#91 All I Want for Christmas....

Dear Daughter -

I'm writing this letter to you in the journal to make it more real than if I said it over the phone.  You always want hints for gifts - well here's a command.

This is what I want for Christmas:  I want 5 or so gifts, costing no more than $2 or so each.  They should each be different. They can be garage sale items, something you made, discards from your home, but not jokey.  I want them wrapped prettily, in different papers.  I would like each of them to include a short personal note from you.  And here's the most important part - I want them mailed at intervals, like two days apart, some before and some after Christmas, so they arrive over a space of maybe 2 weeks.

This will entail some work for you, but that's what I want.  I LOVE finding surprises in the mail!  Your major cost and effort should be in the wrapping and periodic mailing - that's the real gift.

Now for a few hints:  I like those little soluble sheets of breath freshener in the snap-open plastic cases, but they are hard to find around here (they're usually next to the cash registers).  My Christmas tree is Victorian - silver and gold and lace and pearls and glass.  I don't much care for scented candles, but I like incense.  Whatever happened to Tasti-Cakes? (Sp?)  If they exist, I like the butterscotch ones.  I like dark butterscotch candy in general (not the yellow crap), and the regular mix of JellyBelly jellybeans.  I'm still looking for that cheap WalMart lipstick from a few entries back.  I like those itty-bitty flat flashlights that you can put on keyrings.  I had a dishmop - it's like an oldfashioned cotton string floormop but smaller, on a wire stick - that I loved, but the plastic handle part fell off, and all the grocery store currently has are sponge ones.  I dearly love cheap bubblebath (the stuff that comes in jugs - I like to make it "glug" when I pour it in the tub - if it's the "good" stuff, I hesitate to use as much as I really want to), but that might be too expensive to mail.  I could use some pretty-but-not-cutsy simple fat elastic bands for pony tails - mostly in the black gray brown white green color ranges.   If you see any of the type where you overlap the balls, but with something other than balls, they'd be nice too.  Knee-high patterned "pants socks" in black, tan, or "skin-color".  (Discount shoe stores frequently have them really cheap.)  My mechanical pencils take 0.5 mm lead.  My stapler takes standard Swingline staples.  I don't need any soap - I have a backlog of nice scented stuff.  Don't need gloves or scarves or calendars - although a 2-year calendar booklet for my purse would be handy.  The ones I'm thinking of are about the length and width of a hand.   

The above applies to all gift-giving occasions. 

Love,

Mom

#90 Red and Blue by IQ

[There used to be a table here, which listed states by average IQ, colored blue and red depending on how they went in the election.  The states at the top of the list were all blue.  The bottom was all red.  It was amusing, but it was wide, and made the whole journal wide, which was a pain, so I deleted it after a few weeks.  Contact me if you'd like a copy.]

#89 Snort....

New Version of "Survivor" Series to debut...

A television network is developing a "Texas Version" of "Survivor" and "The Amazing Race". Contestants must travel from Amarillo, Texas, through Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and back to Amarillo, through San Marcos and Lubbock ... driving a Volvo ... with a bumper sticker that reads: "I'm for Kerry, I'm Gay and I'm Here to Take Your Guns".

The first to complete the round trip is the winner!

==============================

Failed World Survey:

"Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?"   The survey was a huge failure.

In Africa they didn't know what "food" meant.

In Eastern Europe they didn't know what "honest" meant.

In Western Europe they didn't know what "shortage" meant.

In China they didn't know what "opinion" meant.

In the Middle East they didn't know what "solution" meant.

In South America they didn't know what "please" meant.

And, in the USA they didn't know what "the rest of the world" meant!

(Praveen Muley)

#88 Is It Christmas Already?

I can remember my mother being annoyed when the stores started putting up Christmas decorations and playing carols the day after Thanksgiving.  She thought that was too early, that it diluted Thanksgiving.  Now, they're starting the day after Hallowe'en, and I'm annoyed.   

#87 The Box of Bent Pieces

I spent the first 30 years of my life thinking there was something very wrong with me, that I was either very stupid or slightly crazy.  I was very good at taking tests.  Exceptionally good at all kinds of logic, analysis, and synthesis.  But I couldn't remember the name of the street I lived on, the name of the product I was working on, formulas (for example, my major was math, but I could never remember the quadratic formula.  I derived it anew myself every time I needed it during a test or task!  Same with all the geometry theorems.) and sometimes words just disappeared.  I'd open my mouth, and nothing came out.  Then I found out that I had a type of learning disability.  I wasn't stupid or crazy at all.  It had boundaries.  I could take the "bent" parts and put them in a box.  Once I defined the boundaries of that box, I could compensate. 

I had told Jay about my discovery of how my mind worked, and how much it meant to me to know that the hiccups were not all-encompassing, that the rest worked better than fine.  That got Jay thinking.  He said that he thought maybe he had a problem, too. 

He described it as a concentration/distraction thing.  That when he was working on something that interested him, he tended to get into it so deeply that he'd forget time, food, everything.  He'd get so deep that he'd forget the objective, and start going in circles.  Like if you asked him to paint a stool, four hours later he'd be devising tests to determine the chemical composition of the paint, and the stool still wouldn't be painted.  However, at the same time, he would be easily distracted by almost any little thing.  That's why he had the TV on all the time.  It blocked out all the minor distractions, but at the same time provided a constant low-level distraction that kept him from going too deeply "under".  He said that when he was a child, he was always in trouble at school because he kept forgetting that he had to sit still, and he'd keep getting up to look at things in the room or out the window.    

He and his ex had gone through like six or seven counselors, psychiatrists, and psychologists in the two years before they separated, so Jay was not averse to "head doctors".  A few months after we were married, he was diagnosed as having Adult ADD, and he took Ritalin for a year.  I saw a definite difference, but he didn't, so he quit.  (Later, I discovered that if you don't have ADD and take Ritalin, it acts as a stimulant - what I had noticed as an improvement was increased energy.)  So he still had no answers.

After we'd been married about 2 1/2 years, he said that he had another problem - he couldn't judge people's reactions.  Logically, he could figure out what might make someone angry, but in practice, he never saw it coming.  He'd ask me, how did you know that person was getting angry (before the actual outburst), and I'd say that I could see her eyebrows going down and her lips tightening.   That mystified him.  He couldn't pick up verbal clues, either.  If you didn't actually laugh, or cry, or shout, he didn't know that you were amused, or sad, or angry.  He'd come home from work all upset because someone had gotten angry at him, over time it had apparently built up to a confrontation, and he never saw it coming.

That may be one reason we got along so well.  I have an unusually expressive face (gets me into trouble sometimes), but more, I don't hesitate to tell someone that something is bothering me.  I give plenty of explicit warning.

I tried to find someone in the area who could give him a battery of tests to determine what was going on, but there wasn't anything.  I guess I misjudged the state of the art.  All the educational psychologists seemed to rely on anecdotes - that's how we ended up with the ADD diagnosis.  (Also, I suspect that the doctor we saw had Ritalin for a hammer, so he saw everything as an ADD nail.)

Then when the tumor was discovered, that's when he finally got tested.  Before and after his surgeries and during rehab, he was given cognitive and physical tests, so they could determine what had or had not been affected.  In all of the many doctor's notes, he is described as presenting a "flat affect" - in other words, no animation.  One of the doctors told me that they were shocked to find that, shown faces displaying various emotions, Jay could identify only the most blatant.   He asked me if I was aware that my husband was high-functioning autistic.  Possibly Asperger's Syndrome.

Neither the doctor nor I said anything to Jay about it, but somehow, somewhere, Jay found a description of Asperger's himself.  He came running into the kitchen about six months after the first surgery, and said "I have Asperger's Syndrome!" 

Early in the second year of fighting the tumor, he said that he had probably been depressed all his life.  That he had never really felt a part of what was going on around him, probably because so much of it either went over his head or overwhelmed him to where he shut it out.   (He was starting to build his own box, to put the bent pieces in.)   So we went searching to find someone to whom he could talk about autism and depression, and who might perhaps treat it or teach him to cope with it.  Jay had finally realized that he was a good whole person, with a small disability which was now in a box, and he wanted to experience life without the defenses he'd built up over the years.  He was in a hurry to be opened. 

It was a frustrating search.  Every doctor simply assumed "of course you are depressed, you have a death sentence", and that's all they wanted to talk about - how he felt about his diagnosis, how he felt about dying.   That isn't where he/we wanted to go at all!  Jay was very positive about his treatments.  He was convinced that he would beat it, right up until the end.  He didn't want to talk about his death - he wanted to talk about his life!  These doctors weren't helping at all.  In the end, he was just put on an antidepressant, and that was that.  It didn't do much.  What he wanted to do was to learn how to experience life, to drop his armor.  A pill wasn't going to change habits built up over a lifetime.  He needed cognitive/behavioral therapy.

The diagnosis of autism explains a lot about him.  He had a closet full of gorgeous birthday and Christmas gift sweaters that he never wore, because he "can't stand the feeling" on his arms.  He flinched when anyone touched him lightly or without warning.  He claimed he could see the flicker of fluourescent lights.  Music confused him, especially vocal and instrumental mixed.  He was oblivious to women flirting with him. The excessive concentration/distraction problem mentioned above.  Obsessions. The way he would joke at inappropriate moments.  He always tucked his shirts in, even T-shirts, because he couldn't handle them moving across his body.  His excessive shyness.  The way he would quickly form habits, and then get nervous when a habit was disrupted.  Lots of stuff.  A lot of it sounds like typical male behavior, but in Jay it went to extremes.  I used to tell him he just had an excess of testosterone.

I hadn't realized until after he was gone how much I had adapted to his needs without even thinking about it.  I quickly learned to touch him firmly, and warn before touching.  I didn't play music when he was home.  I'd check on him frequently when he was doing something at home, to keep him on track.  We'd go over what he did at work each day, and talk about what was contributing to the objectives, and what was a side track he should not follow the next day.  I ran interference for him in social situations.  I clued him in when others were not likely to be receptive to puns.  I was very specific about my own feelings, so he wouldn't be caught off guard.    

With a few more years, Jay could have learned to compensate, we could have worked out a pattern, and he could have lived more fully.  I wish we had gotten together sooner.  It pleases me to think that I made him feel safe enough to look beyond the bars, to feel that he deserved more.

#86 Paranoia

Fear leads to paranoia.  Paranoia leads to conspiracy theories. 

I was telling an acquaintance recently that I don't like the idea of electronic voting.  I know too much about computer bugs and bad code.  Plus there's no paper trail.

He said, "Oh, but that's the GOOD part."

Me, ""What's the good part?"

He, "No paper trail."

Me, "Huh?  How?  Oh.  I see.  I guess it depends on who wrote the code and how they want it to come out."

According to an article in Newsweek sometime this past spring, the owner of the company that supplied almost all the machines is a rabid Christian Right Bushy.  I'd love to see a map of the precincts using electronic voting overlaid on a map of how the counts went. 

#85 @#$%^& AOL!

As often happens, the previous entry lost all paragraph breaks after it was saved.  I attempted to edit it, and it wouldn't go to an edit page.  Then I tried to delete it and start over, and it refused to delete.  Buncha poopy!

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Postscript - so after I did this entry, I tried to edit #84 again, and this time it let me.  So then I decided to delete this entry.  AOL asked "Are you sure you want to delete this entry?", and had highlighted ALL the entries for today.  (Note that they are all under one date.)  I wasn't sure whether only #85 or all entries under this date would be deleted.  So I hit Cancel.  More poopy!

Yesterday I had occasion to consult AOL live help (chat), and I accused him "to his face" of being a machine. I was getting canned Help scripts that were keyed off keywords in my complaint, but that had nothing to do with my REAL problem - like - hey - this thing went to the spam folder, and according to your documentation, it shouldn't have.  I had to move it from the spam folder to my inbox.  That email should have been recognized as non-spam.  Answer: To look at your spam folder, blah blah.  To move mail from the spam folder to your inbox, blah, blah....  Isn't it obvious from what I said that I already know how to do that?   I was amused (yeah, that's the word) that only after I complained that "AOL lied!  You aren't alive!", I began to get real answers to my real input.  I guess "alive" is the keyword that queues the real person.

#84 Psycho Test

Read this question, come up with an answer and then scroll down to the bottom for the result. This is not a trick question. It is as it reads.

A woman, while at the funeral of her own mother, met this guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, so much her dream guy she believed him to be just that! She fell in love with him right there, but never asked for his number and could not find him. A few days later she killed her sister.

Question: What is her motive in killing her sister? (Give this some thought before you answer).

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Answer: She was hoping that the guy would appear at the funeral again.

If you answered this correctly, you think like a psychopath. This was a test by a famous American Psychologist used to test if one has the same mentality as a killer. Many arrested serial killers took part in the test and answered the question correctly.

If you didn't answer the question correctly good for you. If you got the answer correct, please let me know so I can take you off of my email list unless that will tick you off , then I'll just be extra nice to you from now on.

.......found on a Mensa website.

#83 Rebuff Unethical Competitors!

Both toll booths at the bridge usually have signs over them saying "E-ZPass" and "Full Service".   During especially busy times, the one on the left changes to "E-ZPass Only".  When I crossed the bridge the other day, the E-ZPass sign was missing on the right, so I moved to the left lane.  When I stopped at the gate, I asked the attendant, "... no sign on the right lane.  Can I still use E-ZPass there?"  

He answered, "Yeah.  They just took the sign down.  It's getting rebuffed."

I wondered about that all the way across the bridge.

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"Reality" shows.  Lots of them on TV.  They're inexpensive, I guess (although the best, "The Amazing Race" probably isn't cheap).  Every time I hear a contestant say "I'm a tough competitor!", I have an instantly negative reaction.  I figure anyone who describes themselves as a tough competitor is someone who would see nothing wrong with doing immoral or unethical things to get ahead.  And they usually do.

I'm afraid that these shows are teaching young people that it's rewarding to be that kind of "tough competitor".

#82 Blather

A few entries ago I said I'd like to get up earlier.  One way to do it is to drink a lot of water before I go to bed.  Then at the first flicker of consciousness in the morning I have to get up, instead of burrowing deeper and going back to sleep, and then I tend to stay up (unless I'm cold.  Cold will send me back into my nice warm nest.)  The danger is that sometimes it backfires, and the pressure wakes me at like 4 am, and then I can't get back to full sleep for hours.  

This morning I was awakened at 6:30 when something crashed into the glass wall in the bedroom.  Whatever it was, it was huge, and shook the wall.  I'm surprised the glass held.  (Something hit Tuesday morning too, but not as hard.)  I jumped up and ran to look, expecting to find a stunned goose on the deck, but there was nothing there.  Not even the dust print a bird will usually leave.  

Is it possible it was another of those mysterious "bangs in my mind", that I mentioned many entries back?

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Wanted to call Daughter.  Cell phone - no long distance charge.  Where's cell phone?  Usually in purse.  Not in purse.  Hmmmm.  Back problems, was taking cell phone to bed because has numbers in memory.  Look in bed.  No cell phone.  Hmmmm.  Ahah!  Made a 1 am run to PO Tuesday night - took cell just in case.  Look in car.  Not on passenger seat in car.  Hmmmm.  Maybe slid to side?  Look between passenger seat and door.  No phone.  Notice that litter bag between seats is full.  Empty litter bag.  Cell phone falls out.  Call daughter.  Don't tell her Mom is losing it.

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On TV the other night, a very self-satisfied woman said "Jesus has rewarded us".  She lives with her husband and two kids in a California shore-side mini-mansion, buys anything she wants whenever she wants, goes to spas, gets her nails done, spends afternoons at the beach, etc.  Beauty and relaxation. Her husband works out of an office at home.  The good life.   

During the program, we find that her husband is under enormous stress to keep the money flowing in.  Worries constantly.  Works like 80-90 hour weeks, leaves his desk and phone only to sleep.  Has no involvement in his children's lives.  They think of him only as "that guy in the office".   

"Jesus has rewarded us"?  She is completely oblivious.  

The statement annoyed me for a second reason - I am annoyed when people ascribe to Jesus powers that belong only to God (assuming that....etc.)  And don't give me that "three in one" excuse - the picture people have in mind, when they say something like that, isn't God.

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Thoughts on the quote from John Kerry in the previous entry, "...we all wake up as Americans. And that -- that is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune ...":  

I don't know about that. Americans in general seem to me to be awfully parochial and ... I'm having trouble finding the words ... conceited?  What's the word that means you don't know much about anything, but think you know best about everything?  What's the word that means "my way is the right way and if you think differently you're stupid"?  Arrogance? 

Americans are disliked or downright hated all over the world, and it doesn't seem to bother us at all.  (I shouldn't say "us", I should say "them", because it does bother me.)  If they think about it at all, they just say "Oh, they're just jealous."    Jealous that we think we own the world's oil and can burn as much as we like?  That we think we own the skies and can foul them as we like?  That only we are capable of controlling certain weapons?  That we can tell other countries not to cut forests, while we can destroy our own and any others we can make money from?   That ... fill in the blank ... lots of choices.

One of the foundations of our government is religious freedom - but apparently ONLY if you are some brand of Christian.  A major magazine surveyed immigrants about religious freedom in the United States, and that was pretty much their conclusion.  Immigrants are a pretty good judge, because their eyes are clear, their minds haven't been bent yet, and they are very aware of the American effort to bend their minds.   

And even though we don't have an American version of the pope, there are lots of people who are more than willing to interpret for us what God wants us to do.  Right now, Bush is in a news conference on TV, telling us that "we" don't push any particular version of religion on anyone.  (He actually said those exact words as I was typing the sentence!)  Ummmm.  Uhuh.  Yeah.  Sure.   You are blinded by your righteousness.   

American tourists in other countries are notorious.  They are loud and demanding, and ignore or dismiss the local customs.  Daughter and I stayed in a small B&B/hotel in a slate mining village in Wales.  The guests were us, an English honeymooning couple, and three late-middle-aged American women with a teenaged daughter.   We were all together for dinner and then later in the evening in the sitting room, and the American women plain embarrassed me.  They asked stupid questions of the host, hostess, and honeymoon couple, loudly complained about the service (things just don't taste right, not even plain meat, and haven't you people ever heard of teaspoons? or mixing faucets?), bragged about how much more convenient everything was back home, shouted to each other down the halls, and generally made their presence loudly known.  

The morning that Daughter and I were to check out, I was standing next to the office window looking at some tourist flyers, when I heard the host say to the hostess, "The English woman and her daughter will be checking out this morning."   

She, "What English woman?"

He, "The little woman with the daughter."

She, "They're not English."

He, "Well, where are they from, then."

She, "I don't know, but I don't think they're English.  They may be Welsh.  (Looking in file)  Oh, here is is.  They're American (with surprise)."

He, "Are you sure?  That can't be right.  They're much too nice."  

I stuck my head around the corner and said "Thank you."  

One of the reasons I haven't traveled lately (beside inertia) is that I can't think of any country I'd want to go to these days as an American.  I'd be ashamed to  identify myself as such.

#81 Kerry's Words

"We worked hard, and we fought hard, and I wish that things had turned out a little differently.

"But in an American election, there are no losers, because whether or not our candidates are successful, the next morning we all wake up as Americans. And that -- that is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune that can come to us on earth.
 -John Kerry            

I stole this from "Patrick's Place", another AOL journal.  I think Patrick will forgive me.

#80 Daughter's ...uh... Nails

Daughter has contributed a scan of her hand.  No fingernails!  But the for kind of work she does, very short nails are necessary.  I kept mine trimmed short when I was on the rescue squad.

I think her larger complaint is not that they are short, but that they just don't grow, so if she ever wanted them long, it won't happen. 

The tips of her fingers are broad and flat (which I've heard indicates artistic/musical sensitivity), which means that her nails are broad and flat.  Mine are narrow and curved - the ring finger nail is a full half-circle in cross section.  I suspect that the more side-to-side curve in the top surface of the nail, the stronger they are.  Physics! 

So, daughter, it looks to me like you are doubly suited to the guitar!

#79 Fonts

AOL offers only a few fonts for Journals.  If you want more choice, I guess you have to compose under some other editor, and copy into the journal, but that can cause some strange problems (the most obvious being that you lose the paragraph breaks), and you could end up with an entirely different, and unexpected, font.  There are things you can do to avoid the glitches, but it's esoteric. 

The size is something else.  For some fonts, 14 is bigger than 12.  For others, 14 is merely darker than 12.  Arial and Arial Black are crazy - what you see here is NOT what it looks like on the edit page.  And then, there's the "System" font, which ignores size altogether.   Also, what you see on the journal "entry" page bears no relationship whatsoever to what you see IN the journal.   Sigh. 

So I have made this little template to help me decide.  If you have an opinion, let me know.

This is Arial.  This is 10.  This is 12.  This is 14.

This is Arial Black.  This is 10.  This is 12.  This is 14.

This is Arial Narrow.  This is 10.  This is 12.  This is 14.

This is Comic Sans MS.  This is 10.  This is 12.  This is 14.

This is Courier New.  This is 10.  This is 12.  This is 14.

This is System.  This is 10.  This is 12.  This is 14.

This is Times New Roman.  This is 10.  This is 12.  This is 14.

This is Verdana.  This is 10.  This is 12.  This is 14.

Note that the Times New Roman always looks like Times New Roman on the journal edit page, but when I "save" it, it is transformed to Verdana. 

I like Arial, but 12 came out  too small and 14 was too large.  Now, having done this experiment, I find that I should use 10, which in AOL-land falls between 12 and 14.  (No, one is not allowed to type in a number - one must choose from a drop-down list.) 

I think there are some bugs.  Again I say - bad beta!!!!

#78 Almost Whole Again!

I almost made it to dance class this evening.  I got up early this morning (which always feels so good I wish I'd do it more often), and then went to vote, at a church up the road.  The TV tonight is talking about record turnouts - not here, I guess.  At 11 am, I was the only person there.   (There's a retired widow in Florida whose journal I read, who says that she tried 5 times to vote early in Florida but the lines were always more than 2 hours long, but today there was almost no one there.  Odd.)

After I left the church, I passed a road I'd never been down before, so I turned around and explored it.  I LOVE having the compass in the car!  I can plot a route on roads I've never been on before, just by watching the compass.  I managed to wander for an hour, and still come out on route 199 just east of the village, exactly where I wanted to be.  The back roads are so pretty now, all covered with leaves.  I had to stop twice to let large flocks of wild turkeys cross.  In my wandering, I passed two other polling places, and there were very few cars there, too.

Then I visited a jeweler in the village who designs and makes all the settings for his jewelry.  I had bought a pleating attachment for my sewing machine, and it doesn't quite fit.  The needle comes down just to the right of the center hole.  These attachments used to be adjustable, and in fact, the adjustment spot has a slot that looks like it should allow you to slide the mechanism left and right, but instead of an adjustment screw, there's a permanent rivet.  (Probably because people would allow the screw to loosen, letting the needle hit the plate, break, and fly into a face - instant lawsuit!)  Thanks to Jay's fascination with the tiny, I have some wonderful itty-bitty brass bolts complete with nuts and washers that would work just fine in that slot.  So I thought maybe someone with a tiny tool and a steady hand could maybe punch/drill out the rivet.  Ahah!  A jeweler! 

He managed to move the mechanism without removing the rivet, and showed me where to tap it to adjust it further if necessary.  He didn't charge, and gave me 50% off anything in the shop (they have an invitation-only sale going), so I walked out with a very pretty amethest/citrine ring (one stone - it shades from purple to yellow - the two colors grew next to each other naturally) that I had fallen in love with while he was working on the pleater. 

Then I ate lunch (open-face pot roast sandwich) at Betty's in the middle of the village (the best cole slaw!), where I sat in a corner in the window and read a Newsweek, then I went to the grocery store and bought milk and yogurt.   Saw Jay's ex there, but managed to avoid her.  

Then I went across the river to the Wal-mart, to see if I could still buy a particular lipstick - I love it and it isn't sold online, only at Wal-Marts and Rite-Aids.  I want to buy five, and stick them in the refrigerator for the future.  They had the maker (Jane by Sassaby), but not the particular line (Lucky Star) let alone the color (Starlet Rose - a mauve lipgloss with sparkles), but I got to chatting with a Wal-Mart lady (Ellen) whose sister works in cosmetics at a larger store out route 28 somewhere, and she's going to check with her sister for me.  I felt almost silly asking for it.  "Jane" is for teenyboppers, not grown up ladies.  But I like the sparkly transparency and the way it feels on. 

By the time I got home, it was 4:30 pm, and my back was feeling fine!  I was sooooo happy!

By 5:30 I was feeling the effects of perhaps overdoing.  I had an ache at the top back of my left hip.  By 6:15, when I would have had to leave for class, it had expanded to both hips.  It's not pain, just a tired achy feeling, so I'm not unhappy, but I think it would be a good idea not to push it.  So I've missed the third class in a row.

I have to be careful not to lose tone in my back, so I'm going to have to start pushing pretty soon.  Maybe tomorrow..........................