Web of All Things

Apologies to anyone whose reading - I’m just busy beyond belief. And moving.

While I love love love my house in the Ledges, life conspires. And I’m moving to an equally great area that will likely be more convenient for me, and better for Max to get out and about. Life is shifting in a big way. It’s been brewing for a very long time, and its time to make a change.

The good thing is that my brother, who also loves my house, is going to take over the homestead and improve upon it in his own way. So, I’ll still be able to visit and enjoy the house, even if it isn’t my home base.
Details will follow eventually. But I need to be sensitive to everyone, and privacy is important around these times.

I knew something was seriously wrong as soon as I heard the words “Axis of Evil.” My stomach turned when the doctrine of pre-emption was made public. And my heart sank the day we invaded Iraq.

Wanna know why your gas is expensive? Increased demand and political instability. Whose fault is the political instability? Let’s see.

So, you call Iraq, Iran, and N. Korea the Axis of Evil. You invade #1. Number 3 restarts nuke program and U.S. goes for diplomacy, then #2, sitting on cache of oil, starts a nuclear program. Unrelated but important saber rattling with Venezuela. Oil futures analysts on wall street see the political instability and oil prices go up. Bolivia sees oil prices going up and nationalizes the oil in the country, booting out American oil companies. It spirals in on itself, creating more political instability and less supply to meet burgeoning demand.
Here’s a word for the day: diplomacy. You know, that thing that keeps the peace. It’s infuriating to watch the lack thereof in this spoiled-brat administration. I think I learned more about foreign policy doing a year of debate in high school than Bush ever did.

Oh well, at least he caught a big fish. The country will be reeling for years after his failed administration. Hope he got that fish stuffed for his wall.

Over 50 million Americans contribute to web content.

Stalkerati - keep track of your “friends.”

I used to think that Capital Hill Blue was overly alarmist, then too much happened. Now they’re editorializing that the CIA will ramp up surveillance on Americans.  So, things good to know: Skype can foil NSA wiretaps and how to protect yourself from being watched online.

Google notebook, a plug-in for the firefox browser, is an awesome tool for keeping track of sites you visit,  thoughts, to-do lists. You can choose to keep notebooks public or private. Neat.

Fo.rtuito.us - find new friends. Or not. Interesting serendipity.

Fake news rampant in mainstream media. One of the reasons alternative media is so important.

So, as soon as I checked in on a few of my favorite news aggregate sites, I saw a link to a story about how Iran passed a law stating that non-muslims would have to wear some kind of tag or insignia displaying their non-muslim status. I first saw the story here on canada.com (now its gone) and later it was picked up by the AFP. The story is not substantiated, yet weblogs across the “blogosphere” are reporting it as if it is fact.

Quite honestly, when I first read the story, my stomach turned. Whoever put the story out got the visceral reaction they wanted, at least from me. But even the AFP story admits that the story unsubstantiated, which of course makes me suspicious.

We’re in a new age of news - rumors get circulated so easily, and when the gullible public will buy assertions of “we know they’ve got WMD,” I’m certain that they’ll circulate rumors of nearly anything to build support for whatever is next.

Update: Josh Marshall has the backstory on how this bunk came to be.

Max lived 5 years on this planet without ever needing antibiotics. Now, in the span of a couple of months, he’s needed them twice - for two separate ear infections. I am not sure what’s up with that, but it’s disconcerting.

And it ruins a parent’s day, I tell you. I don’t know what’s worse, sleep deprivation or the pain of seeing your only child in excruciating pain. Or, trying to keep work going in the midst of it.

So tired.

See? I really am trying to write more. I’m also going to research how on earth I can prevent these ear infections from recurring. Not sure of the cause, so… fun fun.

Part of the reason I haven’t written a lot in the past year is that I’ve been doing a lot of inner work that doesn’t exactly go on a public weblog. I’ve learned that I am empathic; that I feel other people’s feelings. Sometimes I am not aware that I am feeling other people’s feelings, so it ends up making me feel like I am crazy sometimes, especially if I am picking up on crazy people’s feelings.

I also realized that Asperger’s Syndrome runs in my family - which might shock some of my family members who aren’t aware of that. Asperger’s is a highly functional type of autism - it’s not autism, but there are some social issues that make it difficult for those individuals to fit in socially. There are a ton of highly functioning, really smart people in the technical fields that likely have Asperger’s.

Myself somewhat included. While I likely wouldn’t be diagnosed as a classic asperger’s case, I have enough social issues and enough idiosyncrasies to make me aware that I am… different. If you look at some of the work with gifted children, you find a lot of extremely smart kids with strong sensitivities who develop skills asynchronously. In other words, book smart kids who don’t have any social skills, math geniuses who can’t write, or highly communicative kids who have no idea how to sort through all of the stimuli.

Enter the empathic abilities, and I am some kind of freak that doesn’t really have a diagnosis. I’m learning more about these types of people, because just as I was the gifted sensitive neurotic perfectionist kid, it appears that Max is one as well. He’s not only sensitive to the normal stimuli (which can cause him to become over-stimulated very easily), but he also picks up on others’ emotions and thoughts.

How to help him so he doesn’t get so easily overwhelmed, that’s a good question. There are enough books out there that explain how to prevent over-stimulation, but teaching him how to identify his own stimulation threshhold has been challenging. We’re working through it, though.

Still, I wouldn’t change his sensitivity for the world.

Here’s one of those articles about Consumer Reports’ testing of car gas mileage. They claimed that the Civic Hybrid they tested only got 26 MPG.

I wonder about that. Did they get a lemon? Did the drive aggressively? I consistently test my 05 Civic Hybrid’s MPG efficiency, and the lowest I ever got for a tank of gas was last summer and that was 43 MPG. On the last fill-up, when I decided to drive more slowly, I actually got 52 MPG.

Here’s a great article about how to get better fuel efficiency no matter what you drive: the tips are tested, find out what really works.

This is a crazy tax law. So if you buy a hybrid - early enough - you’ll get a $3400 tax credit. But the tax credit is only good for the first 60,000 cars sold be any manufacturer. So if you’re the 60,001 purchaser of a specific model, you’re SOL. What kind of ridiculousness is that? really?
Since gas hit $3 a gallon, I’ve done something unusual - I’ve slowed down. Instead of driving 75 or 80 mph, I’ve been keeping it between 55-65. It is excruciating when I’m driving into Chicago or even driving Max to school, but I hit 52 MPG on the last fillup. And that’s kinda nice.

It’s spring, and that means that everything is greened up beautifully. Bright yellow dandelions also pepper the landscape. Whenver I see a dandelion, I remember a holocaust survivor I saw interviewed who survived on wild dandelions. And he said that he never pulled up a dandelion from his lawn: they helped him live, so he lets them live.

I remembered also a session I went to at the MREA Sustainable Living Fair a few years back about the medicinal properties of weeds. And the presenter said something interesting: eat what’s in your yard. Nature has a way of balancing itself, and if a certain weed is in your yard, it’s there for a reason.

There have been quite a few weeds in my life-yard lately, but interestingly, they’re the weeds that are bringing me to a whole new state of being. I’ve learned so much from the challenges, grown so much, and claimed my own power more than ever before.

I guess that’s a really long way of saying that everything happens for a reason. Even the dandelions.