Random Thinking

After the debacle with Grateful Greyhounds, I went over to PETCO to get food for the cats. PETCO has a couple of cages near the front door and there are usually a few cats looking for homes in there.

One of the cats named China, was a great big tub of a cat (18 lbs.) who was 11 years old. Old timers like that often find it hard to get adopted so I checked her situation. She was very friendly, instantly reaching out for me to scratch her neck. She gave me a very gentle nibble on my fingers.

I called Michel and she and Beth came by the next day and filled out the paperwork. The cat was actually held by the Last Hope Animal Rescue so they checked with our vet who gave us a glowing recommendation and the next day, China was a member of our family. The other cats are slowly working things out with her. China has adopted the family room as her room since it is close to the kitchen. It’s not easy keeping up your obesity!

Update: Click here for a picture of Michel and me with the cat and a letter of thanks to the rescue organization.

Tags: Last Hope Animal Rescue, cat, China

With Lily gone, Michel and I were thinking about getting another dog. We had been at PETCO with Mikey recently and a bunch of people who had rescued greyhounds through Grateful Greyhound were there along with their greyhounds. They told us that greyhounds were bred for dog racing and when their career was over, they were often killed unless they were champions in which case they would be saved for bredding.

Grateful Greyhound is a rescue agency that tries to save greyhounds from their fate and turn them into house pets. As it turns out, greyhounds make great pets. They are very fast but most of the time they would prefer to sit on the couch and watch TV with their owner. All they need is a fenced in yard and to be taken for a walk three or four times a week. We spoke to the people there and they told us that greyhounds get along great with kids and even though Mikey is autistic and a little rough sometimes, that it would not be a problem. Greyhounds have a great temperament and don’t bite. The only issue would be the cats because greyhounds are trained to chase small animals but they would adjust after a little while. It sounded great and the dogs we met were sweet and gentle even when Mikey pushed them so we filled out the paperwork and waited for the call.

We got the first call just after Pop-Pop died so we scheduled it for a couple of weeks after. A couple showed up with two greyhounds. I always get along great with dogs so I tried to pet and play with them. The owners seemed to hold them back a bit and I started to get the impression that they didn’t like our house, they didn’t like our cats, and they didn’t like us. They certainly weren’t pleased with Mikey and kept insisting that these athletic racing dogs very delicate and that Mikey might injure them even though we have ten pound cats that Mikey tosses around and he has never hurt them. Anyway, I didn’t want to fight with the couple (although Michel did) so I just told them “yea, whatever,” and sent them home. So there will be no greyhound in our future.

Now we are filling out the paperwork for Canine Companions. It takes awhile to get a dog but the dog will be perfectly trained to work with Mikey and the rest of the family. We will be be getting a skilled companion team which includes one of us trained to work with the dog and the dog trained to be a friend to Mikey. These dogs look like they are mostly labradors.

Tags: greyhound, grateful greyhound, autism

I decided to check each of the websites of our candidates for president and see what their positions on disabilites were and how prominent they make their position.

I started with Senator Obama’s site. On the main page, I selected the Issues drop down menu and the second item on the list was Disabilities. On the disabilities page, is a captioned video of Senator Obama talking about his plans to improve the lives of the disabled and his detailed plans for helping the disabled live richer lives with the dignity they deserve. I was impressed as his plan includes many of the things we worry about as parents of a child with a disability including IDEA funding and community-based independent living.

Next it was off to Senator Clinton’s site. Senator Clinton’s site doesn’t have an entry for people with disabilities, at least not that I could find. However she does have information scattered throughout the site. If you go to her health care plan, there is a list of How Hillary’s plan affects along the right hand side and one of the entries is for Americans with Disabilities. If you go to the Supporting parents section, there is an entry for Expanding Opportunities for Individuals with Disabilities. The information is good but I couldn’t find anything on community living. It would have been nice to put it all in one place.

Finally I went to Senator McCain’s site. There wasn’t any direct link to disabilities as an issue but there was an entry for Human Dignity. Surely, that would cover the disabled. Apparently not as “human dignity” seems to mean keeping gay people from marrying each other. Education? Not a word about IDEA. Health Care? No mention of the disabled but he does have two paragraphs on how he once sponsored a bill dealing with autism.

So what did I learn? That if you want to know what issues are important to a candidate, just go to their website. So check out their sites and see if the issues that are important to you as an American are important to the candidates.

April 11th was Mikey’s birthday. Here’s a couple of pictures from that day. We had a bigger party the next week when his cousins came over but I was so busy that I didn’t get any pictures.

Notice the short hair? He got the haircut just before his birthday. Here is just a couple of weeks before. Excuse the dirty face but he is a little boy after all!

On April 11th, which also happened to be Mikey’s birthday, I went to C. W. Post College for a conference on Down syndrome. Most of the conference was aimed at educators rather than parents so it wasn’t too useful. However, the keynote speaker was Karen Gaffney, a young woman with Down syndrome. Ms. Gaffney absolutely wowed the audience. First, she spoke for nearly 30 minutes without any notes. Try doing that. Second, her talk was amazing as she told us about her life and the things she has accomplished. She made the audience laugh, cry, and applaud.

Karen starts off with, “When I was born, the doctors told my parents that I would not be able to have a life of my own.” Today, she is just a few credits short of an Associate’s degree and hopes to be a teacher’s aide soon. She spoke about her love of reading, especially Jane Austen. She told us how she swam the English Channel as part of a team and how she swam solo across Lake Tahoe, a distance of 9 miles. She has completed the “Escape From Alcatraz” challenge and has swum across San Francisco Bay nine times. When she finished her speech, she received a standing ovation.

Ms. Gaffney is an amazing young woman. She has done more than many people who have the “correct” number of chromosomes. If you ever have the opportunity to hear her speak, be sure not to miss her.

The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James

This is the last time that I let Gil Grissom recommend a book for me. Yes, I let a fictional character from a TV show pick a book for me to read. The story is a fairly simple and uninspired Gothic “horror” story. There are some ghosts who never really do anything and a governess who overreacts to everything. The idea that perhaps the governess is insane and this isn’t a simple horror story, in my opinion comes from the fact that it is impossible to justify reading this story without that conundrum.

Besides the plot being rather pedestrian is the writing of Henry James. He uses sentences that are confused, confusing, and in many places indecipherable. At 120 pages, the book is probably 100 pages too long. Some examples:

Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill that we vociferously denied we felt; and we had all three, with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time, to mark the close of the incident, almost automatically through the very same movements.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connexion with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch from my open window the faint summer dawn, to look at such stretches of the rest of the house that I could catch, and to listen, while in the fading dusk the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recourse of a sound or two, less natural and not without but within, that I had fancied I heard.

These were sentences randomly pulled from the book and are a fair representation of the writing style of Henry James. The main part of the story is supposed to be written by the governess so one might try to argue that James is trying to capture something of the governess in this style but the introduction is virtually identical and is not written by the governess. Even the end of the story lacks completion as it leaves the entire tale unresolved. There is nothing to recommend this story for personal reading (other than being able to say you read it) and if it is required reading, at least getting through promises a grade at the end.

As far as this edition of the book, it is fairly well done with a glossary in the back to explain some difficult words and phrases and a points for discussion section at the front. But with such a difficult book, I think most students would appreciate more discussion of the book in a general way and perhaps even a brief description of the action of each chapter. The book itself I would rate rather poor and this edition I would rate as fair. Overall, three stars is a generous review.

Tags: books, review, The Turn of the Screw

Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging. I spent a good part of the previous week attending a conference on Down syndrome and then finally upgrading downsyn.com with a new dedicated server. The upgrade was well worth the time and effort. The forum was constantly down when I was running a shared server. We had simply grown too big to share our server with a bunch of other sites. The new server has been great. The forum has had 100% up-time (I probably just jinxed it) and response time is lightning fast. In fact, the great response time has inspired me to post on the forum, something I haven’t been doing much of lately.

There are a bunch of things I have wanted to blog about and I promise to get to them. My outstanding topic list includes some info from the conference. Karen Gaffney was there and so was Dr. Capone and I want to blog about both of them. Dr. Capone’s talk has inspired me to finally do something with the site I own, dsautism.com. I also want to blog about Michel’s dad. The 11th was Mikey’s 11th birthday and I want to blog about the past year with Mikey.

So lots of topics and I promise to start getting to them. But first a book review…

I understand that principals of schools are forced to make many decisions every day but when they make a wrong one it would be nice to apologize.

An 8 year old boy in a school in Colorado had a Sharpie to use for drawing. The boy drew on on his seatshirt with the Sharpie and noticed that “it smelled good,” so he sniffed it. The teacher sent him to the principal and the principal, Chris Benisch, suspended the boy for three days. Yes, sniffing a Sharpie warrants a three day suspension for 8 year olds.

Benisch stands by his decision to suspend Harris, saying it sends a clear message about substance abuse. “This is really, really, seriously dangerous,” Benisch said. In his letter suspending the child, Benisch wrote that smelling the marker fumes could cause the boy to “become intoxicated.”

Except is isn’t dangerous and it can’t get you high.

A toxicologist with the Rocky Mountain Poison Control Center says that claim is nearly impossible. Dr. Eric Lavonas says non-toxic markers like Sharpies, while pungent-smelling, cannot be used to get high.

But the principal didn’t care about the truth.

Despite the medical evidence, Benisch promised to draw an even clearer line on markers. “We’ve purged every permanent marker there is in this building,” he said.

Next, all those lead pencils will be banned from school.

Melissa Riggio was the daughter of the Barnes and Noble CEO. She also had Down syndrome. Melissa died of leukemia this week at the age of 20. Melissa was a song writer and author. She wrote an article for National Geographic Kids titled, I Have Down Syndrome—Know Me Before You Judge Me. The Down syndrome community will miss her.

“And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

- The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., April 3, 1968. The next day, forty years ago today, at 6:01 PM, he was assassinated. He would only be 79 years old if he had not been murdered. I was only nine years old when it happened but I remember that day.

If you don’t know much about Reverend King, Wikipedia is a good place to start.