You know all that pink stuff they sell to raise money for breast cancer awareness and research? I buy that stuff. I have pink everywhere. A pink jacket. Pink socks. The t-shirt. Pink kitchen scissors, two of them. I even have pink baking cups for cupcakes.

I’ve also eaten quite a few too many of the pink M&Ms.

So I wondered all this time what are the dudes going to come up with to raise money for their issues?

They chose the mustache. This month is Movemeber and the bros are going to grow them to raise money for prostate and testicular cancer research and awareness. Friends, family, coworkers, etc. sponsor them to grow it for the entire month and pay up if the participant went through Movember without shaving.

And just as dudes might not feel too welcome to support our cause by wearing pink ribbon things, dudettes might not feel too comfortable growing a ’stache. Nope, I’m not growing mine out, no way.

But my son Blane has joined, Yay! I’ve never seen him wear anything other than a fake mustache as a gag. I have no idea how bushy this thing could become, but I want to see it. I even bought him a present to encourage him. A fifteen inch long gummy snake. And a cat that craps jelly beans. He loves that sort of thing.

Now here’s the trouble. His baby is due November 30th. He says he is shaving it off when the baby is born, so if it’s born early, he’s going to have to pull out that stick-on mustache or do something to convince his sponsors that he really made it.

If you want to know more about this project go to  Movember’s website which is partnering with Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong campaign. There is a cool video on there that lists the statistics for both cancers and other valuable information about the diseases.

You can watch that here:

For all you bros out there growing a flavor savor, this sista supports this important cause. Govember!

Blane says I’m going to be murdering a whole bunch of innocent people because I’ll be giving out H1N1 flu shots the first week of November.

I don’t know how he got into reading all these paranoia spreading conspiracy theory sites, he’s a liberal, sometimes a bit more than I am. Apparently the idea that this flu shot is unsafe is widespread. But hell, if the government is going to wholesale kill people, the first in line would not be children, pregnant women and health care workers.

I’ve spent enough time in after-school detention to know that those two groups are on the priority list to get into the life raft.

It’s your granny Obama wants dead, correct? There aren’t enough shots to go around and those over 65 aren’t on The List (they have been exposed to something similar in their childhood, so they are less likely to contract H1N1).

Maybe we’re being immunized with some top secret serum for the germ warfare they are going to release after all the desirables get their shots?

I hope you know I’m just kidding, I believe the H1N1 flu shot is safe and I’ll be getting mine as soon as we open the shipment. If I don’t return by Thanksgiving, run for the border, the goverment is going to kill every last one of us.

Test your H1N1 knowledge with these ten easy questions.

For more information on the safety of the H1N1 vaccine and other facts about the flu, the CDCs website is :::here:::

I’ve been watching the fascinating clips by Dr. Sanjay Gupta this past week on his “Cheating Death” series that he’s using to promote his book, “Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles that Are Saving Lives Against All Odds.”

The clip from last night showed how a woman trapped in cold water without air for over two hours was brought back to life (she is currently a radiologist in a hospital in Norway, so brain function must be pretty good). Her core body temp was 56 degree F when she was rescued, so that makes her the coldest person on record to survive. You can find that article :::here::: on CNN.

It made me think for just a moment, wow, people who’ve lost loved ones in cold drowning accidents must be having some serious “what if” moments right now.

Then it hit me. My niece, Candace was a cold water drowning (December ‘06). In fact, it was so cold, I wondered if that was why the policeman who came upon the accident just minutes after she crashed didn’t go in to save her.

Here’s what happened to her.

Candace was driving home on a mostly empty road. A policeman on patrol who knew her passed her going the opposite direction. He went a mile further and did a u-turn to go back in Candace’s direction. Routine patrol. When he got to a bridge, he noticed her car was upside-down and underwater. He had just seen her about 5 minutes previously.

The back window was blown out and the officer could see part of a baby seat in the back. He assumed Candace got out of the car and took her baby with her. He did not go into the water to check and make sure. He called for backup and then called her grandparents to ask if she had walked home. All this time Candace was drowning right there in the car, she tried desperately to kick in the front windshield, her legs were found up on the dashboard and there was a spot where she had managed to crack the window with her feet.

Let me back up to the part just before the cop got there. A farmer who lived near the bridge heard the accident and went to see what all the noise was. At this time, he saw the car upside-down, but on the side of the ditch. It had not gone in the water yet. He went back home to call the police and get his tractor to pull the car out.

While he was gone, the car slid into the water.

So by the time the backup came and the place was swarming with police, not a single person thought to check the car. They were stunned when they pulled the car out and found her seat-belted in it. That was about an hour after the accident and there were no efforts to resuscitate her.

I’m not angry about this anymore, she’s gone and isn’t coming back. I’ve accepted this. Two chances for rescue were missed, farmers and cops are human, not superheroes. They have moments of stupidity just like the rest of us. (I understand the cop suffered greatly over this matter)

For some good news, over the summer, Candace’s brother and his wife had a baby girl and named her Candace.

You can read about my niece, Candace :::here:::

You may save a life.

Here’s a two minute CPR lesson I got from CNN. This is a new way of doing it, NO BREATHS are given: :::Click here:::

It was embedded in the CNN article “For young Mom, new CPR beat back death.“

These days, at the free clinic, I wear black scrubs. It’s really strange, when I got paid to work, I wore only whites. There is no hidden message of protest I’m trying to send, I guess I just don’t want to deal with all the stains that white uniforms collect. Now that I wear black scrubs, guess what? I have two white dogs.

Oh well. I still think they are super cool and different.

About the clinic, it is open twice per week and will soon be open three days a week. We can see 80 patients a night, usually. Sometimes we just don’t have enough volunteer doctors on hand. As someone at the clinic told me, “People come to this town to make money.”

It was quite a surprise to me that a free clinic even existed in this town. A friend of mine who volunteers there told me about it, otherwise I would not have known. It is not something that is advertised, but spread by word of mouth.

You might have seen film clips on the news of free clinics popping up in random cities to serve the uninsured in America. I saw one on tv that was set up in the Astrodome in Houston (I think that’s where it was), others at county fairs, some in livestock pens. Our place is in a strip mall right across the parking lot from the Democratic party headquarters for the county.

I don’t know who got there first.

Last time I volunteered, I worked as a screening nurse with my own little office. The patient comes in, I look over their medical history, check their lab work and vital signs, then ask a million questions. Some need to see the doctor, some need more labs, some just need medication refills. Some need to go straight to the hospital, they are way to sick for us. That pretty much sums up screening nurse.

Actually it doesn’t. Some of these people are not sick enough for the ER to treat them, but they are too sick for us and I don’t have the heart to tell them how sick I think they really are because there isn’t anything anybody will do about it.

And they look at me like I can really fix them, the trust they have in me, the hope they have, I can feel it, and I want to push it away but I feel terrible because that is all they have.

“Mercy” copyright Cinemagypsy

Dammit I’m not one to poke around online and see what is going on with classmates from high school, but I was looking for an old friend and ran across a class roster that mentioned a classmate of mine was dead. Not the one I was looking for, hell, I haven’t even thought of her since high school.

It doesn’t say what happened to her, and I don’t know anyone who would know, so I Googled her name and got nothing. She might have died before there even was a Google.

Deborah J. was my first school friend, and we started first grade during the early years of desegregation in the South. Our teacher had just come back from maternity leave and asked us two girls to stay in for recess to do some makeup work. That is when Deborah and I made friends, during that recess period. When the teacher returned and caught us giggling, she accused us cheating.

I don’t even think we knew what that was, cheating, but Mrs. S pulled out a wooden paddle and called us to her desk. She looked at me and said I could go outside. She didn’t spank me. I waited just outside the door, out of sight, and I heard the three loud smacks she gave Deborah. The little girl came out of the classroom, stoic, but when she saw me waiting for her, a smile stretched her face. I didn’t understand why she got hit and I didn’t, but I had a pretty good idea it had something to do with her being black.

No one liked Deborah, not even the black kids. Everyone told me she was just too damn mean. She might have been mean to them, but to me, she always had my back. She’d also sit behind me in class and braid my hair over and over again. She was studious and didn’t like it when any of the kids misbehaved in class, so maybe a bit too straight laced and strung up too tight. But a cheater she was not.

Anyway, I hadn’t thought about the paddling since it happened. The knowledge of her death brought back that memory. I’m just realizing now that the teacher had probably been on maternity leave for a couple of years as pregnant women were not allowed to teach back in those days. I’ve read they had to take two years off for that.

So this day she returned and kept us in for recess? Her first day teaching in a desegregated school. Deborah, I think, got spanked for more than just being black. She got it for having the nerve to make friends with a white kid.

That is what happened to my friend Deborah. May her soul rest in eternal peace.

I stood out on the patio in the dark, the cool breeze rushing past me and through the door, over to Blane, who was sitting on the sofa watching tv. I’d gone out there because I could hear a helicopter. I know a care-flight when I hear one.

I think I do, the heli pad was just outside the ICU backdoor, and when one approached or left our hospital, the unit would go silent, the nurses and patients would freeze, even the machines seemed to hold their breath for a moment.

There is a term for this in French, when a crowd goes quiet all of a sudden, “Un Ange Passé,” which literally translates to “An angel passed.”

Anyway, I get this thumping in my chest when I see those helicopters and a million thoughts race through my head. Usually deep dark fears relating to my own life, such as, are they transporting some teenaged driver from a car crash? I’m feeling this phantom ache for some parent out there who might be suffering the unimaginable.

And just as the copter passes directly over us, the blades frantically chopping air, Blane says what he always says in his very best fake British accent,
“You, Yes You, Stand Still Laddie!”

And I laugh as though this is the very first time I’d heard it because he’s just taken me out of a place I didn’t need to be.

I don’t think he knows the mental dynamics of the situation. Why I laugh at that one consistently, while his other ten or so other canned jokes barely cause a change in my facial expression. Like the Kevin Bacon one. Every time he sees that actor he says, “Bacon and eggs.” Blane doesn’t even have to be around, if I see Kevin Bacon, I hear it in my head. I try not to show that it drives me nuts because I am certain he is testing my patience.
Twenty-seven years to the day, and I haven’t cracked.

In my heart, I know this is one of the things he admires most about me. He says both of his parents had absolutely no patience while he was growing up. So, if I ever did explode, it would kill off something magical for him. I would never want to do that to someone who can make me feel like I’m in a Pink Floyd song. Ever.

Since the weather has finally cooled down, I decided to tackle the big job of cleaning and staining my wooden fence. I could hire someone to do the job, but I wasn’t happy with the work the last guys did (or pretty much anyone elses’ fence around here). If it had been done correctly to begin with, it wouldn’t look so crappy after just four years.

The reason wood fences, barns, whatever turn grey after being weatherized is because of the mildew. So how do you remove it? Bleach, simple household bleach.

I mixed one part water with three parts bleach and used a lawn and garden sprayer like this:

It’s so quick and effortless, it’s almost like a magic trick. The grey disappears right before your very eyes and without scrubbing. Just spray it on and it works. After about ten minutes, rinse the bleach off with the hose. Here are two fence sections, one before spraying, the other after.

The bleach solution also removes some of the stain from the previous job. It’s like starting from scratch with a brand new fence.

Of course I had to wonder, why haven’t pranksters figured this out and run around with bleach sprayers to people’s fences?

kitty wuz here

Of course it couldn’t be that easy, really. Could it?

Within minutes of me starting this job last week, it began to rain. Pouring down bucket loads of rain. Oh well, fine, I thought, it’ll keep the grass alive (if it is not raining, you need to hose the grass down for a while before and after spraying.)

So I got out there the next day to finish, and again, it started to rain. Flash flood rain.

And the next day. And the next, and the next. Is that seven days? Because I have been bleaching this freaking fence for a week, an hour or two at a time in the friggin’ rain.

And now it’s done.

I’ll let it dry for a week or so and then apply the sealer/stain. I plan to spray it, but I know that damn wind is going to fight me the entire time. I don’t look forward to it, but I know one thing for sure. It will be done correctly.

I don’t like giving my dogs human food because they have sensitive stomachs, but every once in a while I am curious to see if they would actually eat what they’re begging for.

So I was eating an apple last week and tested Mireille. She turned her nose up at it.

Then Scrappy came around. She took a couple of licks and then went crazy on it, eating everything but the stem. It’s the funniest thing because I had no idea a dog would eat that.

And enjoy the hell out of it.

We all think it’s funny.

The weather has cooled down so much over the last week I’ve been able to get out in the yard and tackle the jungle that is my yard.

I have some flowering vines that grew over the fence and onto the other side. When they bloom, my neighbor gets this lovely view of flowers spilling over the fence. We are friendly with them and the only grudge I hold against her is that she has a large window on her second floor that overlooks my patio and backyard. In fact, she has a better view of my pool than I do.

When we moved here, I hired a landscaper to put in plants that would grow up to give us additional privacy. As long as she can see us in the backyard, I feel as if I’m living in a fishbowl. And view she does. She has a desk by that window and keeps the blinds open all the time. She waves every once in a while. Once time she told me she loves looking down into our yard because of all the flowers and pretty plants. Jezuz.

And you know, five years have passed and all the plants are higher than the privacy fence except the ones in that spot in front of her window.

That just kills me.