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Maria from IN

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Everything posted by Maria from IN

  1. When my boyfriend was "blessed" with a stray pregnant dog, we put her pups on store-brand dog food for a while, but they were just too sick and not very active at all. We switched them to a Science Diet variety, and their energy level (and digestion) improved dramatically. When I brought the runt of that litter home, I continued feeding him the Science Diet Lamb and Rice, but his digestive problems were slowly returning. Bouts of nausea and vomiting only prompted exclamations of "Parvo! He must have Parvo!" from the receptionist at the vet's office. One day I asked her for the Prescription Diet catalog she kept behind her desk and asked her to order a food without beef, corn, or wheat. Potato and Duck, I think it was. He did wonderfully on that food, but it's $45 for an 18 pound bag--though it lasted six weeks. I found a brand at Kroger called Brandon Farms Pork and Barley variety which is a little cheaper, I don't have to order it, and Fiver likes it so much we also use it for training treats. To stretch our dollar we supplement it with veggies and brown rice. It takes a while to find the food that's exactly right for your dog, but it's worth it. Don't think that the only food they need comes out of a bag. Fresh vegetables and grains are healthy, too.:001_smile:
  2. That's a sight better than the truck that skidded off the road this afternoon with 8500 pounds of dynamite and 26,000 pounds of blasting agent! Granted, I'm allergic to wheat, but the Oreos will kill me a lot more slowly than the dynamite...:D
  3. I can't really think of an entire book at the moment, but I can think of several people that should read the cover of Stop Dressing Your Six Year Old Like a Skank....;) ...not that they'd get the message, probably.:confused:
  4. :grouphug: I had a similar experience when I was 15, 5'9" and 140 pounds. I have always had long legs, and in the eighties it was excruciatingly difficult to find pants that were long enough. Mom told me with a laugh, "You know, you wouldn't need pants that were so long if you didn't have so much a$$ to put in them." It's amazing how much a girl can restrain herself when her 5'6", 230-pound mom makes a comment like that... Of course, she was the same woman who, after letting my brother flounder in college seven years (to finally settle on a major and get a 2-year degree), yanked me out of college after 2 years, giving up a scholarship and the honors program with only a non-committal "Well, it's okay because I didn't like what you were studying anyway." By then I was well-versed in biting my tongue and pretending like she never said anything...:glare:
  5. I definitely regretted reading Alive, about the soccer team (and others) that crashed their plane in the Andes and eventually had to start eating their dead comrades. The part about cooking on scavenged metal parts of the plane is something I can't forget and just gives me the shivers. As far as movies go, definitely the Exorcist--and there was one in the early eighties that I saw when I was thirteen called Threads about British families just before and 13 years after nuclear war. The possibility was still very much in our minds at that time and it just spooked the bejeebers out of me.
  6. Wonderful! :w00t: With all my food allergies this is one of the few portable foods I can take with me. My mom and I were just talking about trying to work out some sort of recipe for these! Thanks
  7. I wouldn't sweat it, either, however... When I applied to graduate school the professors in the department commented about how I didn't take the "cake" classes the others were taking to keep their GPAs up. They would rather have seen someone challenge themselves and get a few B's than keep a schedule that doesn't seem to be challenging them. Granted, that was for graduate school, but undergrad institutions may appreciate the same. Either way I think she already has a strong foundation. By junior year I think colleges are wondering if the student has found an interest (like Spanish or dance):001_smile: and delved more deeply into it rather than done a whole bunch of things and barely scratched the surface.
  8. "Then my dad said, oh yeah, Aunt (his sister) was left-handed, but that was when they tried to change lefties to righties, for whatever reason. So I talked to my aunt, she said she can't write well with her left OR her right now, and it was always frustrating for her! Glad they don't do that anymore, at least I hope they don't!" Unfortunately, they still do this. My son throws and eats with his left hand, and really has to concentrate to kick a ball with his right foot. The eye doctor says he is left eye dominant, and he would write and color and paint with both hands--whenever he got tired, he would just switch. Then came preschool. To "graduate" from the program, they had to write their name legibly so they could apply their names to all that was produced from the kindergarten cut-and-paste oblivion they put the kids through here. I told the teacher three times in the year and a half he was there that I was aware of what was going on and that he is the product of a right handed daddy and left handed mommy and I didn't want him pushed. She agreed each time, but secretly pushed him to his right hand, and several months later when we were doing kindergarten his writing was very shaky and several letters were still backwards. Once I tried to convince him to switch to his left, which I knew would be much steadier given what I knew about him, and he started to cry and said, "But Mrs. N. said if I ever do it again with my other hand I would mess it all up." That was when I decided we were homeschooling for good.:cursing:
  9. I wear a women's 11, and my 13 year old wears a men's 11 clodhopper. :D My feet are narrow, so I call them "skis" rather than feet. :smilielol5:
  10. I knew the jig was up when I started craving orange juice. Because of issues with heartburn that I've had since I was 15, I never drink orange juice. I started craving it with each of two pregnancies, and when I drink it, I have no tummy trouble whatsoever. This was right before the commercials were coming out that talked about women drinking their orange juice if they wished to conceive. :blink:
  11. Last July I counted Motorsports Camp at a local university as school. My son loves racing and wants to make a career out of it, and it was good for him to learn the computer design, health and human performance, and business management sides of it. He learned it's not just about driving fast--worth every penny. I would say Orchestra camp falls into that category.
  12. Mine is a picture of then 11 year old Jake, when I had the camera out and was taking pictures of him like I do every year around his birthday. He'd had enough by then, and wanted to look extra charming...;) I've thought about putting up my other favorite, which is Jake with his shirt pulled up over his head so he looks like the headless boy in the rugby shirt, but I was afraid it might look a little...disturbing. :001_huh:
  13. I just finished my BS at Indiana State, and I'm going into the Masters in Mental Health Counseling in the fall. There's just J and me, and he's 13 now, so it's gotten a lot easier. My mom lives a block away, so I really don't worry about J too much. Since he's 13, he can pretty much get along for a couple of hours on his own while I'm in class. He's learned to get his chores done by the time I get home and cook his own lunches. We have used Switched On Schoolhouse for everything but History this year and he's doing well. I still do many of his lessons with him, but he's learning with the scheduling that's built into the program that he's going to have to get used to a deadline. This last year has been horrible--17 hours in the fall semester, and 16 hours with Field Placement in the spring--and I'm exhausted. I'm looking forward to only taking 9 hours and doing internship at the same time! I'm sure the material will be more difficult, but at least I will find it interesting. I decided a few years ago that working in a factory was going to kill me one way or the other, and my mind was rotting in that place anyway. Also, I realized I couldn't expect J to go to college if I didn't even bother, and I think it's good for him to see. His dad hasn't worked for the last 5 years, and I want J to know that actual grown-ups get off their duffs and go for what they want instead of whining about it. ;) I also don't get any support from J's dad, and I want to have a decent career so I can afford to help him with school when the time comes. ;) Also, I really like going to school these days. I didn't really appreciate it right after high school because I didn't really know what I wanted out of it. Now that I know, I work harder to get there and enjoy it more.
  14. Deadliest Catch Work Out--but getting tired of the lesbian aspect being played up way, way too much--it used to be more about people running a gym, imagine that! Little People, Big World Jon and Kate Plus 8 irks me no end, but I still get caught up in it sometimes Mystery Diagnosis
  15. I voted "educational," but only because I'll be graduating tomorrow. Hopefully the weather will be nice, not too hot, and my mother's fibromyalgia will be in control all day, or at least long enough to get through 900 Bachelors degrees, 360 Masters, and 60 Doctorates! Then, as I told my son a while ago, I'm going to take about an 8-day nap, after which I hope I'll wake up in time to go to bed!:)
  16. I have a BCR myself, and while I too would adore the clothes, I think I would send them back with a note (and a blog entry) that says: "I genuinely love the clothes, but for reasons I don't know I cannot seem to convey to you properly how grateful I am to receive them. Your stress and feelings of disappointment over this and the fact that I cannot properly model them for you because of the remaining baby weight is something that will haunt me every time I see them hanging in my closet. So, even though the gift is thoughtful and wonderful and so dear to my heart, I can't possibly keep these knowing you are disappointed in my reaction." The fact that your BCR is "not someone who can set aside minor disappointments with ease" is not your problem. The way you react to her histrionics is.
  17. I've only encountered the ringback a couple of times, and I can't get used to it. It makes me feel like I'm on hold--like the person doesn't want to talk to me just yet, so here's some music to keep me occupied. I suppose I'm just showing my age here... Though I'm really showing my age when my mother calls my cell phone and I hear, instead of a phone ringing, Lily Tomlin as Ernestine saying, "if you don't pick up the phone I'm going to get strident!!":D
  18. My parents were both born on the same day, two years apart. My mother insists that she is getting younger while my brother gets older. Mark was born when Mom was 22, and when he was 22 and she was 44 he was half her age--next year when Mark is 44 and Mom is 66, he will be 2/3 her age, which is why she says she's getting younger while we're getting older. She may be on to something there...;)
  19. Could be anything, really, but I wouldn't be surprised if it pointed to a drug house. My boyfriend used to work security at the HUD apartments in Indy and one of the drug dealers there would hang a bicycle tire up very high on the wall. Every so often he would do it again and my boyfriend and his coworkers would have to take it down.
  20. You're already on the right track here, about wanting to interact differently with others. So many people think "if I just change the way they think or talk or behave I would feel so much better..." when it's really just changing the way you react to people that counts. I found this out the hard way when I was stuck in a bad marriage. Once I realized I couldn't change him, but could change my reactions to his behavior, I began to see that things could be better and I looked more realistically at our relationship. It's hard to do and takes time, and I know you don't want to pursue therapy, but a counselor would be an excellent resource to "bounce" your thoughts off of. They can help organize your thoughts and offer strategies that change the way you react and lower your stress when dealing with these people. As a pastor's wife, who interacts with many, many people, you may want to look into this. ;)
  21. My son experienced this last year at his first sleepaway camp. He stayed in the campus dorm for a week (but was really only 5 minutes away from home!) and when we picked him up, he was soooo happy to have the back seat of the truck to himself and to not have to listen to a dozen 12 year olds talk all. the. time. Kids were throwing pennies out the 10-story window and buying shot glasses in the campus bookstore so they could stay up all night and play drinking games with the energy drinks. (Where do 12 year olds learn drinking games?!?) He didn't "flip out," because he's too introverted to make the effort, but he was clearly stressed at having been outnumbered like that.:001_smile:
  22. Somehow when I was a kid I had the time to play piano for 2 years, bass recorder for 3 years, handbells for 3 years, cello for 7 years, and trombone for 1 year. Also I played softball every summer (usually on 2 different teams), basketball every winter, and soccer every spring. I liked staying busy, and my grades were okay. I enjoyed the experiences. Just thought I'd throw in my 2 cents...
  23. "Because to the majority, the "hearing" world may be so beautiful and wonderful and fantastic that you can't imagine living life without it. Oh, how much those poor deaf people are missing! How can you take that away from your child? What kind of a parent are you? Well, we adapt. Right?" I agree. If someone was born deaf or nearly deaf, what are they missing? :iagree: What if they're perfectly happy with their lives the way they are?
  24. It's a sad thing all the way around. The complete "Stepfordness" of the women is just amazing to me. The way they go on about "what's best for the children, the children, the children..." simply makes me sick. How many of the wives are children? Who's looking out for them? How many of those frontier tablecloth-wearing, bouffant-sculpting "wives" in that courtroom and begging on national television are (or were) mothers at 12, 13, 14? Just sick. :sad:
  25. "Anybody who has travelled a narrow passage a few feet ahead of about a ton of snorting, pounding death will appreciate that I didn't dawdle." --James Herriot He goes on to say: "I was spurred on by the certain knowledge that if Monty (an enormous bull) caught me he would plaster me against the wall as effortlessly as I would squash a ripe plum, and though I was clad in a long oilskin coat and wellingtons I doubt whether an Olympic sprinter in full running kit would have bettered my time." There's a time to dawdle, and there's a time to sprint, no? :laugh:
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