This is what the NRA and its followers say every time any regulation of gun ownership is proposed.  First let me say that I have no quarrel with gun ownership by competently trained, mentally stable, law-abiding citizenry.  I happen to feel the need to own a gun myself.  In 59 years of living, going all over Houston and the country, I have never felt the need of a gun to protect myself, even when one was pointed in my face.  Since I didn't get shot, my verbal skills were apparently enough.  To be fair, I don't drive a flashy car, wear a lot of expensive jewelry, live in a house that looks filled with ripe pickings, or tell people I have my millions hidden under my bed (as if I had millions..there might be a quarter under there.)

This may seem a silly thing to be thinking about at 5:39 am on a Sunday morning, but I have a mind with a few little unique wrinkles.  My way of saying I'm a little weird.

There's an idea that's been knocking about in my head for a few days.  I generally rely on motorized carts to get me around stores.  Anything larger than a typical convenience store, and my knees and hips, sometimes my ankles start hurting so badly I want to scream or cry.  On at least one occasion I did cry from the pain.  when stores don't have them, or don't have enough of them, my husband has to push me in the wheelchair, with me pushing the shopping cart, which is hard on him as he is aging and has high blood pressure and a bad knee which was repaired poorly after and ACL tear.  So I favor stores with a fairly large supply of shopping carts:  Randall's, WalMart & HEB come to mind.  Kroger sometimes has enough, sometimes both of them are gone.  ALCO has one, and I almost always can count on getting it.  If not, they have a wheelchair with a basket, which has to be pushed.

One of the major disadvantages of the standard motorized cart is that eye level is about the second shelf from the bottom.  With bifocals, reading labels, prices, etc. on the higher shelves requires a neck contortion I can not do.  I'm not sure a person without RA could do it either!  Maybe that TV ad character with the flip top head could.  

A few days ago, my husband and I stopped into a WalMart at Wirt and Long Point in Houston.  Sitting in front of our parking space was a cart clearly designed for a child, but what appealed to me was that the seat was large enough for an adult and up high.  So I climbed on for a test drive and my husband pushed me into the store, intending to return the cart to its storage spot and get a motorized one.  However, as soon as we entered the store, I discovered a huge advantage to this cart for me. I could see the upper shelves!  I could also see the signs over the aisles sooner.  So we conducted our quick, and fruitless (they didn't have the product I wanted at that location) trip with me in the kiddy cart.  Of course, there a few disadvantages.  The seat was really too flimsy for an adult weight.  There was some steering problem which might have been related to this weight issue, or might have been related to the problem one often has with older carts where the wheels twist around and stick in a non-optimal position as it ages.  At any rate, I started dreaming of the "ideal" cart.

I found some great things on the web, like this bicycle shopping cart, but no image of the cart I rode in at WalMart.  I guess I'll have to call up there and get some information. or go up there and take pictures.  I've never seen anything like it anywhere else.  With a few modifications, I think it might be the ideal shopping cart for the disabled AND children.

A couple of remaining problems, after the seat height issue, are the controls.  Unless you turn them off every time you stop, if you lean forward to put things in the basket, or rearrange things in the basket, you end up leaning against the controls and making the cart move.  I've goosed another shopper or two this way!  the second is that when you're shopping, you're facing the end of the aisle.  Twisting in the seat is not always a good option.  perhaps the seat could be set to face the aisle shelves, or the seat swivel 180 degrees?  The final problem is no place to put a coupon notebook; perhaps an attachment similar to those standup plexiglass cook book holders, wide enough for an open notebook OVER the controls could solve a couple of problems...

If you have been reading my blog, or any of my pages, or my Facebook page, you know that I have SLE (Systemic Lupus Erythmatosis).   What you may not realize is that this is primarily "a woman's disease," as 90% of the patients are women.  Most of them are 15 -45, the childbearing years.  For some enlightening information about pregnancy and lupus, please read this study in Japan about pregnancy outcomes and lupus  .

Women of color, across the board have higher rates than white women.  I once had a former Texas benefits evaluator tell me that "lupus is a made up disease by people who are too lazy to work."  To me, it was clear he was referring to Black women.  Black women have higher death rates from breast and cervical cancer, higher rates of STD's and teen pregnancies, higher infant mortanlity.  SOURCE:  Debunking the myth.  Black women, Hispanic women, Native American women all have higher rates of lupus.  Black women have more severe outcomes more often.  Poor women without health insurance have a harder time getting the help they need to treat lupus.  SOURCE:  Lupus Fact sheet

For some information about lupus symptoms in general, please read this article about two lupus patients.  

My diagnosis was originally made by a gynecologist to whom I had gone for a simple pap smear.  At the time, I had health insurance.  I no longer have health insurance, and my best option for pap smears is Planned Parenthood.  Read one woman's story about not affording to go anywhere but Planned Parenthood.    

Please make yourself aware of two FACTS:
1.  NOT ONE TAXPAYER DOLLAR GOES TO ABORTION.  That has been prohibited since the 1970s.
2.  Abortions are only 3% of their services  FACT SHEET HERE

Finally, let's talk about SOCIAL SECURITY and Disability and Social Security Supplemental Income.  I worked from age 15 until about 40.  I've been fighting to get SSDI so I can get Medicare to cover my lupus medications.  First they told me I ought to be able to work (in 1995) because I am educated.  Know many employers who want employees who fall asleep on the job, or who miss work frequently because they cannot drag themselves out of bed and stay awake long enough to bathe, dress, and get to work?  Or who catch the flu and the miss weeks because the immunosuppressant drugs they take for lupus don't fight the flu well and leave them with bronchitism pneumonia and a lupus flare in which their joints swell and cause agonizing pain?  If so, please send those employers my way!  I'd love to work, use my brain again for pay.  Of course, it has to be low stress and pretty free of deadlines, because stress makes my lupus worse, and I never know which day I'm going to wake up and be unable to stay awake -- which makes it difficult to meet those deadlines.  See this blog for another person's perspective.

The next time I applied for SSI/SSDI  they told me my $3000+ savings account made me ineligible for  SSI and I no longer had enough qualifying quarters for SSDI.  I appealled and they told me I wasn't disabled!  NOIT DISABLED?  I cannot shop without either my husband pushing me in the wheelchair or an electric cart.  Some days my knees hurt so badly the 8' from my bed to the toilet  has me in tears.    I cannot stand in lines for more than 30 seconds without the knees and hips begging me to sit down. That's not disabled?

Now their story is that we cannot prove I was disabled WHILE I STILL HAD ENOUGH QUALIFYING QUARTERS.  THEY have the 1995 records with the doctors names, but OOPS  I can no longer get those records because the doctors who made the disagnosis, and who treated me, destroyed the records 10 years after my last visit.  I'm SURE those records are in the SS records;  they just demand that I produce them, knowing I can't.  

So now I'm still 5 years too young for SS and Medicare.  What if they raise the retirement age?  First how will we tap into our retirement accounts without penalty to pay for medical expenses?  I will NEVER see my SS money that I paid into the system all those years I worked (sometimes at 2-3 jobs at a time!).  I WILL NOT LIVE LONG ENOUGH!

Let me repeat that  I WILL NOT LIVE LONG ENOUGH!  I can no longer take Methotrexate because my platelet levels drop too low and I am in danger of bleeding to death internally.  The prednisone I have been on for over a year now will, according to my rheumatologist "take five years off your life."  It also induced Type II diabetes, which is implicated in heart disease, even if I didn't have the extra clotting factor from lupus.   The Hydorxychloroquine (Plaquanil) no longer controls the disease by itself.  I also cannot take aspirin, NSAIDs like ibuprofen.  So I take ginger and turmeric for the constant pain.  Some days it works, some days it doesn't work so well.  I need Ben Lysta, according to my rheumatologist, but she's not going to administer it.  It's about $2000-$3000 a pop.  I think it's once a month.  I tried to get onto a drug trial, but the diagnoses (both of which I think are wrong) the county hospital gave me of non-alcoholic cirrhosis and heart failure keep me out of the trial.  I need a liver biopsy to rule out the cirrhosis, and an echocarcdogram for the heart failure.

My only hope is Obama's health care plan, because I could not be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions.  If I cannot afford the private health insurance or the high risk pool insurance, I could, as I understand it, get Medicare without having to be on SS, SSI, or SSDI.  So think twice before you pull the lever for someone who wants to repeal Obamacare;  that lever pull will be a death sentence for me and many others with my illness or others like it.  Of course, it you want to be a good, compassionate Christian, you can send me money at PayPal to help with my medical expenses. Leave a comment on this website and I'll send you my email.  They are. or would, if I were seeing the doctors I need to see and taking the meds I need to take run from $3000 in a good year for routine meds and visits and tests to upwards of $24,000 if I had to be hospitalized.  My brother is currently supporting us and paying our medical expenses.  He's nearing retirement age.  He spent years paying for our mother's needs because her SS didn't cover the utilities, food, out of pocket medical expenses.  Now he has us, and his own family.

Language is almost the first skill humans acquire, absent some physiological impediment.  Most children utter their first words around age 9 months.  Research now suggests that the best time to teach second languages is while the child is still in the womb and the first year of life.


As I look around at the growing number of people who barely speak English, and I am NOT referring to immigrants here, but American citizens, while demanding that immigrants learn English, I am appalled.  I am especially appalled when one of these people proudly announces they never learned a second language "beyond what I was compelled to take to graduate."  [I resist asking them when they are going to learn English, because I learned long ago that people complaining about others do not like having their own faults pointed out to them.]   I do think that if you cannot speak your own language properly, and you have limited experience with learning another language, beyond struggling through the required courses, you are arrogant to demand someone else do what you will not, have not, and by your own reports cannot.  I have a test:

Im hear too c there nu baby.                  If you don't cringe when you read that sentence, you are illiterate in English.  LEARN IT!

I understand there are people with learning disabilities.  I don't fault them for having trouble with remembering when to use "too," "to," and "two."  I fault them for griping about  immigrants not speaking English, not learning English.  

I know something about learning languages.  It's a hobby of mine. I know it's far easier to learn to understand the written and spoken forms then it is to actually speak it.  Even if you have learned the differences in pronunciation, often involving repositioning of the lips and tongue, you find yourself groping for the correct word to use in the context.  I studied Spanish from age 7 through 17, and into the University Level.  I can listen to Spanish language movies and TV shows without getting lost.  Oh, sure there are words now and then I don't know, or an idiomatic expression I don't quite understand, but I get the gist of it. When I try to speak Spanish with neighbors and fellow Houstonians, I'm amazed at how often words I know just can't seem to come out of my brain to my mouth!  Part of that is just memory.  Part of that is self-consciousness, fear of saying the wrong thing. Sometimes I just never learned the word.  After all, no matter how many years you study a language, you won't learn every single word for every context.  When I had my dead pines cut down last November, I realized I didn't know and had never learned the words for "Limb" "lumber" "stump" "grind"  "mulch" "saw"" etc.  So when I speak to a Spanish-speaking person, I have the courtesy to respect the effort put into learning what English he or she does know, and I give them the respect for being human and having to deal with that pesky memory thing and the fact they haven't ever heard some of the words they want to use.

I have also seen how delighted people from other nations are when I speak even a few words in their native language.  Their eyes light up and everything gets friendlier, usually.  There is the rare person who seems to think I am implying they cannot speak English and who answers me frostily in English.  Recently, I smiled sweetly and said to one such person "I spent so many years learning Spanish and I love the opportunity to practice it and not lose it."  Her face went from frosty to warm in a split second and we had a nice chat in Spanish.  It doesn't take much to learn a few words or phrases, and what do you know?  Most people think it's a sign of respect for their language and culture.  

If you don't even respect your own language and culture enough to learn it properly, what gives you the right to demand someone else learn YOUR language before you treat them with respect?  Now there are good reasons to have a common language -- disasters, emergencies, and the like.  Of course that presupposes you want to help each other understand the situation.  

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who liked everybody.  She quickly learned that not everybody liked her.  Sometimes it felt like nobody liked her.  she spent a few years trying to do things that would make people like her.  Her first lesson was that once someone decided they didn't like you, they rarely changed their minds.  

As she got older, she realized that a lot of the reasons people had for not liking her were, basically, silly.  They didn't like her because she was fat.  They didn't like her because she got better grades without studying half as hard.  They didn't like her because she didn't like what they liked or want from life what they wanted.  

Finally, she said "Aw ***k it!" and she did what she wanted to do.  Now there were even more people who didn't like her.  She just didn't care any more.  After awhile, she started having people come to her.  They seemed to like her!

"I love America!"  We hear it all the time.  I see flags up and down my street.  "I support our military."  Is that all there is to patriotism?

People, I have observed in my almost 6 decades of life, run from boredom in a variety of ways.  They drink too much.  They take drugs.  They drive too fast.  They take up risky sports.  They shop too much and spend too much.  Ad nauseum.

Merriam-Webster's free online dictionary defines boredom as "the state of being weary and restless from lack of interest."  As a child I complained about being bored.  Then I discovered reading.  The closest I have come to thinking I was bored since was my episode of clinical depression in the early 80s.  In reality, that was not lack of interest.  It was the inability to feel pleasure in any activity, even those I had always enjoyed.  Fortunately, I took imipramine for about 18 months or so, along with therapy, and never has the condition recurred.  I do often feel weary, but that's the lupus assaulting me.  

Escaping boredom -- the real thing -- is actually very easy.  Get interested in something.  Now this might not work for people with really low intelligence, I don't know.  I do know that even people with intelligence levels below "functional" can find things to be interested in.  My brain damaged cousin surely does.  So my suspicion is that the biggest impediment to finding interest is lack of effort. So here are some things to get interested in; pick one or two.  It's not an exhaustive list.

Acting.  Community theatre is a great outlet
Animals.  Adopt,. foster, volunteer at a sheter.
Art -- doing or studying its history.  Youy don't have to be good at it.  IF you enjoy it, DO IT!

Birds -- watching them, learning their calls, volunteer for the annual bird count.