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Been having a lot of theatre dreams lately. Not "actor's nightmares" - mostly actor's dress rehearsals. Very busy and involving ornate costumes. I have very small, mostly non-speaking roles but am having a great time.

Also dreamed last night about finding an injured baby black bird, very fluffy and very frightened, but he quickly settled in - most likely provoked by hearing, in my sleep, the 3 newest finchlettes in the aviary, screaming, "FEED ME THIS SECOND OR I WILL DIE!!!"

Then I was awakened by happy dogs licking my face, "WAKE UP MOM!" (yes, all animals yell everything enthusiastically). I felt like Snow White with 4 Prince and Princess Charmings, "You found me!" ... without coughing up any nasty poisoned apple bits.

So. All that's a pretty good start to a Saturday morning.

Now for a little breakfast, a little "Ocarina of Time" and a lot of house cleaning.

Don't let USDA privatize chicken inspection!

Three chickens per second.

Under a new plan proposed by USDA, that's how fast inspectors would have to conduct quality control inspections in poultry factories -- six times the current rate.

Worse, USDA's proposed rules privatize these inspections, letting the industry police itself by replacing highly trained USDA food inspectors with poultry facility employees who have no required training.1

Salmonella in our meat and poultry makes nearly a million people sick every year in the US -- it's our number one cause of food-borne illness. USDA's new plan could make the problem even worse, and we have just days to stop it.

More (including a petition to sign): https://act.credoaction.com/campaign/usda_poultry/index.html?r=6888744

Watching the American Corporate Aristocracy ordering the police to act violently against the masses, watching our corporate-owned government indulging in torture, permanent imprisonment without trial, declaring personhood for Corporations while declaring citizens to be non-persons, working to restrict free speech and in general neutralizing the Bill of Rights while making itr sure that neither moral law nor legal strictures and consequences apply to themselves - in other words, seeing, as we have throughout recorded human history, a tiny minority arbitrarily declaring themselves to be superior, more deserving than the rest of us, yet again attempting to establish monarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy, un-elected rule over the overwhelming majority. This is exactly what the Founders sought to prevent: an undeserving class of sociopaths who is unaccountable to, and feeds off of the work of, the rest of us. This is why the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, exists and why we have such things as inheritance taxes why we have the kind of regulations that the Bush Administration stripped away. Fortunately, there is nothing these would-be tyrants can do to destroy the rapid-fire forms of communication that are now available to the masses, and the more brutal the tactics become, the faster and larger the revolution grows ....

Sic Semper Tyrannis

"...it is important to realize that being GLBT itself is not a risk factor for suicide. Rather, the negative treatment that many GLBT teens endure can lead to suicidal feelings."

I can't stop thinking of Asher Brown's suicide along with what Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered youth have to go through in the 21st century when we should be more enlightened. It's hard enough for non-G.L.B.T., dealing with self-image, peer "issues", family relationships and everything else without also being surrounded by people telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to marry the person you love because that's not really "love", that's not a "family", that you shouldn't be allowed to adopt children or teach in schools because just being who you are would be a bad influence on kids, that, "HELL NO you can't have a gay-straight alliance at school because that will allow you to believe you're okay." And all of the hate rhetoric filters down to non-GLBT kids who see it as permission, maybe even a mandate, to terrorize any kid who is the least bit different.

Some of these kids are getting it at home, at school, in church - it never lets up. How do those kids pull together the hope, keep from being overwhelmed with despair until they can make it to adulthood?

One thing I think we can do is pass around information and pay attention. If they are fortunate, there is a group like LAMBDA. If, where they live, they can get to uncensored internet, there is help online: http://gayteens.about.com. There are role models like Dan Savage: It Gets Better: Dan and Terry. There is also a toll-free national hotline for teens: 1-800-246-PRIDE.

Here are some other links:

Is Teen Suicide a Bigger Risk if You are GLBT?

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning Youth Suicide Statistics

Teen Life Q&A Special: FAQ on Teen Suicide
Your most frequently asked questions about teen suicide.

This is, regardless of how some people try to paint it, quite simply a human rights issue and, while I've decided it's a waste of time and effort to continue passing along political opinions and links, I'll never be able to shut up about basic human rights. Never. I will harp on this until the day I die. It may well be my last words.

I don't remember my parents ever restricting my reading as a child. My dad dealt with his embarrassment over my love of comics by going into my room a couple of times a year, finding my stash and tossing it and he'd probably be horrified to see the stash I have now, but he didn't forbid me to read them.

I walked to the library a couple of times a week. It started out in one of the apartments in the complex I grew up in, then, when I was in high school, it expanded to a big, beautiful building of it's own across the highway. I forgave them for plowing under the land where my dad and I hunted night-crawlers and Momma and I picked berries - it was worth it! And, by the time I was a teenager, we weren't picking berries anymore and my dad had given up fishing for golf.

When I wasn't hiding in trees, doing stunts on my bicycle or roller skates, watching old movies on TV or writing my own TV shows, I had my with my nose buried in books. By the age of 13 I was reading Robert Heinlein and Ian Fleming, with nary a comment from my parents. Probably because they usually had their noses buried in their own books.

Had I known about a banned books list when I was a kid, I probably would have made it a goal to read every book on the list. As it was, the only list I knew of like that was for Catholics. I would not have made a good Catholic because the minute they told me not to read this book or see that film, I would have wanted to check it out to see why it was so controversial.

These days, I find myself at the computer less and less and reading books more and more. It's a lovely, rediscovered addiction.

We took Kaylee on a late night walk, cross Church street and see a chihuahua and a pug trotting down the street. All by themselves. No leashes, no humans. So we try to calmly catch them and get them home. The chihuahua was having none of it. The Pug was a little more submissive but ultimately wouldn't let me pick her up. Chihuahua heads the other way down the sidewalk and the pug nonchalantly trots into the street. Skip runs into the street with Kaylee to try to stop, or at least slow, traffic - even with the narrowing of the lanes to one each way, people drive Church street like it's the Indianapolis 500. We manage to herd the dogs to a big hole in what must be the back fence to their yard and the owner appears, frantic. Apparently they haven't had money to get the fence fixed; she was talking to her son at the back door and the dogs ran out. Skip, being the kind of guy he is, offered to go over and put up some mesh over the hole tomorrow.

Too much excitement for one evening.

Yesterday I developed a flood of squiggly, thready "floaters" in my left eye, followed last night by a weird white flash that looked like a lit-up light switch flipping up and down in the far corner of my eye. As this started about an hour and a half after my thyroid biopsy (had one last year, which was negative, expect this one to be the same), we called the endocrinologist, who said that it's not related. The we called our GP who said that it could be related, but to wait and see what happens.

galbinus_caeli contacted a friend of ours who is an eye surgeon to ask if we needed to go to an ER or see a specialist. He called us back, asked about the symptoms and related health issues, then explained that it's normal for people to get "floaters" and flashing lights in their eyes in their 40's, 50's, 60's and up, due to the vitreous in your eye pulling away from the retina as we age. After the "flasher" started we thought we should call a specialist and the Nurse, reassuringly enough, said pretty much the same thing as our surgeon friend, adding analogies about Jello pulling away from the side of the bowl and wallpaper (the retina) tearing and how you didn't want to getting water behind it because it might come loose. The Nurse is also a big Shakespeare fan, and a fan of English history - especially Henry VIII ("I can name all the wives!") which presented an opportunity to tell her about the Shakespeare Tavern and their upcoming run of Henry VIII & Anne of the Thousand Days in repertory starting 9/12.

In any case, I have an appointment with a retina surgeon next week to make sure it's nothing serious and I'm just glad that these things are hitting me relatively late in life and, though annoying, are generally not all that serious. Lucky me!

Details behind the ( CUT )

So I go in for my ultrasound of my thryroid. It was scheduled as an ultrasound. That's what the visit was supposed to be for. The Dr. asks "How long has it been since you've had an ultra sound?" I say about a year. She says, "You sure it hasn't been 2?" I haven't been seeing her that long, but I don't say that. She looks it up and, sure enough, my last visit was July, 2009.

I tell her that I am having difficulty sleeping because my husband is out of the country. "India, in fact. Chennai" I say in an enthusiastic and friendly manner.

"Mmm" she says.

I tell her that my GP did a full thyroid panel and, based on the results, recommended increasing my Synthroid and that I had been following his recommendation. She gets VERY upset. "Are you shaking? Is your heart racing?" "No", I say. She says, "You've lost 15 pounds! That's because of too much Synthroid." I tell her I started running in April because I'm feeling much better. She says, "Well you can't just be increasing your Synthroid just because it makes you feel better! There are long term consequences!" So then she sets me up for a blood test and tells me they will call me to set up an appointment for an ultrasound. WTF!!! I say nothing because you cannot talk to this woman.

Still trying to be friendly, and thinking maybe I had been offensive by implying she was from India I ask, "Are you from India?" She smiles and says, "Yes. The NORTHERN part." As if that is very important. And that sense of entitlement and arrogance completely explains why she treats me as she does, and why I can't talk to her about anything.

Thus proving that people are just people everywhere.

Good old Dr. Seuss summed up the human race best in, The Sneetches - "Stars upon Thars." I clearly need a new endocrinologist.