Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Maybe Not With EVERYTHING, But This Blog-Entry IS Loaded!!!



There's so much that needs to be said on various topics in a limited amount of time.  Even now, I likely won't get all said that I'd like to today -- but, at least, I can get a good start on it.

First of all...Have you heard of Everything Bagels and Loaded Baked Potatoes?

Keep in mind that neither the bagels nor the baked potatoes are loaded with everything -- this only means that they're loaded with a lot.

Same goes with this blog-entry.

I'm not sure if I'll even get it done before Larry arrives at one-ish and *totally* distracts me.

If you're reading this before Larry arrives, that means that I got it all written.

If you read it after he leaves, that means that -- sometime between this beginning and when I write the last word before posting this -- Larry has arrived at the library.

Anyway, it's now almost 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, October 4, 2016.

I keep thinking that it's a day later, for some reason -- and I'm glad that it isn't...

Anyway, for starters, I want to back up and link to the last seven entries I posted ( between August 2 and October 1) to this blog...


It's Happening In Tanzania...


Sharing A Generous Slice Of Aunt Kate & Uncle Don















This is what a blog looks like, if it's being kept up by somebody (such as myself) with limited time on the Internet -- or, at least, this is what my blog looks like.

Now that you've read them, you'll have a pretty good idea re: how I've spent my limited time online...

It's now 11:34, and Larry has just arrived!!!  Details later...

Okay!  Details about Larry...We had a wonderful visit, and I gave him the various items (mostly, tabs that I both got on my own and got from various other people -- AND the various ones of the other items that he likes to collect to recycle).

He wants me to be sure and thank everybody who has been helping him with collecting tabs for the wonderful work done by Ronald McDonald House of Indiana.

As you can read here, the good that this mission does has hit close to home!

As quite a few of you who are reading this probably know, I have a condition called lymphedema.  Although I had this condition for a few years before (mistaking it for merely edema), I was officially diagnosed with it in late May of 2009 when it became seriously-infected, requiring me to spend several days in the hospital.

My level of having lymphedema isn't quite to the place where my legs look as extreme as those pictured in what I've just shared -- however, it goes without saying that my legs still have an advanced enough form of it that they (get ready to groan...) stand out like sore thumbs.

But I want to tell you about the late evening when I finally went to the hospital.

My mom was at my place, because she was concerned about my being alone.

This was Memorial Day Weekend, and she had been concerned enough that she stayed with me instead of doing what she had planned on doing:  going with Pinky & Bud to decorate the graves of family and friends.

I kept telling her that I would be fine -- that I just needed to get my legs elevated so that the places where the skin had popped open would begin to heal.

However, I was having a lot of trouble lifting my legs up high enough to even get them on the low-level loveseat where I was sitting and watching the latest on a remarkable and talented woman who had just recently received much-deserved acclaim -- a woman with a message to share re: what our priorities should be when it came to our opinions of others/ourselves.

I was glad to have her home with me, even though I hated to think of her missing out on decorating graves -- but, as it turned out, she was getting more and more concerned that there might be at least one more grave to decorate the next time Memorial Day rolled around.

Many months later, I would read the symptoms of somebody about to go into a coma -- and they matched up with many of mine.

Anyway, my mom told me that I really needed to get to the emergency room to get checked over.

I told her that I didn't think that it was that necessary -- and that we might end up owing a lot more than we'd like to be owing, as I had allowed my health insurance payments to lapse, as I was starting to think that I was spending more on making the payments (which seemed to be increasing about every quarter year) than I was needing to be helped by them.

But I finally said that I would go to the ER to be checked over the next day but that I also had things to take care of first (e.g. getting bills paid, writing deadlines, etc.) in case I did end up in the hospital.

That was when she said something very profound to me:

"I have a couple of phone numbers and plan to call one of them tonight.  Which would you prefer:  St. John's Hospital?  or  Robert D. Loose Funeral Home?"

To make a long story short, I was soon to become educated re:  lymphedema and how to manage it.

To top that all off -- thanks to a charity foundation, I ended up owing under $500 (paid as slowly as it took) for my part of my hospital stay (close to two weeks).

Here in our country, there are a lot of measures put into place to make it easier to take care of our health.  We don't have the perfect system -- but it works far better than the one used by Rose Njilo, my special friend from Tanzania.  With her, everything is a struggle.

Right at this time, she's dealing with serious ulcers and vomiting blood.  She's a strong person, but even she has her limits.

This wonderful woman continues in her mission to empower women and girls to give them alternatives to becoming slaves to so-called husbands who aren't deserving of them.

As most of you know, I share news about what she does from time to time.  In fact, the first link I've shared in that group of seven provides information about how she and others are making a wonderful difference in the lives of these marginalized females.

After hearing about these women and girls, I've never taken for granted my own hopes and dreams -- where the relationship between males and females gets associated with things such as wonderful music like this instead of  female genital mutilation (still acceptable and not considered to be illegal abuse over in Tanzania) and domination.

I know that not everybody reading this will be able to donate cash -- either to help Rose's mission or to help her to get the medical attention she's needing now in order to keep on going in her quest to give women and girls in Tanzania a real chance at having empowered and full lives.

However, even when cash is tight, we can still send prayers, love, and positive thoughts -- AND we can get the word out in hopes that other people who are able to donate cash will be touched.

Therefore, with this in mind, I'm going to share a link to Rose's GoFundMe site.  You can earmark the donations so that one part will go to her mission and another part will go to restoring her health again.  If you can't personally do this, please suggest this as a possibility when you share this information.

Time is getting late, but I wanted to thank so many people who have made it easy for me to take care of what's been going on in my life and still not totally neglect what I need to do in order to manage my condition so that I don't end up in the hospital again.

I'll be giving you some shining examples in my next Blogger blog-entry -- hopefully done tomorrow.

For now, I'm going to be posting this so that it can start getting read, as I've covered a lot of important ground.

It's really great to be able to get online several days in a row and for more hours than usual.  I'll take all of the time that I can get.

Maybe, I'll make the title of my next blog-entry:  How I Spent My October 2016 Vacation In Anderson.

Then, weather and other things concerned, I'll probably make another entry next week from the library downtown in Muncie called What I've Been Doing Since I Returned To Muncie.  Of course, I'm hoping to be doing an entry pretty soon called Getting Settled In Anderson But With A Big Piece Of My Heart Still In Muncie.

Hopefully, I'll be casting a vote for Gary Johnson from Anderson come November.  We shall see...

For now, it's time for me to shut my Cyber-piehole!!!  LOL


P.S.  In case you're wondering why it's probably showing that I finished this blog and posted it much earlier than so close to when it's time for me to catch the bus, it's because I posted it just long enough to test some links and, then, put it back into draft form again.

Just a little information to satisfy your curiosity, just in case you happened to notice and got curious.

On this note, I'm going to encourage you once again the keep sharing the link to this blog entry...


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