadada"

Try to get that song out of your head, ha!

Oh yeah, the injections and the nurse's warning...so if I don't post it would probably be I'm just feeling something wretched I'm supposed to be feeling so don't worry...be happy :-D

happy winter to whoever it is that is enjoying (or enduring one)

Well, this certainly is an old fractal. A good old fashioned Mandelbrot looking like winter to me.

Don't move nice birdy...

There! Do you see that? You can see straight through his nostril thingy. Is that cool or what? I wonder what purpose that kind of nostril thing serves. I can't believe that bird stood still long enough for me to take a picture of his nostril thingy. Yay!

Almost looks like candy to me----click the image

beautiful bird

Another test post. (lol)

I found this black bird at the airport when it was time for my daughter to go back. We must have seen a million, no, I'm being silly, it was about a trillion or at least a hundred gazillion of them while she was here. I only got pictures of about 20 or maybe 50. I might be wrong about that too, there were a lot of them in flocks. Heh. Did I ever mention that I love black birds?

Okay. Enough words for a test post.

I'm off to visit all the blogs I've missed so badly.

Then I will get around to posting what (I hope) will be a very short, non-depressing post about my diagnosis. Bleh. Even that sentence was mildly depressing. Ah, look at the pretty birdy! I swear, that bird almost seemed to be posing for me. He was definitely not camera shy. When the light hits these birds a certain way their feathers look irredescant blue/black-gorgeous.

Hugs and smooches!

test

I think I've figure out how to use blogger again. It's not the way I used it before, which is confusing so I will avoid thinking about that. If this actually posts I will post something more substantial in a day or so.

But for now, here are some pink flowers for all of you that I have missed so much and who have actually remembered and cared about me during my absence.

Hugs and smooches.
O

Shrink Yourself!

Aha! Look what I found in my Apophysis folders. It looks kind of like one of those ink blot tests, don't you think? What do you see when you look at it? First I saw a butterfly but the longer I looked at it, the more it started to look like a tick to me. Yuck. Now it looks more like a waterfall. Yes, definitely a waterfall. Maybe that's because I have waterfalls on my mind because I'm going on a trip (tomorrow) where I get to see a waterfall I've been wanting to see again for a while. Yay!

I will be gone for about 9 days on my yay trip. So I'm leaving you some homework. :-P Look at the "ink blot" and tell me what you see & why you think you see it. "Shrink" yourself!

Waterfall, here I come!

tagged

I got tagged by auntsissyfaye so here are the rules:

"Each player must post these rules first
Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves
People tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to tag and list their names
Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they are tagged and to read your blog"

So here goes, eight random facts.

1. I collect rocks.
2. I love landscaping...digging in the earth, smelling the earth, sculpting it and getting earth all over me, then washing it off--the whole experience. I LOVE that. Dirt is cool. I guess you could say I like getting dirty! Ha! First thing I'm going to do when I get well is play in the dirt. Yeah!
3. I like to peel lemons and eat them, just like that. Yummy. (Hmm...Note to self: buy lemons)
4. When I was a kid, the boy next door feed me some really good cookies that he said were loaded with calcium. He was right about the calcium. But the cookies were...dog biscuits. :\
5. I was known as "the Bird Lady" because I was a breeder and had so many aviaries. So whenever someone found a baby that fell out of the nest or injured birds, they took them straight to me. Not all of them were wild birds. People buy exotic birds and get fed up with the noise, the mess, the demands and responsibility of owning a bird and just open the cage and let them go, indifferent to the fact that most of these birds will not survive for reasons I won't list. If they made it to my house, they struck gold. I love, love, love birds.
6. I like shiny objects. Heh. Seriously, I do. :-)
7. When I was 14, I broke my arm showing off for the football team doing a series of cartwheels. Am I cool or what? Don't answer that question. :-P
8. I like fractals. Bet that was a big surprise.

Whew! I thought I'd never come up with eight things. I'm so glad it was only eight, how cool is that? :-)

Now I'm supposed to pick eight people and tag them but I am not that assertive, so...how 'bout somebody surprise me and write a list of eight facts about themselves? I'd love to read them. But nobody is obligated.

Smooches!

Oops, almost forgot. The above fractal was made with Fractal Explorer.

one man's trash, another man's treasure

One of the neighbors had done some yard work and left this at the street for maintenence to pick up. I thought, what an very interesting pile of old vines and I was thoroughly enjoying the colors and textures and every little twist and turn of them when it occurred to me how strange I must look standing there in the road just staring like that. But I wasn't nearly done looking at them! Yeah, I'm funny like that. So I went home and got the camera. Ha!

Wouldn't it be fun to make a sculpture with those vines? They already were a work of art, just as nature made them. Sigh. I really miss having a camera. Good times, good times. :-p

a taste of Mississippi weather

This picture was taken about 20 years ago on the drive back from a visit to Vicksburg, MS. I was used to severe weather but this cloud made me a bit nervous. A vivid memory. The picture doesn't do it justice but it can still give you a taste of how threatening and ominous this cloud was. The side of the road we were on was blue skies and sunshine but the left...wow...I don't think I'd ever seen such an intimidating cloud before. We snapped a picture out of the car window and prayed that a tornado wouldn't drop out of it. It looked so heavy, it was hanging so low to the ground--I didn't know it was possible for a cloud to hang that low, especially as full of water as this one was. When it did finally break there was a heavy downpour so we had to pull over to the side of the road because you couldn't see to drive. Then it ended abruptly and gave birth to a beautiful rainbow rather than the tornado we expected. What a great storm!

yesterdays

But I won't cry for yesterday
There's an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find
And as I try to make my way
To the ordinary world
I will learn to survive

Duran Duran, Ordinary World
The fractal was created with Apophysis and Fractal Explorer