Elite go green - - -

We saw this tote bag in Barnes and Noble today. It looked interesting to me, so I went close and looked at it. This is made from empty juice boxes that were recycled. I was really tempted to buy it and it took a lot of strength to stop myself. I found the price to be a little steep for a tote bag. I mean, my mom always sewed tote bags, from gabardine pants that my brothers wore out in the knees. We used those to buy dry groceries. Plastic bags for carrying groceries was a foreign concept to me when we moved from India to New York State in 1974. I wanted to take those bags back to buy groceries in them, but I was told that it looks cheap. So instead, I started using them as liners for small garbage cans in our rooms. We were still buying the big hefty bags for the kitchen and for leaves. Then somewhere in the eighties, supermarkets started giving back 2 cents per bag we used over again. Still my friends told me that we get looks from the packers if we brought our own bags. So I felt ashamed. So we all went with the flow and hardly recycled anything until almost the end of last century, when we started bringing our own bags. Now why did I go with the flow? Fear of looking cheap?

Last time when my son came home from Hawaii, I told him how I am a closet environmentalist as I washed and saved plastic forks. He laughed and said that everyone is into recycling, I do not have to be ashamed any more.

Would I listen to myself ? Now why did I feel ashamed to recycle when I come from a place where recycling is the way of life? We left India to make a better life. Does it mean that we start copying the elite ? Well, who are the elite? I would not know.

The snowstorm of last month left us without power for forty hours. Then there were people without power even up to a week. So a lot of people went to hotels, but some hotels and businesses did not have a working generator. People were forced to do without refrigeration and hot coffee and even heat. They had to make use of blankets and live minimally. Then they realized how difficult it is to do without resources. Now just about everyone, especially the elite, is trying to be careful with hot water and heat and electricity. 

How often do we need storms like these?

A Gift Of Gardening Experience

 These were grown in Orange County New York.  However kids in Junior High and High School in Texas will not be able to complete their garden that started growing.  Thanks to Donors Choose program a lot of kids throughout the United States are able to work at projects or receive necessary equipment their school would not be able to provide. This year in spite of getting help, from Donors Choose Program, Texas kids are not able to enjoy the harvest of their hard work. Please help if you can. I am sure they will appreciate a lot.

Here is the link if you would like to help.

October

It was few years ago we were driving on route 9, through Beacon and Cold Spring New York, my husband asked me to write a poem on the month of October as he loves the fall foliage. By the time we got home, I had the poem ready for him. He loves it. Being a science person he does not look at poetry in a critical way. As long as I conveyed his feelings he is happy. Here it is.

October

Colorful leaves of New York Autumn

your beauty is so mellow

Orange, Red and royal Maroon,

lightest Green and Yellow

Heavenly horticulture

surrounding all the highways

you cover majestic mountains

and shine through the sun rays

Graceful, delicate and short lived,

like Tulips and the Daffodils,

you always surrender to winter land

and make room for the sleigh bells

I remember that he pointed out the word "the" before Daffodils as he too had read the famous poem. Then I realized that I should not have assumed that just because he is a science person , he would have nothing to do with fine arts. I was ashamed.

Some thing Fun

Some thing fun or spooky.?  My brother sent these to make me laugh.

Look Out

We do most of our learning by the first four years of our lives, they say. I tend to minus the first nineteen years, (up to twelve years in childhood, then the emo teenage years.) I mean besides our activities of daily life, what aspects of serious life business do we know before we are out of high school? "Plenty," says my husband, because according to him a lot depends on where we come from. He thinks that if you are sheltered you don't learn much, but if you suffer through childhood and teenage years you learn a lot. So, would we know how to recognise kids who are distressed or stressed even and are thinking of killing themselves? I mean if you are a teenager and you see a young girl in deep depression because she is watching her parents go through a divorce would you think she would OD? Or would you just think that it is one of those things emo teenagers go through? Even as an adult if you see an otherwise pleasant co-worker unusually quiet or even complaining that his wife is always putting him down would you think that he would kill himself after killing his wife and kids? How do we know how to help people preemptively? Can we learn?

If you are that one person who is always ahead of the game when it comes to arranging secret Santa or are the person who buys a birthday card and collects wishes for someones birthday, then you can be that person to suggest to the HR of your company to see if there can be a counselor who can come and lecture at your facility. If you are a parent of a kid in high school, you can ask your school board to train people to watch out for signs. I think what we need to do is look out for each other.

Two murder suicide cases on national television are more than enough to make me break till I shatter. It is time we say something to the people with clout.

Value A Life

It was very hard for me to blog yesterday.  I have been to the walkway before, but I never felt tired as I did yesterday.  Then I realized that emotional stress can be even more tiring than physical hard work.  I felt selfish for thinking about myself, when there were people who had lost their children, their siblings, their parents, their friends and their spouses to suicide.  At the end of the walk all I wanted to do was to remember the Hudson as serene as I always found it to be. So I asked my daughter to take a picture.

What does it take for people to educate people about the seriousness of suicide? I wouldn't know. It was a hard reality for me, forty years ago, when my classmates and I lost my best friend to suicide.  Yesterday we saw quite a few people wearing different colored beads to honor the loss of loved ones.

 When we saw the actual faces of the people on the quilts people had made for their missing loved ones it was extremely hard to look at the survivors. Yet they were very brave.

There were many more quilts, I just did not have the heart to look at them, let alone take picture.

We were not prepared how upset we would be. So I came to an understanding that we have to learn to value life.

Let the echoes of love and understanding resonate.

Learn about mental illnesses.

If you feel that your family is dysfunctional get help.

There is help out there, get it before it is too late.

Tell each other how much you care.

Just remember that your life is very valuable

Also you are not alone in this world.

You are always loved you just don't know it yet.

Understanding?

When it comes to science, botany was my limit. I love plants. When it comes to the human body, it's a different story. I leave everything to my doctor. I always have. However, for the last couple of years the whole infrastructure and protocol of medical practice has changed. Now when I go in, I think I spend less than 20% of the time of my visit with the doctor. The rest is spent in the waiting room, then in the examination room with the PA who asks me the questions that a doctor is supposed to ask me, then the doctor walks in with a smile and after a handshake spends five minutes with me, talks to me while looking at the computer, barely looking at me. I told him in my last visit that I feel funny, and that I could be losing my mind, I have become irritable and forgetful. He smiles and says that everyone forgets a little bit as they get older, the less I think about it the better.
Before I forget:-  I urge all my family members, my friends, my neighbours, my blogger friends, my coworkers and my bosses, please, please, please, understand the disease or diseases you may have. Learn all the names and dosages of every medication you take. Do research. Understand contraindications and side effects. It seems like our doctors who we used to depend on one hundred percent are not in their own control. Tired of paying the overhead and competing against HMOs they have given into working for HMOs and are subject to their rules, one of which is the limit of time they can give us - the patients. So now it is up to us to take care of ourselves. See a specialist when you need to. That is where I made a mistake and it is not because I am ignorant but because for something as simple as Diabetes I thought that an Internist would have been sufficient. No hard feelings against my doctor. He has his hands full.
I am not a fan of alternative medicine and I will always depend on modern medicine. However a doctor of alternative medicine was telling on the television that a medicine that is used to treat diabetes is actually causing Pancreatitis. Now Diabetes has a lot to do with Pancreas, so, I did research on the medicine that I take for maintaining my blood sugar level. I read a lot of complaints against that medicine including the foggy feeling in the brain, forget fullness and irritability. I stopped taking my medicine last week and what do you know, all my symptoms are gone. My fasting sugar level is within the high normal numbers. My guess, since I had started going for really long walks my sugar was getting metabolised and the medicine was actually making my sugar level go to extreme low levels. That can cause a lot of different things. I am glad that I did the research. the thing is I am not supposed to stop medicine just like that.
"So, what do I do now?" I ask myself. According to my daughter I should see a specialist. As far as my own doctor, he is still good for my BP and my asthma -  until something else comes up.