My 2 Cents

My 2 Cents

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You Don't Say

• A good report

  Eight months ago I started insulin therapy for treatment of my diabetes. I really hated the thought of sticking myself with a needle every day for the rest of my life. Now, with the addition of yet another drug to my daily medications, I am up to three shots a day.
  
  I often feel like a pincushion and look like I came out the looser in a boxing match. Sometimes I get down in the dumps about the whole thing and feel as if nothing is ever going to be right again.
  
  Then there are those moments when things seem to take a turn for the better. I had one of those last week when I went for my regular checkup.
  
  My doctor came in carrying my chart and asked me what in the world I had been doing. My heart plummeted and I was expecting the worse.
  
  He waved the papers he was carrying at me and finished his query with, “because your glucose levels have really dropped. These results are half of what they were last time.”
  
  Then he grinned and said, “I think I get bragging rights for this!”
  
  My sigh of relief was probably audible clear out in the waiting room.
  
  With the upcoming holidays temptation will be everywhere. My next checkup is in January, and I hope that my doctor will still have bragging rights.
  
  Discuss this post at Lawco Talk

  
• Angel Food Ministries

  I am so pleased that Lawrence County will be an Angel Food distribution point. Thanks to all the hard working volunteers the group no longer has to travel to Jonesboro to pick up the food. What a time saver that will be.

  Angel Food Ministries is a fantastic resource for those on a fixed income. A box of food containing meat, vegetables and other food items is available for just $25. If you haven't heard about this wonderful program contact Debbie Spangler at 759-0135

  To order a unit of food contact Spangler or Vicky Davis at 759-1568. Other contacts for ordering include: Kristen West, 886-5709, at WestWeb in Walnut Ridge; Betty Ross, 886-5460, Main Street Church of Christ; Teresa Helms, 886-7856, United Free Will Baptist Church; Paula Decker, 886-6681, First Free Will Baptist Church; Susan O’Connor, 870-528-1111, Smithville/Lynn area; Kathy Lee, 870-219-4385, Alicia area; Cathy Harthorn, 886-2752, College City area; and Rhonda Turbyeville, 501-412-4464, Imboden area.
  
  Discuss this post at Lawco Talk

  
• Chain disdain

  Chain letters have always made me crazy. But at least in the good old days of snail mail the things came less often because the sender had to pay for postage and then get them in the mail. Now they just zip through my e-mail at all hours of the day and night.

  Threats of retribution and bad luck often accompany them or they whine about friendship. If I’m a real friend I’ll pass them on to all the people I know and continue the chain.

  I always break the chain. I do not want to receive it, and I do not want to send it. So far the only bad thing that’s happened to me is that the stuff keeps showing up in my inbox. I guess that’s bad enough.

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• Christmas wishes

  The Christmas season has begun. Some of us look forward to it with real anticipation while some of us dread it.
  
  I love Christmas. It is a time when the people you meet have a smile on their face and they speak to total strangers wishing them a “Merry Christmas.”
  
  My house is already showing signs of the season. A Christmas tree (only one so far), the teddy bear, snowmen and Santa Claus collections are in place. This weekend we will set up the crèche and our old time village. For me Christmas is a time of anticipation and excitement and a time when I can once more look at the world, if only for a moment, with a child’s sense of wonder.
  
  But I can also sympathize with those who dread the day. I often believe I must shoulder all of responsibility for our family’s Christmas experience. I am slowly learning to let go, but still for one month out of the year I try to don a red cape and blue spandex (not attractive, believe me) and create a perfect moment in time.
  
  This year I intend to stop and realize Christmas is not about me. It is about hope, love and compassion. After all the angels sang about peace on earth and good will not about figgy pudding demands.

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• Close but no cigar

  I have always been interested in words and phrases. We have a lot of peculiar phrases in our language and sometimes I wonder how they came about. Phrases often were derived from a specific use. One of these phrases has come my way lately — close but no cigar.

  I never really thought about what the words meant but generally accepted that the phrase meant one hadn’t actually hit the nail on the head. That’s one cliché for another.

  After a little investigation I found that the phrase originated in the 1930s as carnival lingo to tell a patron who had fallen just short of winning the prize of a cigar that he was a loser.

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• Common Sense Media

  I stumbled onto a great website for parents called Common Sense Media. The focus of the site is providing parents with the info they need to judge whether or not a particular movie, television show, website, book or game is suitable for their child.
  
  The site gives the pros and cons for a particular piece of media and includes ideas for discussing it with your child.
  
  I appreciate the openness of the site and that they provide the information a parent needs to make their own judgment call about whether their child should have access to a particular piece of media.
  
  The website is located at www.commonsensemedia.org

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• Ever changing grammar

  As a proofreader I constantly struggle with current usage questions. The English language is a living language and as such it constantly changes and reinvents itself.

  The grammar that I learned as a student is still basically sound, but not all of it is still correct. Many of the taboos of a half-century ago no longer pertain and now there is a new list.

  In addition to desk references we constantly browse the Internet looking for those sites that provide sound writing advice. As a college student I found myself dreading those long research papers I had to write each year. The Internet would have been a great blessing to me then.

  A couple of sites I have found to be particularly helpful are dictionary.com and askoxford.com. Both of these sites deal with current usage and both have several reference tools. They are a wonderful resource for students at any level of study.

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• Family Time

  Our family just returned from my husband’s family reunion. It’s always the weekend following Father’s Day, but the location changes on a yearly basis.

  We gather each year to renew our family ties and meet the newest additions. It is also a time to remember those who are no longer with us.

  Our reunions include not only Heyls, but also the blended families of remarried siblings. We all have a great time, and we have become one big family.

  If I have had doubts about the need for these once-a-year gatherings, they were laid to rest when Matt, the child of my husband’s brother’s second wife said, “Aunt Viv, let’s not wait so long to get-together again.”

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• Getting the blues

  My husband and I have been going to the Arkansas Blues and Heritage Festival, FKA The King Biscuit, for many years now. I know folks who have been to all 22 of them.

  The King Biscuit is not the granddaddy of blues festivals but it is the largest. Each year there is doubt as to whether it will be happening and somehow each year it does.
  
  This year they brought Pinetop Perkins to the stage. He is the last of the old Helena blues men. He played with Sonny Boy (Rice Miller) Williamson on the old King Biscuit Time radio show.
  
  Also on stage was Sam Carr. Sam is the son of Robert Nighthawk another legendary Helena musician. Sam also played music with Sonny Boy and was a member of his last band.
  
  Sam is ailing and was wheeled on stage in a wheelchair to play one song on the drums. He came straight from the hospital and was taken back there as soon as he finished his performance.
  
  Both of these men have paid their dues over and over again. It will be a shame when we lose them.

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• Is your PC virus free?

  I was surfing the Internet news feeds the other day when I came across an article about a website set up to test the stupidity of computer users.

  The website offered a free virus to those who didn’t have one. “Is your PC virus free? Get it infected here!” the site asked and there was a clickable link to get the virus. In the six-month campaign over 400 people chose to get a free virus.

  There was no actual virus. The whole setup was an experiment to see whether advertising with an overtly malicious intent would work. It appears it will.

  --

  Discuss this post at LawCo. Talk

  
• News worthy?

  I am a big fan of good news and of positive outlooks. I think that one of the nicest things about The Times Dispatch is that we don’t just focus on the gloom and doom of today’s society. There is always a positive bent to the paper overall.

  Most of us suffer from news overload. Our ears and eyes are assaulted with sensationalized headlines from the time we wake up until we go to sleep. The news channels on television are in such a hurry to report the latest scoop that they don’t stop to get all the facts anymore, but rely mostly on shocking us with a barrage of images and staccato sentences to emphasize the enormity of the event no matter how trivial it might be.

  Sensational journalism is not new. I suppose the forerunner of this type of journalism was gossip. Gossip takes some truths and some speculations and presents it as fact. This is not sound reporting, but for many it’s the only type they are exposed to.

  If every news media tried to find something positive to report along with the bad, perhaps there would be more hope in the world. Something we all desperately need.

  Good news is rapidly disappearing from our broadcasts and from our newspapers. Thankfully The TD still manages to find space for it.

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• To clone or not to clone

  I had a brief moment of nostalgia recently when I ran across a website devoted to obsolete computers.
  
  We still have an original IBM PC, which only has two floppy disks (the 5-1/4 inch variety), no hard drive and basically runs on 16 KB of RAM.
  
  Next we had an IBM XT (extended technology) system. When the XT arrived on the scene with a five-megabyte hard drive, this was the ultimate in computer technology. It ran on PC-DOS and BASIC. No more swapping out floppy disks or running out of room to store information. Five megabytes was an impossibly large amount of room and no one could possibly fill it up. Unfortunately we found a way.
  
  Then the IBM AT (Advanced Technology) was developed and was it ever a hotrod computer. It could hold up to 16 megabytes of RAM and support a 20-megabyte hard disk. I ran AT systems for years and years.
  
  These systems were for the most part stable. Occasionally a floppy disk would bite the dust, especially if your mother pinned it to the fridge with a magnet. They ran day in and day out and seemed to be virtually indestructible.
  
  We had other computers as well, Commodore 64, Atari 400 and 800 and Apple II. It wasn’t until the “Clone” became available that computers hit the mainstream. Everyone was learning computer technology. Even I could change cards and mount hard drives. Now I want a cross and holy water to approach a computer.
  
  Anyway, if you have one of the old “boat anchor” computers hanging around and you would like to get it rolling again or you just want to reminisce here’s the website, obsoletecomputermuseum.org.

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  

My 2 Cents

• Aging moms

  Being pregnant at 31 is no fun. Jason and I were married seven years before we had our first son, Conley. I was 27 for the latter part of my pregnancy, and I can attest that four years can make a big difference.

  The crazy thing is that 31 is not that old for having babies anymore. My mother had her youngest at 40, though it was not planned. I now wonder how she ever survived.

  Now, with improved fertility drugs and what I would call some women’s crazy notions, the childbirth age is being extended up into the 40s and sometimes the 50s. It is especially crazy to me since the drugs that allow them to conceive often also cause multiple births. Being 55 years old and pregnant with twins does not sound anything like fun to me.

  Discuss this post at LawCo. Talk

  
• Bittersweet

  I watched coverage of the 875th homecoming on television Saturday. Every image brought tears to my eyes, as did each of the banners as I drove along Highway 49 from Jonesboro to Brookland the previous evening.

  The tears were, of course, tears of joy for the soldiers and their families who were at long last reunited. But, they were also tears of distress for those who remain deployed and those who are preparing to go.

  While the soldiers are proud and willing to serve, a yearlong trip to Iraq is undoubtedly not high on their list of desires. As the war has continued, and support for the effort has waned, it is always a concern that support for our soldiers might fade as well.

  Perhaps we might get bored with the same old, same old — another group leaving, another group coming home. Apathy can take hold easily, especially when the conflict seems to have drug on so long already.

  One gentleman in my church, who served in Vietnam, said his heart was filled with joy to see the welcome the 875th received. He said it was a much different welcome than troops received when returning from Vietnam.

  We should remember every night as we settle into our beds that they are suffering hardships and risking their lives in service to our country. I hope and pray that though individuals may not support the war, the support of our soldiers remains strong.

  Discuss this post at LawCo. Talk

  
• Driving lesson

  Conley and I were driving home the other day when a police officer did a U-turn in front of us to go after a car that was speeding.
  
  The blue lights caught Conley’s attention in the back seat and he asked me what the policeman was doing. I told him he was probably going to catch the car that had just passed us and give them a ticket.
  
  To this, he offered the ever-popular four-year-old question, “Why?”
  
  I told him they were driving too fast and that is why they were getting a ticket.
  
  Now, it didn’t occur to me that to my four-year-old son tickets are a good thing. He acquaints tickets with riding rides, winning a prize or going somewhere. It didn’t take me long to realize he did not understand that in this case getting a ticket was not a happy occasion.
  
  “You better hurry up, Mom,” he told me. “Why?” I asked him. “You have to go fast so we can get some tickets, too,” he said grinning.
  
  I explained to him that when you get a ticket from a police officer it is because you were doing something bad and you have to pay money as punishment for getting in trouble. I also told him that driving too fast can cause an accident, which he took very seriously.
  
  The next day he told his grandma that you can’t drive too fast because you might get a ticket, and even worse, you might crash.
  
  So often, we want to make the police be the bad guys for writing the tickets, but my four-year-old son really got it. It’s not about driving slow so you don’t get a ticket. It’s about driving safe so you don’t get in an accident.

  Discuss this post at LawCo. Talk

  
• Expect the unexpected

  If there is one thing I have learned about children it is that one should always expect the unexpected. Nevertheless, my boys still managed to surprise me this Christmas.

  Conley is four and has a pretty clear concept of what happens when Christmas rolls around. Colter, on the other hand, at four months, is a complete beginner.

  As we prepared for the holidays, I found myself purchasing more presents for Conley than for Colter. Mainly because Colter’s wants and desires are pretty much limited to a bottle, a jar of baby food, a clean diaper and a warm blanket. I was looking forward to Conley’s excitement on Christmas morning, but did not expect Colter to really even be interested in the presents.

  Boy, did they pull a switcheroo on me. Conley opened his stocking and then was ready to go to his room and play. The other gifts and the pop-up tent under the tree seemed to have no attraction at all. I had to call him back into the room to open the rest of his gifts.

  Colter on the other hand, loved opening the presents. At first I thought he just loved the paper, which he’d grab and tear off the gifts. I realized, though, that he really enjoyed seeing what was inside the packaging too. Each time we would hold up the opened toy or book, his face would light up.

  I guess it just goes to show that one can never be prepared for life with children. I look forward to more of the “unexpected” in the new year.

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• Forward progress

  There’s been a lot of talk in the Hoxie and Walnut Ridge area, since the election results were announced, that the newly elected mayors might be able to bring about needed progress for the community. Citizens who cast their ballots because they want to see that progress need to remember that for good things to happen it takes the involvement of many, not just the elected officials. Great things can happen in Walnut Ridge and Hoxie, but they won’t happen magically and they won’t happen without hard work. If Hoxie and Walnut Ridge residents want to see forward progress, they need to pull together, set some goals and put one foot in front of the other.

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• He's not my baby anymore

  My baby is growing up. Of course, if he knew I was calling him my baby, he would quickly correct me and tell me he is a big boy now. Conley already didn't like being called my baby before we had our second son, Colter, but now he gets downright offended. I think in his mind he thinks if I call him my baby that means Colter can't be my baby. He always tells me "Colter is your baby, I'm your kid."

  Monday, he started school at Greene County Tech. He is in the Pre-K program and though he is not technically in school, it is on the school campus and they have class time and eat in the cafeteria and he will even be able to ride the school bus (which he is quite excited about). He had a great first
  day and I was so happy for him, but I was also a little sad. I guess it made me realize that he is in fact right — he's not a baby anymore.
  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• Health is precious

  I have always felt blessed to be a pretty much sickeningly healthy person. I am grateful that I rarely catch the bugs that are going around and I have had no major health problems, having only been in the hospital to be born and to give birth twice.

  In recent months, my gratitude for my health has increased even more. One co-worker, Howard Golden, lost his wife, Darlene, earlier this week after a battle with cancer. Another, Amber Adams, was recently diagnosed with Addison’s Disease, an auto immune disorder, which has left her sick more often than not over the past year.

  It is easy to feel sympathy for people when you hear about their health problems and struggles, but when close friends or family members are dealing with problems, you begin to feel empathy. While I cannot say I know what either of my co-workers are going through, I can feel their pain and look forward to times when I can share their joy.

  I know there are no guarantees in life, and I could be facing health issues myself some day. Knowing that makes each day even more precious, and I hope I can make the best out of each one I am given.

  Discuss this post at LawCo Talk

  
• Hectic Holidays

  I love the holidays, but they sure make life more hectic.

  At work, we have to adjust the day the paper comes out or adjust our deadlines to be able to complete a paper on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s weeks.

  At home, there is the hustle and bustle of decorating, shopping, wrapping, etc. Most homes also include lots of cooking, but that never seems to be a priority for me. I do love to eat, though.

  At church, we have a children’s Christmas production to rehearse, a parade float to build and many holiday activities to prepare for and attend.

  Hopefully, I will be able to find some time during all this activity to relax and enjoy the holidays a little. They will be here and gone in a flash.

  Discuss this post at LawCo. Talk

  

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