Kung Zhu Pets Review and Giveaway

Zhu Zhu Pets have added a new line of products called Kung Zhu Pets, and thanks to a group called Mom Select, which I am happy to be part of, I received a chance to try a box-full of Kung Zhu pets and accessories.The Kung Zhu Pets are very similar to regular Zhu Zhu pets, but they have an edgier appearance from the previous cutesy Zhu Zhu Pets. These stealthy,

Where's P.T. Barnum When You Need Him?

A Medical anomoly, that's what I am...isn't that another word for a freak?

You know that song sung with such marvelous humor long ago by Harry Belafonte that starts off with, "THERE'S A HOLE IN THE BUCKET, DEAR LIZA, DEAR LIZA,"?

Well, in my case, the song should go, "THERE'S A WHOLE IN MY LEFT LUNG, DEAR DOCTOR, DEAR DOCTOR."

It's a funny little hole, with a character all its own and quirks that make me one of only SIX people in the entire world who have this kind of hole.

Let me tell you how I came to learn about my advance case of FREAKHOOD!

Several years ago, I was minding my own business, hoping for a quiet death from a really bad case of the flu that my daughter had brought home from her germ laden teacher. A MONTH my daughter fought this nasty bug bemoaning, with all the Acadmey Award winning angst of Theda Barra playing Cleopatra during the very early Movie era, about her desire to pull a shroud over her head and gasp her final, lung choking final gasp.

Being a parent long used to adolescent overplay when it comes to stretching out excuses to stay home from school, I often looked at her laments with eye brow lifted in doubt...until the bug decided to migrate.

Coming from a long line of hacking coughers...not from smoking, but from bronchial and asthmatic conditions, I had thought, with delilghted superiority, to have escaped the family curse...I was, after all, nearly through my forites. But was I ever wrong!

After a month of coughs that developed into pneumonia then downgraded to just a violent, but continuous hack, I began the quest through the murky maze of Pulmonary Mucktitude. (No, I know that's NOT a word...but it fits nonetheless.)

Some doctors did nothing more than write a script for prednisone...a steroid...for asthma...a steroid...let me repeat that. I was a size four when I began my foray into Pulmonary Mucktitude. Six months on Predinisone for an asthmatic cough, which by the way, I did NOT have, did change my entire outlook on life...sorta. See, I can no longer see my toes, because I gained 60 pounds...(a typical side effect to prednisone, I now know, and I began exhibiting bruises for no reason at all...long term prednisone use.)

Six months without rellief...nor change...well, not quite true...the cough had changed. I was now coughing hard enough to crack ribs. Ever had to cough when you already have coughed hard enough to crack a couple of ribs? My daughter's earlier laments for death were sounding more and more reasonable...and I was over the flu!

Dr. Pulmonary Muckraker #1 finally gave up and winged me on to number 2. What do you think number 2 does? Begins the process all over again! Prednisone again...but only for 3 months this time...so only 20 pounds more, and a herniated belly button joining in for the fun. (A herniated belly button that no one would tell me about for five more years...and then only when it became a SERIOUS intestinal crisis...How was I to know that wasn't just an outtie from all the new weight? I'd never weighed more than 130 pounds before except when I was pregnant!)

Let's do an MRI, Dr. 2 finally suggests as the three month mark wings to a close without the Prednisone showing any signs of curbing let alone stopping the rib cracking coughs.

Uh oh...dark spots...bronchoscopy...must do. Serious. Could be cancer. Can't put it off. Cancer? Scary, right? Sure, and yet, in a strange way, it was a relief. Finally maybe we would have an answer and know how to treat the cough. Yeah right!!!!

Bronchoscopy...the colonoscopy of the nose, throat, and lungs at the same time. Bronchoscopy...where they send this long tube with a lighted camera on the end and pinchers, to snip and clip here and there, and just for extra fun, a water hose for the added thrill of finding out what it's like to drown from the inside out. (You have signed a medical release form to let them into the area that allows you to suck in the air you breathe to live so they can perform these death defying feats...and it's on film. =^..^= For THEIR future laurels.)

How?

We come to the hole.

Within the left upper chamber of my lung is a hole. The hole does not go all the way through the lung...if it did, my lung would deflate like a limp balloon, but because it doesn't it is a medical anomaly.

Now I am in the modified OR room, with this thing up my nose, down my throat, into my lung and prodding my inner lung when the room that has my doctor, the anesthetist...(we're talking what they euphemistically call "twilight sleep" anesthesia here)...a nurse, a Pulmonary tech, and the video guy, goes quiet. My doctor, zips over to the wall phone, taps in three numbers, tells whoever is on the receiving end to get up here...and five minutes later it is SRO (Standing Room Only) as a phalanx of staff crowd around the TV and my entrapped body.

Outcome?

I have never been able to get rid of the Prednisone weight gain. That stuff changes your body's chemistry enough that there's no going back to pre-prednisone status. I still have the cough...at one point they treated it with Nexium...acid reflux after another equally invasive, equally disgusting, equally failed test, equally erroneous diagnosis...at another they sent me off for Speech Therapy...the Speech Therapist had some really interesting words for the doctor that made THAT diagnosis...Post Nasal Drip was another...no antihistamine known to mankind, and believe me they have put me on them all, has worked...but they...my glorious doctors, wrote a stellar paper for the AMA. They routinely meet with the doctors who "treat" the other five "hole-in-the-lungers" around the world...they seek out funding from wealthy benefactors and discuss new methods/tests/treatments.

For me, I cough, I suck on Halls Fruit Breezers, about the only things that give me ANY relief, and steer clear of any further dealing with Pulmonary Muckrakers. The dark floaters? Probably scar tissue floating around from the pneumonias I have had over the years? Should they be monitored? The Muckrakers say they should...but I'm not really sure I want to entrust myself to them again...would you?

I'll never be a size 4 again, but I'd really rather not try for a size 35 thank you very much!


=^..^=

Sandra Bullock A Study of Grace

Sandra Bullock is a mom. through the maelstrom of the past weeks, she has stayed quiet while the women who'd participated with Jesse James in cheating on his wife have dominated the media milking their soiled moments of fame.

In an atmosphere of success rising from the skanky conduct of people we would never have applauded in the past, thanks to Mark Burnett and the dregs of human entertainment that is Realty TV, people like these mistresses have the platform to parlay their sinfulness into unprecedented success.

While those women grabbed their megaphones and scorched our eardrums with the constant sound bites about them and how misunderstood they are, Sandra stayed quiet. Every show, every pundit spoke about Sandra and how she should be behaving. Get out there and vilify, they were all saying. Speak loudly and definitively about the pictures of her husband and his Nazi praising stances. Respond to the walking tattoo with a mouth that wants one and all to feel she is so naive that SHE is the victim of this piece, not an aggressive pantheress who liked playing on the edge.

But Sandra stayed quiet.

All around the world voices of the masses took exception deciding they knew what Sandra should do and when.

But Sandra stayed quiet...and now we know why.
Sandra is a mom, and was a Mom before the dark stuff hit the fan right after Sandra won the Oscar. Rather than bleed before the public's scrutiny; rather than climbing onto a bandwagon of public warfare, she withdrew, escaped from Hollywood, and devoted herself to the most important element in her world...the baby she'd just adopted. She closed ranks, not around Jesse, not even around herself, but around the innocent child none of us knew she had.

Can anyone forget the media circus that took place the night the Octomom brought her babies home from the hospital? The cacophony of flashing lights, yelling voices, crushing bodies? One can only imagine the trauma those babies sustained because the Octomom put her own desires to become "FAMOUS" above the needs of the children she claimed were all that mattered.

Unlike the Octomom, Sandra DID put her child's security first.

I cannot begin to imagine how devastating it had to have been for Sandra to learn in such a cruel way and so soon after receiving one of the highest awards her industry can bestow, that her marriage was a sham. I cannot imagine how it had to have cut her especially when you add that precious baby, they'd only just received into their care, learning that her marriage as she knew it to be, was an illusion.

I admire her and give her the highest of marks for disappearing from the media barrage and letting her love in being a new mom soothe the sense of betrayal and allow her to find her center. Now that she's found it, she continues to show what a class act she is. She still does not vilify the man who'd so grossly deceived and betrayed her...no, instead she introduces us to her joy; she comes out and acknowledges the marriage cannot be sustained, but she is a mom with all the joy and wonder that goes along with being a mom.


Jesse James is the loser in all of this. He couldn't keep it in his pants. He couldn't cherish what he'd been lucky enough to have. What a sad commentary for an obviously sad man.

Disaster Response Time Truly Depends

NO one watching their TVs today can doubt that disasters and the expediency by which they are dealt with depends on who we are angry with or fighting.

I sit here, in my home, nowhere near the waters swirling like a pathetic soiling from within the earth's mantle, that the earth herself did not spew forth. My heart is breaking over and over again. How could it not?

Dying, the animals, innocent creatures that did nothing beyond the acts that they are required by nature to perform, are dying.

Eleven people, lost beneath the magnitude of this disaster, are dead, whether we recognize the dimensions and consequences of their deaths or not...they are dead.

The estuaries that provide the home base for many creatures, some only recently brought back from the brink of extinction, are being smothered beneath the strangling encroachment of mankind's arrogance and disregard for the laws of Nature.

The future of the entire planet's waterways are in danger, though I don't hear much said about this scenario, even though anyone looking at a globe can tell no body of water remotely connected to the ocean currents is safe from this gunk eventually working its way to their shores.

So how come it is taking so damned long to fix man's incredible foolishness and disregard?

Since John F. Kennedy vowed to put a man on the moon, we have focused on the great out there, claiming it as our final frontier, but it's not. Out there is easy compared to down there, beneath our waterways, where the squeeze of gravity is so intense mankind cannot plummet its depth, yet some questionable brain thought it was wise to drill into our waterways, set up platforms and snake pipelines that are created by the lowest bidders just to get more of that gunk, oil from places we should not be harvesting.

During the recent elections for President, I lost count of the people chanting the mantra, "drill baby drill" even though one of the loudest mantra chanters comes from the State where the Exxon-Valdez disaster had already happened.

Yet now, those mantra spouting proponents of the mass oil conglomerates are backtracking on one hand, while still urging full steam ahead on the other.

We have no business opening new fissures in Mother earth's mantle so the oil companies and their bobbing head "yes-men-politicians" pursue a course of planetary destruction.

It has been nearly three months since the explosion that has caused tens of thousands of gallons of crude crud...let me repeat that word CRUDE, into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, yet it's not fixed, and there hasn't been legislation to hold BP, Halliburton, Dick Cheney and his bosom buds, and whoever else is a part of that disastrous explosion, CRIMINALLY responsible for mass murder.

Mass murder! That's rather extreme, some of you are saying. NO it's not. Eleven human begins died from incompetence, but the murders aren't stopping there. I haven't heard a count of how many creatures have died or are dying because of that junk swirling around in THEIR home.

How long does it take for the government to get off their timid back ends and do something?

Surprisingly, not long...as long as the cause fits in with not rocking the boats of the side bonuses they all get from companies like BP and Halliburton.

Let me give you an example. How long has it been since the Gulf disaster? Well over two months...how long did it take to get all kinds of injunctions against pulling the plug on Terry Schiavo so she an her husband could finally have peace and that poor woman could pass on with dignity and no more tubes thrust into her organs doing all the busy work to keep her heart ticking and her lungs expanding?

Not long...as I recall...in fact damned if the government, all the way up to the then President Bush, didn't get involved IMMEDIATELY.

How come we can respond so quickly then, but now, when the entire future of the planet's waterways are threatened, we decide there is wisdom in letting BP, the idiots behind the disaster, call the shots on AMERICAN SOIL? Didn't we have a Revolutionary War and a War of 1812 to keep our land from British control...yet we're handing it to them so they can act like the Gestapo and keep American's out of the area...God forbid REAL pictures of REAL dead carcasses make it out of BPs war zone?

President Obama you are a very intelligent man who now has the power to make BP more than just accountable to set aside, what to them is basically chump change. BP is guilty of mass murder. Murder is against the law. So how come they aren't in jail? How come the US government is not conscripting any and all technologies BP or anyone else has about stopping the ongoing release of CRUDE crud into the American waters, and how come people aren't sitting in jail, without benefit of bail?

This is MASS MURDER? How many times must those words be repeated? Tony Heyward's passport needs to be confiscated; he needs to be locked away, along with Dick Cheney and his cohorts. Otherwise let's just give the country back to Britain and the likes of Tony Heyward. He's calling the shots anyway. Might as well just hand America over to him on a silver platter, and stop pretending we aren't in Big Oil's pockets and clutches.

Genesis

In the beginning the world stood still and onto the backdrop of blankness a hand reached out and My Oyster World Began.

Not long ago, I sat content in my willingness to hide the creative part of me away, letting it surface only briefly and always with a tight reign kept on its activities. Fear, paralysing fear, had been the villain, fear of repeating events from ten years ago.

Ten years ago I let my muse freely dance and play wherever she felt like going, until the two demons from Publishing Hell came in and corralled her into the limitations and demands of poetry.

My muse can write stanzas and maintain pentameter, but it makes her wither. When she withers she ends the freedom that is her Storyteller keeping it from soaring and breathing within her oyster world. The two demons would not let her breathe beyond the contraints of poetry, so she withered killing the poetry too.

Fallow. Broken. Lost.

Not today. Thanks to the constant support of my daughter, my amazing editor, and a woman who has done more to undo the damage done so long ago to my muse, the shell is open and within my oyster word, the pearl is shining once more.

I dedicate this Blog's Genesis to Kathy, Carrie and Lea. You three women saved my pearl and let my oyster open once more.

Thank you all.

Summer Coloring Pages

The beautiful and hot days of summer are upon us. Longest days and shortest nights. Kiddies done with school. Time for a little fun with the family and maybe some relaxation (MAYBE).In celebration of my families official start of summer, here is a nice list of Summer Coloring Pages for you and the kids to print out and decorate.Man laying in a Hammock coloring

Tux Paint - Free Drawing Program for Kids

One thing my children really love to do is draw and color, they can't get enough. So, I was really excited when Fun 4 The Children reader, Nicole sent me an e-mail to let me know about a program called Tux Paint.Tux Paint is a terrific, free, computer art software for children ages 3 to 12. It has a simple, easy-to-use interface, with great sound effects, and an

Free Disney Movie Rewards Mini Posters

Over at the Disney Movie Rewards website you can download and print out free Disney Movie Rewards Mini Posters.They have a choice of three different posters:Fab Five features Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto.Princess features Cinderella, Snow White, Princess Aurora, Belle, Ariel and Tiana.Disney Pixar features Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug's

Borders DOUBLE-DOG DARE 2010 Summer Reading Program

Borders is running a DOUBLE-DOG Dare 2010 summer reading program, where any child under the age of twelve, can read ten books (any ones they like) and receive a free book.Just print the DOUBLE-DOG DARE form on the Borders website, list the books your child reads and bring the completed form into any Borders, Borders Express or Waldenbooks store by 8/26/10 to redeem

Father's Day Coloring Pages

Father's Day is a day of celebration of Dad. It's a day not only honor your father, but all men who have acted as a father figure in your life.In the USA, Canada and UK, Fathers' Day is celebrated on the 3rd Sunday in June since it was made a national holiday in 1966. In Australia and New Zealand, fathers are honored the first Sunday in September and other