mopinko
mopinko's Journali doubt the people looking for support in this SUPPORT group are interested
in crack pot medical advice. i know i am not. if you want that kind of info the health forum, which is the proper place to discuss symptoms and treatments, if full of that sort of thing. or there is alternative healing, too.
i intend to alert on them in the future. they make this forum useless. and aggravating as hell.
dear hive mind- a question about nigerian culture.
we have been invited to the 10th birthday party of our tenant's son. i have been told it is a huge deal, coming of age time. i am flattered to be invited, and don't want to be stupid. (i love my tenants.)
so, my question- does anyone know what a traditional or appropriate gift is? is it one of those money type occasions? what would be an appropriate amount?
i know someone on here knows the answer here, and sometimes it just mind boggling the depth of the hive mind here at du.
don't forget your local party.
i serve on the steering committee of my ward dem party. most of the heavy lifting has always been done by the committeeman, which is an elected but unpaid job. (go figure.) so, it was mostly just a rallying point, bus trips to iowa, etc. we are part of the lean, mean, election winning il-9th district machine. most of us were there from that feb day in springfield, through iowa, and part of the 5 seat gain in illinois last november.
as it happens, tho, our committeeman has been gravely ill. were it not for the generosity of our alderman, our office would have closed. and our phone equipment was not going to be any help in 2014.
so, a lazy committee stepped up to the plate.
we raised almost enough money to keep the office open for the next year. we are still twisting a few arms, but we are first going to upgrade our phone system. we do do a lot of phone banking, and were a very busy ofa office. we are getting a new router which supports predictive dialing, and new phones.
we have every intention of helping jan schakowsky increase the illinois democratic delegation, as well as reaching out to other states, particularly wisconsin.
i loves me my president, but we all have to focus on 2014, and that is a block to block, district to district fight. get down on the ground level, and get ready!!!
the boss must be in town.
just saw the usual 3 helicopter formation over the lakefront here.
my son is getting sucked into the woo.
in spite of being my child, he is so soft at heart that he just can't think of people as nuts. he is 22 and a high school drop out mostly sitting on my couch. there is no conspiracy theory to outlandish for him. he was a buddhist for a while, but that wore off. he just throws in with whatever comes along.
my most off the beam neighbor sucked him into a mission to help build a house for an old choctaw chief. with one day's notice, he takes off for south dakota. now, this is really the kind of thing the kid needs to be a part of. i just shut my mouth and lent him my car.
he has been there for a few weeks, has done a few sweat lodges, including having the "honor" of stoking the fire. now he is on his way to a sun dance. 4 days of eating, 4 days of fasting and dancing, followed by a flesh tearing ritual.
i am assured my son will come home a different person.
yes, i suppose he will.
oy.
no man's land.
you know. that time between the end of your denial that something is wrong, and your visit to the doc, and the part where you know what it is and the new meds work great.
every since i admitted to my rheumie how much my hands hurt in the morning, and his almost instant dx of carpal tunnel, followed by by an emg that i thought would do me in, followed by.......waiting, denial has slipped away and it is just driving me out of my mind. tingling, hurting, dropping things, weak as a kitten.
oh, please, can i have some plausible deniability?
potato questions.
so, i have tried a few times to grow potatoes, and have had some good, some bad. more bad.
last year was the first time i ever heard of hilling potatoes with anything but soil. apparently straw works even better than soil. or half and half.
i am wondering if anyone uses anything else. i am tempted to use some shredded paper which i have had great success using for chicken litter.
who here is the potato expert?
want to recycle a barn.
so after much wrangling, the city of chicago is going to let me build a small barn on my microfarm. 
since our really core principle here is sustainability, we would like to build it from recycled parts. it is pretty much a typical small scale barn, 40' x 25'.
the midwest is littered with dead and dying old barns. they can be had for little or nothing, you just have to take them down. there are companies that demolish your barn, or sell you parts from other barns. some even resaw old timbers to true them up.
there is also a great organization here that is deconstructing houses, so anything that i might need in that dept will be available, too. (love this place. the good old stuff, brass faucets and stuff like that, for pennies on the dollar.)
so, anyone have experience with working with recycled materials? am i buying myself extra headaches that will end up costing me more in the end?
porphyria?
never heard of it till the other day when my baby- aged 20, was told that she might have it. the kid has been sick since she was 9, dx'd w/crohn's, and had the strangest collection of symptoms/problems/dx's that there ever was.
she was sent to an allergist because she was breaking out from the sun. after looking over her whole medical record, which is about 2 gig, and looking at her skin, etc, said she thought this might be it. after her looking into it, she also found several oddball things that finally made sense.
they are waiting for her to break out again, and they will biopsy the bumps. after that probably genetic testing.
her older sister and i are both almost as messed up as she is, and we have figured for a long time it is genetic.
i have read the wiki, and know that sometimes it can kill you, and that is about it. and the only real treatment is a liver transplant.
anyone know anything about this?
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Member since: Tue Oct 28, 2003, 08:34 PMNumber of posts: 70,088