Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Spring Surprise

The surprise being that this post is actually going up.

Though the fact that I’m wearing a T-shirt today is surprising after last week’s snow storm that dumped more than eight inches on the property.

Last time I posted was nearly a month ago. How time flies when you aren’t having fun. While February was tough on my health, March pushed me to my limits with no spare energy for anything constructive. That, of course, includes writing.

Friday, March 06, 2015

Spring Is Coming…

…Or so the weather forecasters claim.

Temperatures are finally supposed to go above freezing for the highs this weekend and I desperately need them to. It has been a cold, harsh winter making my bones ache constantly. Thankfully, things have been rather busy the past month thereby causing time to fly and writing to fall by the wayside.

Lately we have been traveling to Gunderson Clinic quite a bit due to testing being performed on Dad to see if something can be done so he’ll be able to eat food again. So far we know that liquids pass through but not solids, so nothing has changed there except for the fluids transiting more easily than last year.

Monday, February 23, 2015

The Sound of Spam

More referral spam from Russia and the Netherlands cluttered my Blogger stats in Fevruary. Adding to the mess is the loud blast of spam from http: // ranksonic . info / krawler . pho?refToken threatening to blow the doors down on my blog for the past month. Join me as I explore the links you should never click on…

Ranksonic Spam 01

Let’s start with spam from RanKSonic since it is clogging up Statcounter as well as Blogger’s stats. Of course, it is SEO spam claiming to be able to boost traffic to your website. Hey, if they were that good at it, would they be spamming blogs to get business? Of course not.

Ranksonic Spam 02

Scrolling down to the bottom of the page, I tried several links since there was no way I would sign up for the shady service. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy produced 404 errors like the one above, while About Us just took me back to the top of the home page.

Inspires great confidence in their understanding of webpage design, doesn’t it?

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Definitions Matter: IOM Report on ME/CFS

Being a sufferer of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) means dealing with skeptical doctors, a lack of public awareness, and a very confusing diagnostic process. The last is a much bigger problem than even sufferers understand for it is the doctors being confused as well.

So I applaud the new diagnosis method proposed by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies here in the United States. While I haven’t read the full report yet, the outlines and video presentation depict a much more streamlined (and dare I say it, more accurate) list of symptoms for diagnosis.

Quoting from the Key Facts PDF:

There are five main symptoms of ME/CFS:

  1. Reduction or impairment in ability to carry out normal daily activities, accompanied by profound fatigue;
  2. Post-exertional malaise (worsening of symptoms after physical, cognitive, or emotional effort);
  3. Unrefreshing sleep;
  4. Cognitive impairment; and
  5. Orthostatic intolerance (symptoms that worsen when a person stands upright and improve when the person lies back down).

The first three are mandatory and one of the latter two is needed to fulfill the criteria for diagnosis.

I suffer harshly from the first four and haven’t been tested for orthostatic intolerance. Lately, number four has been particularly bad, hence my not posting much. The last few days have been especially challenging making coherent sentences a challenge even when speaking. Today is better, thankfully.

Also in the report is a proposal to rename the disease to Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease or SEID. Doesn’t roll off the tip of the tongue, does it? However, it is bang on what the illness is really about and, most importantly, replaces “syndrome” with “disease” which is important in the medical world.

Note that this report has nothing on treatment and is confined to diagnostics for doctors and researchers, so please don’t get your hopes up on a treatment being developed quickly or even at all. What this report does is add legitimacy to the illness which is vital for extensive research to be done like Stanford’s findings last year of physical abnormalities in CFS patients’ brains.

After over 25 years of having this miserable illness, I’d given up any hope of advancement in any way or form from the medical community. This may be more than a glimmer.

Monday, February 02, 2015

February Already?

Tiger Tabby

“Tempus fugit,” said the Romans and indeed that observation still applies two millennia later. January turned out to be a bear of a month to get through, so next to nothing got done other than what was required. Hopefully, things will get easier as the temperatures warm and winter weather slowly departs.

That may be awhile, as I was snowed in yesterday and didn’t make it to church. Great irony could be found in the fact that I had asked to be covered for my Sunday school lesson the week before due to a forecast of snow that didn’t arrive. So of course the boy that cried wolf (NOAA) wasn’t listened to this time and I awakened to heavy drifting across our steep drive.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

The World Is Burning–So What?

The first post of the year 2015 is something I actually started awhile back and forgot about. Lately I’ve been pondering how people deal with life’s challenges along with how much behavior is influenced by external pressures. Stress fractures in society are increasing in size and quantity while people seem less equipped to deal with them. That’s the backdrop for what I began writing last year and updated for this post…

Russia slowly undermines and takes away chunks of Ukraine, China bullies its neighbors and lays claim to vast swathes of sea, Islamists are wreaking havoc in France and Africa, illegal alien minors including gang members are flooding over the border with Mexico, Iraq lost territory to terrorists and Iran sent troops in, and the United States has the most corrupt and incompetent leadership in its history. Yep, it is business as usual -- if you are a student of history. Unfortunately, most people are not.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

2014 in Retrospect, 2015 Looms

New Years Eve is upon me much faster than expected since life has been complicated of late. Of course, it has been for the entire year so I should have expected 2014 to end that way. To sum up the year it was a relentless grind.

Starting off with my father’s cancer battle, 2014 proved to be a bad year demonstrating 2013 was no fluke. Life got harder, so the blog didn’t get the attention planned for it, along with many other things.

Normally, I write a post with statistics for the blog, however this year I’m discontinuing the practice. Why? It is clear that growth is dead. Other than the front page and one post on spam, the top twenty pages viewed all were originally published in prior years.

Suffice it to say that visits decline by a quarter thanks to Google’s constant screwing around with their algorithms and my producing fewer posts. Having matured, the Web is now a pay to play business rather than the bold new frontier of the past.

Good thing the blog wasn’t created to garner wealth or fame!