Thank you Emily I think so too! Sorry to go OT with the cat stuff (is there a dedicated Cat Thread btw?) but I think its hilarious the way Max does this. (thats not him tho)
I do socks for my feet. He doesn’t use gloves for his hands. I’m not sure you need to, but I do it to make sure I don’t goop up the footrest on my chair. 
Bog works outside chopping wood, tending the property, etc., and his finger ends crack and bleed, too. He sits each evening and rubs this into his fingers and it works. I’m not as clockwork about doing my feet, or I’m sure they’d look and feel much better, but I’m lucky mine is minor. His is not. Hope it works as well for your mom!
Re the dry hands and feet thing and Vaseline: I use the occlusive method sometimes by putting plastic bags over the Vaseline before slipping on heavy wool socks. It seems to help the Vaseline penetrate better and soften the calluses. I also have to exfoliate frequently with a FootFile (from Sally’s) and keep them moisturized.
Good idea about wearing gloves too for chores.
You can also slather up your hands with Vaseline before doing the chores (and then putting gloves on) - when you wash your hands afterwards, the Vaseline acts like a protective barrier against the very drying soap.
I have several facebook friends who are the parents, siblings or aunts of children with autism. As such, many post about their efforts to encourage autism awareness, research, etc., so much so that I am now heartily sick of facebook posts saying, “I love someone with autism” or insisting that people with autism are just as or more special than those without.
What really sucks is that several of these kids are old enough to be on facebook themselves and they keep getting tagged in this shit. If you want someone to be considered just another person and not defined by a syndrome, why must you insist that this condition makes this person better or just the same? Especially when said kid (two of them teenagers) probably just wish they fit in? Awareness is one thing, but forcing someone to live a syndrome for purposes of somehow mainstreaming them seems really, really shitty.
I’ve often wondered that myself. It seems to me that a lot of these parents, well-intentioned or not, are defining themselves by their children’s issues. “Look at me! I have a special needs child! Aren’t I such a wonderful person for taking care of them and accommodating their issues?” No. You are not. All parents do that.
The more I see this sort of thing, the happier I am that my parents never did that with me and my health and mental issues. They took the old-fashioned way of saying, “Well, SpazCat is Just That Way” and moving on. It’s kind of liberating.
YES!!!
Many years ago, one of my cats did this except it was when they were bringing her back out after her spay. As soon as she saw me, she turned around in the tech’s arms, held out her paws and started demanding I save her. Totally favorite kitty …
Seriously. I just broke off online communication with a woman my age (50ish) who has spina bifida. Her parents not only raised her to be a cripple, they also gave her an entitlement attitude that is hard to believe.
“Click ‘like’ and share if you love someone with [insert syndrome/disease/disorder here]!”
Uh…no (for all the reasons mentioned previously). To be sure these people have figured out that I’m just not responding to that shit.
My husband and I had been talking about our favorite local restaurant/bar and how the two of us were going there for New Year’s, when we were at at Christmas with his family. We love the place and want to promote it as a nice spot to go to, since they’re new. When we got home from the Christmas get-together, he asked me to post to his family’s private Facebook group the link to the restaurant’s info, since we’d been talking about the place.
His alcoholic (and probably addict) sister (who thinks she does a great job of hiding it, but couldn’t get through their eldest sister’s funeral without shaking from the DTs) made reservations and has been posting and texting about how she’s going with us (uh, what? wait?). And she texted him about how her train gets in an hour before the party starts. Well great, I hope she has plans to go somewhere that isn’t our apartment for that hour, and that she pays attention to when the return trains are running to take her home afterwards.
She acts helpless, but she’s not. She can manage to set up weeklong vacations to Las Vegas to get her drink on, but when it came to having to make hotel reservations around their sister’s funeral, suddenly she’s hopeless and can’t arrange a hotel or any transportation, and sponges off her family. Sorry, don’t buy it. So I’m not going to hold her hand when she’s thinking this is a big ol’ party with us (as we’ve never ever gone out for NYE with her before), and I’ll be damned if she makes us look bad to the owners and staff of this restaurant, who we adore.
Getting blood drawn tomorrow for a PSA test*. Means no sex (of any kind) for 3 days prior. I’m white-knuckling it at this point.
*I know the PSA test is not considered worth much any more, and I will be speaking to the urologist when I see him next week about better methods. But this is what’s available for now, I guess.
Roddy
Call you mom. Call her right now. My mom died in June of 2012. We had our enormous differences when she was alive. She was not a particularly good mother. She did things I do not care to remember even today.
But she made up for it once my eldest was born. She was a good grandmother, and even a great grandmother in the literal sense of the word. We made our peace five years before she died, helped by the love we both felt for my children. I want to call her so badly right now. I want to tell her that my eldest did a cartwheel and my youngest said fried squid. I want to tell her about my new blog and ask her what she thinks of the couch I bought. And I can’t.
Call you mom. I want to call mine and all I have is instead is her memory. And tell your loved ones to never, ever smoke. My mom had emphysema even though she’d quit smoking more than four decades before. I would like to set every single damned person who promotes the stuff on fire right now.
Sorry, my mom’s asleep already.
So I checked Google News just now and saw that 10 people had been killed in a bombing in Volgograd. “Oh, good, they revised the death toll down a little bit from this morning,” I thought.
Nope. Turns out this is a second massive bombing in the same city in 24 hours.
Human beings, WTF.
This head cold can go fuck itself right in the eyeball.
LavenderBlue, Im so glad you had the chance to make peace with your mom. Some dont have that luxury and I agree: do it while theyre alive no matter how hard you imagine it will be.
Another thought: you can always have those convo’s now spiritually. I talk to my parents all the time in my head and they answer me (no not literally but I feel them answering me). Its never too late to make amends.
I’m going to put this in mini-rants even though it is kind of a good thing.
My brother sent me the link to a Craigslist ad for a car that’s the same year and model as my first car. I really wish he hadn’t. I just can’t afford it right now. Well, I could, but I don’t want to short myself. Also, what bank would lend over $6000 on a 50 year old car.
But, damn, it is nice and I want it bad.
Ugh. End of year retrospectives. Hate 'em.
Since it’s eyeball is your eyeball…
Well, these things never work out as intended.
Hey, 2013, you’ve been the shittiest year EVAH and the sooner you’re in the rearview mirror the better. Go. Away. Piss. Off.
OK, that was funny. 
ignores it’s/its error