A Fascinating Read

A friend recommended this book to me and I hope to use it for our grade 12 homeschool this fall. Amazing!

The book contains some rough language and information - however, the story itself is a must-read. Henrietta's contribution to science has helped us all through the years - although she and her family had no idea of her important contribution.

Written by Rebecca Skloot.

No Impact for Me Too

No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process, by Colin Beavan.

I just completed reading this book and I have to share some quotes with you. These quotes are just some points that struck me - there's a TON of info in this book. Hopefully they will encourage you to read the book ... and think about what YOU can do to help preserve the world around us!

I'm not a tree-hugger. I don't think that we can actually "save" the planet because God says that it will eventually be burned up. But that doesn't relieve me of any responsibility. As a Christian, I believe that it is my responsibility to be a good steward of the world around me - and the resources that I choose (or don't choose) for myself and my family.

I do what I can because of my responsibility to God. Simple as that.

This is not a Christian book - and it contains some swearing as well as some meditation-zen stuff. It also contains a lot of questions and biblical questions. It made me see my world in a different light.

I recommend this book. The following quotes are from the many pages that I dog-eared...lots and lots to ponder and glean from this experiment. It has made me look even closer at what purchases I'm making and how I can improve my "footprint" in this world. (Note: the quote titles are mine.)

PS Read the book first. I haven't watched the DVD yet, but I do have it and hope to watch it soon. I'll keep you posted.

Life:
"The happiest people, the shrinks discovered, did not live their lives on this perpetual loop. Rather, these folks had raised their baseline mood in ways that did not require repeated doses of new stuff. The people most satisfied with life, it turned out, had strong social connections, found meaning in their work, got to exercise what they considered to be their highest talents, and had a sense of some higher purpose." (pg. 26)

Garbage:
"According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food packaging makes up 20 percent of our solid waste nationwide [US]. The archaeologist studying our nation's trash, it seems, would see that it's not just the city folks who don't have time to cook. A lot of suburbanites aren't exactly finding the time to peel a carrot, either. It's just that instead of getting their throwaway packaging from takeout, they're getting it from the frozen-food section." (pg. 39)

"Think of the grocery store. If you're lucky, in the aisles around the edges you'll find some fresh produce -- some food you can actually cook. But every other aisle -- the aisles in the store's heart -- has shelves crammed with cereal in boxes and vegetables in cans and frozen food in plastic trays. That's the stuff that's destined to become, after a couple of minutes in a microwave and a couple more on a table, or a lap, a full 20 percent of our nation's trash.

However much my grandparents' ghosts might cluck their tongues at my way of life, it is not that my family alone had turned into some sort of monstrous, garbage-making machine. It's not that I'm a marred human being who took a wrong turn, or that I've turned bad in the twenty-five years since my grandparents wielded their influence over me. It's not that I'm the lazy ingrate I thought I was. But it may be that, as a member of the crew of the huge steamship that is our culture, I had acquiesced to some decisions that caused the whole boat to take a wrong turn, and possibly sink." (pgs. 39-40)

"Sure, it was just one piece of tissue, but the problem is, as Heather Rogers points out in Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, some 80 percent of our products are made to be used only once. As trivial as that paper towel might seem, it points up a multitude of individual and cultural choices we make every day, choices that mean we are sucking resources out of the planet and sending them to the landfill or incinerator, having barely used them.
As long as we're talking about waste, it's worth noting that, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, 4.8 million tons - nearly 10 billion pounds - of disposable paper napkins, towels, cups, and plates is what the United States sends to landfills every year. I don't know why it never occurred to me before, but what we're talking about when we talk about 10 billion pounds of trashed paper products is 10 billion pounds of dead trees." (pgs. 47, 48)

Plastic Bags:
"Every year, we junk some 4 to 5 trillion plastic bags worldwide, according to the Worldwatch Institute. Around the globe, plastic bags, used for a matter of minutes and then thrown away, leave stores and markets in quantities hundreds of times greater than any other piece of merchandise. They are the world's most ubiquitous consumer items and, not coincidentally, its most pervasive throwaway product.
We recycle plastic bags at a rate of less than 1 percent, and thrown-away bags formed some 4 million tons of municipal waste in the United States in 2006. They poison the air when burned in incinerators, or leach nasty chemicals in our landfills for hundreds of years. And thanks to their lightweight aerodynamics, the wind carries an estimated 1 percent of plastic bags out of trash depositories. These renegade bags end up billowing from trees, hanging from fences, or, worst of all, floating in the ocean.
In 1988, across a span of just two weeks, fifteen leatherback turtles, an endangered species, washed up dead on the beaches of Long Island. Alarmed by the deaths, marine biologists performed autopsies. They discovered that eleven of the fifteen dead turtles had ingested plastic bags that blocked their stomach openings. Leatherback turtles, you see, have the unfortunate twin qualities of a taste for jellyfish and bad eyesight. To these nearly blind turtles, it seems a submerged plastic bag looks simply delicious." (pgs. 53, 54)

Stuff:
"Everybody says I want this and I want that. If our assumptions about happiness and the fulfillment of desire are true, well, then, so be it: the economy is rightfully predicted on the fulfillment of desires and it will burn along until there's nothing left to burn. But if that is so, why did Jesus say that a camel can fit through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man can get into the Kingdom of heaven?" (pg. 115)

Chemicals:
"Corn belt fertilizer washing off the land into the Mississippi River, meanwhile, ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. It turns out what when you fertilize the ocean you get a massive bloom of oxygen-hogging algae. The results if a 7,900-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf that is so depleted of oxygen that it suffocates fish, shrimp, crabs, and all manner of marine life. The EPA estimates that 210 million pounds of fertilizer end up in the Gulf every year." (pg. 122-123)

Light:
"...I read that people without artificial lighting often experience a phenomenon known as "second sleep." They go to sleep when it gets dark, wake up halfway through the night, light a candle, get up for an hour, and then go back to bed. They supposedly end up more rested than people who go to bed later and sleep through the night." (pg. 166)

Water:
"In the United States, for example, the average single-family household uses some seventy gallons of water every day. A full quarter of that we use to flush our toilets. In other words, while 1 billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, Americans are flushing 2.5 trillion gallons a year down the toilet." (pg. 193, 194)

Children:
"More children have died from diarrhea than people have been killed in war and conflict since World War II. A child dies every eight seconds from drinking dirty water." (pg. 194)

Simple Steps:
"To keep toxins out of the wastewater, around the house we use nothing toxic. Pretty simple. We learn to make our household and personal cleaning products from a combination of borax, white vinegar, baking soda, and Dr. Bronner's vegetable-oil-based liquid soap. Baking soda, it turns out, makes the world's best underarm deodorant. A vegetable-oil-and beeswax moisturizer made by a local person is better for our skin than anything we've ever used before." (pg. 197)

Thoughts:
"When I take my last breath, will there be a wish that I had more stuff? ... This life is so short and it will soon be over. What will we use it for?" (pg. 210)

"I'm just suggesting that we should at least wake up long enough to make it an active decision. And yes, it's our decision. It's a decision that belongs to us. Not to the government. Not to big business. It belongs to us." (pg. 215)

"I'd hear criticisms like this constantly throughout the No Impact project. What difference can one person make? Well, absolutely none if that one person doesn't try to influence a difference. But who among us knows how much we will influence the people around us? Which one of us knows which of us, by applying their talents and efforts to what they believe in, may not become a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Bobby Kennedy or a Betty Friedan or a Nelson Mandela?" (pg. 219)

"I'm not going to make myself a martyr. But I am going to keep trying to live my life deliberately. For most of my forty-five years I didn't try hard enough. I got too paralyzed by this question of whether I was the type of person who could make a difference. Finally, during the year of the project, I realized that's the wrong question. The real question is whether I'm the type of person who wants to try." (pg. 224)

~~~
Colin's blog link: http://noimpactman.typepad.com/

A letter from an Alzheimer's patient, to you

Good morning. My name is Dr. Alice Howland. I'm not a neurologist or general practice physician, however. My doctorate is in psychology. I was a professor at Harvard University for twenty-five years. I taught courses in cognitive psychology, I did research in the field of linguistics, and I lectured all over the world.

I am not here today, however, to talk to you as an expert in psychology or language. I'm here today to talk to you as an expert in Alzheimer's disease. I don't treat patients, run clinical trials, study mutations in DNA, or counsel patients and their families. I am an expert in this subject because, just over a year ago, I was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

I'm honoured to have this opportunity to talk with you today, to hopefully lend some insight into what it's like to live with dementia. Soon, although I'll still know what it is like, I'll be unable to express it to you. And too soon after that, I'll no longer even know I have dementia. So what I have to say today is timely.

We, in the early stages of Alzheimer's are not yet utterly incompetent. We are not without language or opinions that matter or extended periods of lucidity. Yet we are not competent enough to be trusted with the many demands and responsibilities of our former lives. We feel like we are neither here nor there, like some crazy Dr. Seuss character in a bizarre land. It's a very lonely and frustrating place to be.

I no longer work at Harvard. I no longer read and write research articles or books. My reality is completely different from what it was not long ago. And it is distorted. The neural pathways I use to try to understand what you are saying are gummed up with amyloid. I struggle to find the words I want to say and often hear myself saying the wrong ones. I can't confidently judge spatial distances, which means I drop things and fall down a lot and can get lost two blocks from my home. And my short-term memory is hanging on by a couple of frayed threads.

I'm losing my yesterdays. If you ask me what I did yesterday, what happened, what I saw and felt and heard, I'd be hard-pressed to give you details. I might guess a few things correctly. I'm an excellent guesser. But I don't really know. I don't remember yesterday or the yesterday before that.

And I have no control over which yesterdays I keep and which ones get deleted. This disease will not be bargained with. I can't offer it the names of the United States presidents in exchange for the names of my children. I can't give it the names of the state capitals and keep the memories of my husband.

I often fear tomorrow. What if I wake up and don't know who my husband is? What if I don't know where I am or recognize myself in the mirror? When will I no longer be me? Is the part of my brain that's responsible for my unique 'me-ness' vulnerable to this disease? Or is my identity something that transcends neurons, proteins, and defective molecules of DNA? Is my soul and spirit immune to the ravages of Alzheimer's? I believe it is.

Being diagnosed with Alzheimer's is like being branded with a scarlet A. This is now who I am, someone with dementia. This was how I would, for a time, define myself and how others continue to define me. But I am not what I say or what I do or what I remember. I am fundamentally more than that.

I am a wife, mother, and friend, and soon to be grandmother. I still feel, understand, and am worthy of the love and joy in those relationships. I am still an active participant in society. My brain no longer works well, but I use my ears for unconditional listening, my shoulders for crying on, and my arms for hugging others with dementia. Through an early-stage support group, through the Dementia Advocacy and Support Network International, by talking to you today, I am helping others with dementia live better with dementia. I am not someone dying. I am someone living with Alzheimer's. I want to do that as well as I possibly can.

I'd like to encourage earlier diagnosis, for physicians not to assume that people in their forties and fifties experiencing memory and cognition problems are depressed or stressed or menopausal. The earlier we are properly diagnosed, the earlier we can go on medication, with the hope of delaying progression and maintaining a footing on a plateau long enough to reap the benefits of a better treatment or cure soon. I still have hope for a cure, for me, for my friends with dementia, for my daughter who carries the same mutated gene. I may never be able to retrieve what I've already lost, but I can sustain what I have. I still have a lot.

Please don't look at our scarlet A's and write us off. Look us in the eye, talk directly to us. Don't panic or take it personally if we make mistakes, because we will. We will repeat ourselves, we will misplace things, and we will get lost. We will forget your name and what you said two minutes ago. We will also try our hardest to compensate for and overcome our cognitive losses.

I encourage you to empower us, not limit us. If someone has a spinal cord injury, if someone has lost a limb or has a functional disability from a stroke, families and professionals work hard to rehabilitate that person, to find ways to cope and manage despite these losses. Work with us. Help us develop tools to function around our losses in memory, language, and cognition. Encourage involvement in support groups. We can help each other, both people with dementia and their caregivers, navigate through this Dr. Seuss land of neither here not there.

My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I'll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I'll forget it some tomorrow doesn't mean that I didn't live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn't mean that today didn't matter.

I'm no longer asked to lecture about language at universities and psychology conferences all over the world. But here I am before you today, giving what I hope is the most influential talk of my life. And I have Alzheimer's disease.

Thank you.

(pgs. 251-254, Still Alice, by Lisa Genova)

Good Reading!

I'd promised to have some book reviews on this blog last summer already! It hasn't been that I haven't read anything good, I just haven't posted about it here as promised! So now that we're all down & out here with the flu, I am doing some reading, I wanted to take this opportunity to recommend "The Claire McCall Series" by Harry Kraus, MD.

I got the first one out of our church library and avoided reading it because it looked like one of those typical Christian-ish love story novels where the beautiful woman has gone through so much trouble in her life and needs a good man, and gets exactly that. A handsome one too! HA! I hate predictable stories.

Well, these novels are not predictable in the least. Because they are written by a doctor, they are filled with medical jargon and information -- not overwhelming but informative and I found that it added another dimension to the story. I felt like I was learning something while being entertained by the story.

This series is about a surgeon-to-be who finds out that her father has Huntington's disease -- which means that she has a 50/50 chance of developing the disease herself. If she has it, it will put an end to her surgery career. That is the gist of the story -- there are many twists and turns and mini-stories throughout the book -- involving all kinds of issues and situations. Nothing predictable (IMO) or "typical".

I highly recommend the first two (Can I Have This Dance? and For the Rest of My Life) -- haven't read the third one yet...but I will as soon as it arrives! I will read more of Harry Kraus' books -- his writing is very, very good!

Shenandoah Series by Michael Phillips

Last summer I participated in a book reading program at our local library in which you read books during the summer and review them for the library and win prizes. It was fun because I love reading, but also because I won a free book. BUT, our library doesn't have the program this year so I thought I'd review the books that I've read here, on my blog instead.

The series that I just finished is written by Michael Phillips and is called The Shenandoah Series. There are four books in this series and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed all four of them. In fact, they kept me wanting to read more and I was tense when I finished a book and had to wait for the library to get the next book for me!

The story is set in the 1800s in the Southern United States, just after Lincoln pronounced the Emancipation Proclamation, making the black slaves free. This story has a unique twist in that it is about two unlikely friends -- both around the same age, both orphaned by marauders who went around killing families -- one friend is black, the other is white. Now this may not seem unlikely to you (it wasn't to me) -- the fact that a white would/could be friends with a black person -- but in those days, in that time (and perhaps still now, I sure hope not though), blacks were not seen as persons and it was not accepted that whites would have anything to do with blacks. I cannot fathom that myself, having grown up in a basically multicultural society and having black friends myself. But I have heard that in the Southern States, even now, this sort of racism exists.

Anyway, without giving the story away, I would highly recommend this series. I did find that the first few chapters of the first book (Angels Watching Over Me) went slowly and I got frustrated at the author. But once I made it through those chapters, I was hooked! Let me know what you think!


Here are some excerpts that stuck with me:

That's the trouble with people of all colors -- they judge folks by what they see, which is usually only on the outside. But it's what's inside that counts. That's what makes a person who he or she really is. And sometimes it takes a little work to dig down inside and see what someone's made of, what kind of stuff their character has in it. That's just about one of the most important things in life -- learning how to do that, learning how to find out what people are made of.

...right then the words I'm sorry were too hard for me to say. They ought to be such easy words for people to say to each other, but for some reason they're not. People seem to choke on the two words that would make the world such a kindlier and happier place.

That's the way life is -- you learn thing slowly, especially things about yourself. Sometimes it takes a lot of years before some of the best things in life sink in. If you're trying to get rid of it, self-centeredness seems to gradually fall off you through the years. It's probably not because it gets easier when you get older, but that it gets easier because you've been practicing so long at it.

I think what might make forgiveness so hard for some folks is that they expect other people to be perfect. They especially never want anyone to do or say anything that might hurt them. But when it comes to looking inside themselves, they don't expect their own actions and words and attitudes to be perfect. And they make all kinds of excuses for themselves when they aren't. At least that's the conclusion I've come to from trying to figure myself out. I can be so cantankerously mean-tempered when I'm looking at somebody else, and so sweet and forgiving and understanding when looking at myself. Doesn't make much sense, does it? It seems like we'd want to treat everyone else the same as we do ourselves.

Growth is one of those things you can't see up close. You have to stand back to see how something or someone has changed as time has passed. ...What an amazing thing it was. God had been so good to us!