I should be doing paperwork or something else productive for my private practice.  But, I have had so many conflicting feelings about my career, that I think I will save the heavy thinking for some other day, and write a little more about family vacation memories.

This one is from when I was 13, so the memories, while still probably not exact, are a little more fleshed out.  I have rather visual way of memorizing.  While it is not "photographic", it does recreate memories as little Super 8 films in my mind.  Maybe that is how everyone's memories work!

Our trip to Washington D.C. and the outer banks of North Carolina was memorable for other reasons as well

1).  This was our first family vacation without my sister.  She was working as a tour guide at the Capitol building and or was touring with the Lion's band (Marching band.  Not cool garage band btw).

2).  I have pictures from this trip

3). My Dad was working (sortof)

The reason we were in DC, was because my dad was a delegate to the General Synod, which is the  governing body of the United Church of Christ.  So he spent most of his time in meetings while we were there.  The conference was in The Washington Hilton.  It's claim to fame is that it is the same hotel that President Regan stayed when he got shot several years later.  The place was huge!  And it had a great pool.

One of the reasons I remember so clearly that I was 13, was due to an incident at that pool.  I was reading The Exorcist.  I was too young to see the movie, but I could read the book!  I was sitting on a lounge chair by the pool when this...hippie chick, I guess you might call her, came to sit in the next chair.  In hindsight, I am pretty sure she was under the influence, but maybe she was just a spaced out, in-the-groove kind of girl.  She was in a bikini that was a little too small and she lolled languidly on her towel.

She struck up a conversation.  She asked where I was from and I told her Jefferson City which she, of course had no clue where THAT was.  She asked what I was reading and when I told her, she said, "Wow! That's really heavy!"  I'm sure she made some small talk and then she asked how old I was.  "Your only 13? Wow!  You really have your shit together for only 13"  That was the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.  She talked some more about stuff I do not recall, but I do remember her telling me that I should meet her brother and that I would like him because he looked just like Jesus.

Because my Dad was working, sort of, my Mom, brother and I did all of the touristy things.  We were hanging with another women and her daughter.  I know the daughters name was Ellen because I wrote it one the back of some picture with her in it.  We went to The Smithsonian, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, all the usual stuff.  I love that we were in an actual city because, despite it's name, Jefferson City is not one!

The rest of that trip accounted for our real vacation.  One where my dad didn't have to work.  For this phase, we drove to the outer banks of North Carolina.  We did some touristy things like visit Kitty Hawk, but mostly we hung out at the rental cabin by the shore and swam and hung at the beach.

I want to put up some pic, but the scanner is being obstinate, so look for them in another post.

I could write more about vacations and trip memories,but I am going in a different direction for awhile.  Be prepared to shift again!

 I already fell off the "write everyday" wagon.  Here is my excuse.  On Saturday, I actually saw client which took up most of the day and had me away from a functioning computer. Then we were trying to go to this Italian place for dinner. My car had a flat tire, so we were taking my husband's car.  I drive a Nissan Cube.  Don't laugh, it is really roomy on the inside.  Even my 6'2" father says it is easy to get in and out of that car.  We were driving the Honda Accord instead.  Significantly nicer, but not nearly as easy for me to enter.  When I was maneuvering my way in, my son (who has no trouble climbing in the back), slammed his door shut with my pinkie finger still in it.

It is amazing how many thoughts go through your head in a split second.  After the initial,"Oh my God!  What the...? That really hurt"  I thought, "Oh.  My pinkie is in the closed car door."  Then "I'd better not move, or I will break/tear off my pinkie"  The thought were not in any particular order.  they included "Damn, I wanted to go eat out." " Damn, I don't want to go to the hospital." " Oh look, my necklace fell off.  I'd better wait til my finger is free before I pick it up.".  I heard my husband yell at Eli to open the door, which he did.

When my finger was free, I got in the car and took a look at my poor little pinkie finger.  I was interesting to see it sticking out at a right angle to my palm. I reached down to smooth it back into place with my husband yelling "Don't touch it!"  But too late.  I pulled on it the tiniest bit and it really and truly just straightened itself out like a good little soldier.  I wiggled it around, bent it, and compared to my other pinkie.  It wasn't even swollen!

We went ahead to the restaurant, discussing how we thought we would be on our way to the ER rather that eating fish tacos and chicken mole. (The Italian place was packed. so we ended up eating Mexican)  My son said, "There's rubber around the door for a reason  My husband said, Yeah, to keep out the rain!"   I guess that cushioning for a wayward finger is strictly a fringe benefit.

If I were am Evangelical Christian, I'm sure I would think that the fact that my finger was not severed or smashed was proof that all that prayin' and church-going was the reason.  However, scientifically, I am sure that it was probably not all that uncommon of an event.

So all of that to say give me a break for not writing.  The poor little guy is still pretty sore and stiff.  I just glad it was only my pinkie!

Here's what I've noticed. 

My post have three, maybe four, distinct themes: waltzing down memory lane, kvetching about MS, professional type topics, or religion.  The last two sort of go together, so it's really just three.  Oh yeah, I get political sometimes, too but not very often.

Since it continues to be a major deep freeze right now, I think I will stick with memories of warm climates.

My mom clarified that New Orleans and Texas/Mexico were, indeed, one trip.  In New Orleans we stayed with my Dad's cousin, John and his family.  Relationship-wise, that makes him my first cousin once removed, and his kids, James and Christa are my second cousins.  There''s a lesson in familial relationships for ya!

I'm pretty sure James was a toddler and Christa was an infant,  I remember John's wife, Beth, pushing a baby carriage, so someone was an infant!  Beth was so beautiful to me.  John was a professor at Tulane at the time, and they lived in a beautiful walk-up brownstone-y apartment (my memory may completely off here.)  I thought they were the epitome of cool!  I remember that we bought a boatload of gulf shrimp for dinner, and I think we had enough for everyone to have a whole pound to themselves!  I'm sure that was the only time I got completely stuffed after just eating steamed shrimp!

I'm not sure how long we stayed, but it was long enough to have breakfast at Brennan's.   I had something call eggs sardou  (according to the Brennna's menu that is:  crispy artichokes, Parmesan creamed spinach, choron sauce)   Even though it was breakfast,we had banana's foster for dessert.  Boy that make me want to steal the cookbook my mom brought back and I'm sure she still has somewhere. ( Watch your cookbook shelf next time I visit, Mom!)

I also remember Bourbon Street.  While I remember trying to divert my gaze from the debauchery of naked girls swing from the upstairs windows, I mostly remember that I found a little shop that was playing the soundtrack to the Wizard of Oz!  The shop clerks must have thought I was a weird , white girl shop-lifter or something, because I just wanted to hang out in the store and listen to Dorothy and friends made their way down the Yellow Brick Road!

After new Orleans, we went to Texas.  We went to Brownsville where my dad grew up.  People there called my dad "little Bobbie " even though he is now 6'5".  From Brownsville we made a quick hop to Mexico for just a few hours. It was very touristy there and we shopped a bit then ate lunch.  You know how the water quality is just a little suspect in Mexico?  My dad insisted that the restaurants that catered to tourists probably had water that was just fine, so I didn't hesitate to drink away.  I thought the waiter looked a little surprised to see this very obviously Caucasian family asking for more agua.  I don't know how long it took, but I know we were at a museum when it hit me.  I spent a whole lot more time seeing the bathroom than anything cultural.  My dad insisted that is was all the fresh oranges we had been eating that were wrecking havoc with our systems.

Going through the border check coming back to Texas also sticks with me.  My sister and I had bought some marionette puppets.  One of them was a mustachioed mariachi player.  I kept singing the Frito bandidto jingle (which I am sure was suspiciously racist, but it was the 70's and we were from the midwest!) until I am sure my parents wanted to throw me out the window. I'm pretty sure I would have kept singing that little ditty right through the border check if my parents hadn't stopped me.

My parents  had bought a case of wine in Texas before we went into Mexico.  I think there was a moment of touch and go when they weren't sure whether or not the border patrol would either confiscate it or make them pay a huge fine.  Oh, the excitement of being an outlaw and sneaking an American domestic product in and back out of Mexico.

These posts say more about the nature of memory than they do about actual events.  Maybe I'll write about that sometime!
But, next time, I am venturing in Washington D.C.

Why , oh why do I not live somewhere just the weensiest bit warmer?  I may as well be living in Alaska..or Fargo.  Well, it's a moot point so I will just relive memories of warmer places.  Cue the Scooby do hand wave....

Those vacations/road trips always included boredom, lots of fights in the back seat and tons of singing.  My sister and I literally (not figuratively) sang 100 bottles of beer on the wall all the way through 100 to 1.  We started to go into negatives, but my mom put her foot down on that one.  Instead we played a round of "See who can be the quietest"  This was an obvious ploy for a blessed moment of silence, but it  just resulted in us kids trying to make each other laugh so we would "win".  My mom's a saint.

We played a lot of the alphabet game-trying to find a word on a bill board that started with each letter of the alphabet in order.  This is a good game for urban areas, where there are lots of billboards.  Not so great for those long stretches of rural nothingness with only mile markers and exit signs.  Burma shave signs would have been great, but I think they quit being a think by the 70's. We also tried to spot license plates from as many states as possible.  Never did see one from Hawaii.  Go figure.
At least once we made up our own song. Iowa is a beautiful state, but we were driving through the flattest part where the only break from monotony was trying to figure out whether we were driving through corn fields or soy beans.
So, we wrote a song that  went like this

" We took a boring trip on day
Tra la la la la la la lay
Nothing interesting came our way
Tra la la la la la la lay
So we all decided to say
Boring !!! "  (with the lat boring  drawn out with a trill, ala Joanne Worely on Laugh-in )
Obviously none of us ever hit the big time as lyricists

I also remember having to have all of the tires on the car replaced.  Apparently our steel belted radials decided to warp,  Knowing my dad, they were likely the very cheapest tires available, and they did not stand up to the hours of driving in the heat of the south.  I'm pretty sure that was the Tennessee trip.  So four new tires later, our vacation budget was seriously depleted, and we had to stay in the very cheapest hotels we could find. Oh, wait.  That would have happened anyway.  

That's my limit for the day.  I may write more at one time in the future, but my goal is to write everyday,  not to write prolifically everyday

It is negative 4 degrees outside.  That is not the windchill Tat is the temperature in Fahrenheit in the Midwest for crying out loud.  That gets me thinking about vacations, preferably to somewhere warm.

My family was a vacation family Mostly, we went camping at The Cabin in the woods.  It was way fun when we were kids and didn't care about things like electricity or flushing toilets or not finding mouse turds on your pillow.  However, we did take some actual vacations to other places occasionally.

We always drove to ny destination anywhere we went.  The highlight trips I remember the most are a trip to the Smoky mountains in Tennessee, a trip to Washington DC and the outer banks of North Carolina, a trip to New Orleans, and a trip to Texas and into Mexico.  I actually may be thinking those trips were separate, but maybe we did Louisiana and Texas all in one.  Anyway, I have very specific memories f each.

Tennessee must have been a pretty early one, because memories of that one are a little sketchy.  I remember visiting some of my mom's relatives.  I was totally enamored with my cousin (2nd or 3rd or once or twice removed)  because she had a really cool rainbow painted across the wall in her room.  I also remember that there was an international grocery store or something along those lines,  My dad bought some smoke, canned octopus tentacles.  This product bore no resemblance to calamari.  I remember having little suction cups sticking to my tongue while we were trying to chew them.
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Ialso remember going hiking in the mountains.  While I am sure it was beautiful the thing that was the most memorable (sorry Paul) is that my brother really, really, I mean REALLY had to pooh.  and seeing as how we were on the (semi) pristine side of a mountain, there were no little rest stops in the general vicinity.  Eventually, my dad took him off the path and returned with a much happier, and more comfortable, little brother.

After yesterday, I was thinking I wanted to write about lies, (The kind you tell and that George Washington did not).  But I have been sleeping a lot lately and my leakage issue (figure it out.  I am not expounding) has been out of control.

You may think that extra sleep is a good thing, and normally I think sleeping well is highly underrated.  However, I have been close to narcoleptic in the evening, and after nearly  pulling an old lady all-nighter ( only having to get up once to pee), I am sleeping till 6:30!  If I was going to bed super late, that may be acceptable.  But I am basically falling asleep on the couch watch TV at 7:30 or 8.  I 'm not talking about a light snooze, either.  I'm talking full-blown REM-wake-up-up-knowing-where-you-are type sleep.  Sometimes I feel too tired to go to bed!

My worry, as always, is that the insidious worsening of scar tissue in my brain is again making a ploy to make living life even harder.  I have already graduated from a cane to a walker.  No one ever questions my need for handicapped parking, and I have become a connoisseur of incontinence products.  I'm 52, and I see ads for AARP with women in high heels and mini skirts, or men climbing around on rocks, or couples dancing  the night away and I get pissed.  Even if I could do any one of those things, I couldn't stay awake long enough to enjoy them.

I am aware that, in the grand scheme of things, I am pretty lucky.  I have truly amazing, caring doctors.  I have a supportive family, and I am able to drive and maintain a semblance of independence.  I am aware of other people with MS who struggle through sub-par healthcare and unrestrained symptoms.  But sometime, I just want to whine.

I'll got off the pity pot tomorrow and tryto be interesting.

I love it when things are empirically validated!

Empirical validation means that someone somewhere did some kind of study and found that the resulting information, within a good range of certainty,  supports or does not support something that people want to know such as global warming is real and trickle down economics doesn't work.

Here are some of the things that have been empirically validated that I personally think are really cool

1).  Marijuana is not a gateway drug.  Actually, you can't prove a negative so what is really empirically validated is that there is no evidence to support that pot is a gateway drug.   So smoke away.  Unless you are a teenager.  It is also empirically validated that early use of marijuana is correlated with development of schizophrenia as an adult.  Of course corelation does not equal causation, but why take the risk?  Put down that joint, you preteen kids who shouldn't be smoking anything anyway!

2).  Complaining is good for you.  It helps you to get things out of your head and examine them.  It actually lets other people know that they aren't alone in their dissatisfaction and that can lead to camaraderie and connection.  Of course, maybe t's not such a good idea to complain about your boss to your boss.  But complaining about your boss to your co-workers lets you feel more in charge of the situation and your feelings and can lead to finding solutions or some resolution to manage the situation differently. But be aware that...

3).  Classic brainstorming doesn't work very well.  Group brainstorming is having everyone bring all their ideas to the table and then have everyone mull them around.  Everyone is supposed to let lose with all of their ideas no matter how crazy.  The problem is, people are not necessarily going to let everyone hear that their best solution is to have a singing gorilla deliver a telegram to let someone know they are fired, or that the thing to do with all those extra donated office chairs, is to paint them and auction them off at the next dinner dance. (That one was my idea that no one liked).  People don't want to expose themselves , and people think that, when they are in a group, it is someone else's job.

I could come up with a billion things that have some kind of empirical evidence.  Some things are useful. some are not.  It is also possible to go overboard.  In my field everyone is all about best practice.  That's great, but it means that some types of interventions are discredited and others are put on a pedestal.  Other types of treatment become so obsessed with being done correctly that they become lost as viable options.  People have let me know that Play Therapy doesn't work because it has not been empirically validated.  So does that mean that everything that has not had a university research-based study done to prove that it works, actually is ineffective?

You also must look at who did the research and what is their motivation to do it.  Did a cigarette company do research to support that smoking actually does make you look cool?  You also have to look at risks outweighing benefits.  Are you willing to look cool at the risk of developing cancer?

Also, don't forget that correlation does not equal causation thing. Kids who love to read have been highly correlated with having parents who own lots of books.  However, that doesn't mean that if you want your kids to read,  you should fill your living room wall with shelves of encyclopedias and romance novels. Remember that things being correlated does not mean that they is any relationship to causality.  I love to read, but I don't ever remember seeing my Dad's book collection and thinking "Oh, maybe books are fun!"

So, be aware that some of the thing that are accepted as true may be proved wrong through research (like telling kids they are smart all  the time is just settiig them up to be neurotic about failure)  Some research is crap (like the guy who found that vaccines cause autism admitted to faking data and outcomes), And finding out something is empirically validated, doesn't necessarily make it better than something else or mean it's good for everyone. I probably wouldn't take my 98 year old grandmother for her yearly mammogram, or tell her to quit smoking even though those things are absolutely proven to have positive benefits,

In the long run, research is important to make life better and make thing work for the good of all. Now, can someone please empirically validate that binge eating chocolate chip cookies while watching a Harry Potter marathon in you pajamas is actually good for you?