Month: October 2018

How’s Your Health?

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November is known as the time for employers to furnish their employees with the next year’s health insurance and other benefits plans. It comes and goes at a fast pace. We are often caught unawares, and it’s something we have to do proactively every year.

My suggestion as we come upon the first of November is to take a health inventory. This would include what services and insurance benefits you used this past year, and what you expect to use next year so you can choose the best plan for you and your family without rushing around in the twenty-four hours of the very last day.

Take your health inventory.

Are you due for a tetanus shot? Any other missing vaccinations? Flu shot?

Have you had your yearly physical?

Is it time for a pap smear or mammogram? Prostate screening?

Colonoscopy?

How are your eyes? Do your glasses need updating? Do you need glasses?

How’s your hearing? I just got hearing aids, and I’m still adjusting to them. It’s not like going from deaf to hearing, but it is quite an adjustment to the new sounds that I’m noticing – the rattles in the car, the water and heat through the pipes in my house, the tapping of the keyboard I’m using right now. (I honestly can’t believe how loud it is!)

Take a medication inventory.

Are all of your medications up to date? Are they still working the way they’re supposed to? It may be time to change some dosages.

How’s your weight? Mine could do with some losing and increasing some exercise. On her TV talk show, Rosie O’Donnell used to say, “Eat less, move more.” Simple and yet really good advice that anyone can succeed at. Keep a food and exercise log. It’s not to guilt you into doing the right thing, but it’s good to see how far you advance from where you had started.

How’s your blood pressure?

Another simple, healthy choice is less salt and sugar. Less is more. Can’t go wrong with that. Smoke less, or stop completely. Drink in moderation.

Laugh. And sing. It’s good for your heart. And your head.

Take a mental health inventory/check-up.

Any depression? Anxiety? If yes, mention it to your doctor. Don’t put it off and let it sneak up on you.

Keep in contact with your doctor, and your health care administrator at work. Look at all of the available plans and compare them to what you have now. It’s not always better to take the cheapest plan, and by the same token it’s not always better to take the more expensive plan. Know your needs, and choose based on that.

Are you eligible for the Affordable Care Act? Medicare? Medicaid?
Here’s to a happy and healthy 2019!

October – Fall into Halloween – Quotation

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I had wanted to share some quotations from murdered journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, but I couldn’t choose. So please visit The Washington Post and read what he’s written including his last column, published posthumously. 

Also, if you’re so inclined, please support the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life, define yourself.”

-Harvey Fierstein

Moon Shot

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​In 1995 when we moved into our second apartment the moon always found its way to my pillow. It was most prominent in the winter, but it always managed to be there sometime through the nights of the full or nearly full moon.

The window faced northwest and because we were on the second floor we hadn’t put up curtains and the windows were always kept open.

I’d wake up in the middle of the night and feel the moonlight shining. I’d open my eyes and stare. I’d reach my hand out until it bathed in the light reaching out to me from space.

We’ve been in our house for twelve years. Our bedroom window still has no curtains, but it is smaller, about half the size or less of that first window. It faces southeast.

I can sometimes see the moon, but it doesn’t shine as prominently on this side. I try to reach out to it, but it is far away, almost never shining on my bedcover.

When it does, I reach out and touch the light. It is a rare occurence.

This photo was taken just a few weeks ago. I woke up and I was a bit shocked at how clear the moon looked. How bright it shone the through the window, touching my face. I squinted.

I knew the picture wouldn’t come out, but I took it anyway.

It was a memory.

It was a held hand.

It didn’t actually come out that badly.

My light. Moon light.

October – Fall into Halloween – Reflection

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​I mentioned in my initial blurb earlier in the month that October is my favorite month. The leaves are changing colors, the pumpkins are in full force in the neighborhood, the kids are talking about their costumes, I’m preparing my own costume, my son’s birthday is happening, we go applepicking, there is usually a one day retreat, comic store activities, the return of The Walking Dead, my parish’s anointing mass, the Living Rosary, and a host of other motivations and inspirations for writing and centering.

This year, however…

Ugh.

It is 15 days before the midterm elections. Most years I vote, but I don’t pay that much attention. I trusted President Obama and even President Bush, who I did not vote for, to keep the country steady. I trusted Congress, even in its usual disfunction to keep a check and a balance on the President, although the Republican Congress during the Obama years went a little crazy on the obstructionism. I trusted the Supreme Court to follow the law. Even Scalia, who I didn’t like and disagreed with on almost everything, had a moral compass.

But this year….Good Lord. The hyperbole is strong – this may be our last free and fair election. Vote now, you may not get another chance. This is the most important election of our lifetimes.

And you know what?

It is all of those things.

In early 2017, I re-read 1984, and i was kind of amazed at how much of it I had forgotten, and also amazed, and petrified at how much of it seemed to be coming true with the new Trump Administration. I hesitate to call it a Republican administration, but the Republicans in  Congress seem to have forgotten their function in favor of…I don’t know what it’s in favor of.

So, yeah, long story short, tl;dr, yell, scream, run, don’t walk to your nearest polling place, and VOTE!

We also were not able to go applepicking this year. This is the first year since we’ve had kids that we haven’t gone. Even when my son was nine days old, we still went applepicking. I’m so torn about this.

My oldest child is moving out.

I know; it’s time. He’s ready. I’m not, but I probably would never be, but he’s ready. He also has two jobs, a car, and has been feeding himself for mostly a year now. He’s ready. I need to keep telling myself that.

I was late to my doctor’s appointment this  morning, and I would have only been less than five minutes late. Except for the speeding ticket. I can’t even.

I was going to go as a Hufflepuff professor for Halloween. I just needed a witch’s hat, and then Jamal Khashoggi was brutally assassinated in Istanbul. In 2016, I went as a journalist because of all the attacks on the media by the Trump campaign. Back then, I had no idea how bad it would get for the journalists and their colleagues. I would have never expected any President of the United States calling our free press an enemy of the people. I even less expected that after the murder of a US Permanent Resident, writer for the Washington Post, that any President would take the side of the murderers and make excuses akin to covering up that murder. So I’m recycling my journalist costume, both in honor of the free press and in memory of Jamal Khashoggi.

Let me try and think of three positive things before I go.

My brother may come for a visit for a few days. The kids are excited and it would be nice to see him. We’ll have to come up with something interesting to do. We’re a boring group, but I think we can fake it. We’ll need to start cleaning now. Like right now.

I’m planning on doing Nanowrimo this year. I loved how last year it gave me focus and motivation. I need that again, and am very much looking forward to it. It begins in ten days!

I got hearing aids this week. I’m still getting used to them. Some things are a little too loud, but the amount of times I say “what” and cup my hand over my ear has gone down by about 99%, so that’s a bonus. I’ve noticed a real difference in church, hearing the kids talking to me from the backseat of the car, talking to a waiter or waitress in a restaurant, and I’m more disturbed by the rattling that I can now hear my car making.

A Melting Pot

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​When I was a kid, I would occasionally say that I was Canadian. My father would not have it. He told me I was an American, not Canadian. I tried to argue. But Grandpa was born in Canada. His family still lives there. Why aren’t we Canadian? We’re American he would say. And that was the end of the discussion.

It wasn’t a diss against Canada or our Canadian relatives, but to him it was more than important; it was pride, it was honor, it was a patriotic act.

When my kids have done their genealogy or ancestry in school or for class projects, they’ve asked, and we’ve told them where their families have come from. We’re Jewish so for us it wasn’t that we came from Eastern Europe, but that we were Russian, German, Polish, but always prefaced by being Jewish. It was our ethnicity more than our religion despite being both.

My kids are all of those things, but their families also come from Canada, Russia, Germany, Poland, and Ireland. We eat foods and follow traditions from all of those family histories.

I’m an American. And some of my family is Canadian. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, and neither takes away from the other.

When I heard the first time someone referred contemptuously to Elizabeth Warren’s nod to her Native American ancestry, I had to shake my head at their myopia. She wasn’t saying she was Native. She wasn’t saying she was Indigenous. She wasn’t asking for a government benefit or acknowledgment. She was simply relaying a family story that she’d heard her whole life about her heritage, about the traditions in her own family.

It was the President who made a political issue out of it, and then the racists jumped onboard with their laughter and their name-calling. The President continued with his name-calling just this week.

Even Democrats criticized her for bringing it up now, a distraction from the important midterms, although I would remind them that the President is the one who brought it up, and Senator Warren simply responded. I know what it’s like to have that continual gnawing inside when someone says something about you or your family. They say it, and it’s forgotten, but not by you, not by the aggrieved. The hurt remains and festers and dogs in to all those places that have been hurt before.

I think she also knew the President wouldn’t follow through with his promise of a charitable contribution; he has never kept his word, and he’s not about to start now, but still…

Was she supposed to ignore his taunts? Is she supposed to take it because the timing isn’t right for the election campaign cycle according to some pundits? Is she just supposed to sit down and be quiet little lady?

As someone who lives in a melting pot, I understand where Warren was initially coming from, and the more air we give to the nonsense that this President does and says, the more air he sucks out of the room, and the rest of us, the rest of us are suffocating.

So good for Elizabeth Warren.

One day my kids will be telling someone about their Canadian or Irish ancestry, and they will be mocked because they don’t have the proof; just a handful of family stories they cherish, and I hope they don’t back down either.

Election Reflection – 21 DAYS TIL MIDTERMS

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VOTE!

Vote Save America – check your registration. People are being purged and voters, especially minorities and Democratic voters are being suppressed. If Republicans had a message and could take the responsibility of governing, they wouldn’t need to cheat by suppressing legal voters from making their choices.

In Georgia, the Republican running against Stacey Abrams is also the Secretary of State of the state of Georgia, and is the one who validates the security and legitimacy of the election, including certifying the election. Currently, there are 53,000 voter registrations that are being held up. 70% of them are African-American voters.

Georgia Lawsuit is Latest…
The Supreme Court just ruled, merely a few weeks ahead of this year’s election that the North Dakota law requiring street addresses (rather than post office boxes) is legal and upheld. This disenfranchises many Native Americans voters, a voting group that primarily goes for the Democratic party. Living on reservations and on rural routes, the post office does not assign street addresses. This is significant.

Native Americans Decry Supreme Court Ruling on Voter ID in ND

Indiana is trying to purge voters in the weeks before this midterm election.

Federal Judge Blocks Indiana…

Again, I ask, what are Republican politicians afraid of?

We are still at risk from Russian election interference. Nothing has been fortified since the 2016 election that has been proved to have been compromised.

I’m worried.

You should be also.

Check your registration, drive your friends to the polls, and VOTE!