American Revolution II: Stay Home, Don't Vote!

Post removed for further investigation. I trust my blog companions and the Stay Home, Don't Vote campaign deserves more scrutiny on my behalf before I sponsor/champion the idea. Who knows...I may just be wrong about this thing.

Thought YOU were having a bad day?

Have you ever driven away from the gas pump and forgotten to put the pumper back?

Lessons from the Annual Daddy - Daughter Weekend

As luck would have it, the annual Grand Session event for Job's Daughters AND the annual Girls Camp event through our church fell on the exact same weekend. For my oldest three daughters, it meant making a tough choice regarding which event to attend. For me, it meant figuring out how to keep my six, four, and three year old daughters busy for four days and three nights ALL BY MYSELF. (Qeue the horror movie theme music).

Since my beloved wife had received the calling of Girls Camp Assistant Director, that meant she would be gone with whomever chose to go to camp for the weekend as well.  Now I'll admit, I panicked a tad at first.  The thought of keeping these little ones content, fed, dressed, pony-tailed, and NOT BORED was a HUGE undertaking for the Dad who hadn't planned a toddler event without the aid of his wife since...well...ever.

I quickly learned what NOT to do if you want a stress-free day with the princesses.

1) Don't even THINK about mentioning what you MIGHT do unless you know FOR SURE that you will be doing it. Heaven forbid if the plan falls through because the "YOU SAID's" and the "WHY AREN'T WE's" will echo like teradactyl screechings in your suburban until you find a swift replacement activity.

2) Don't expect to roll out of bed and out the door with minimal prepping like you do when you are going to Home Depot solo. Oh no. I left the house without a bottle bag AND the all-important Blankie. My sanity may have disappeared forever had it not been for the dvd player in the suburban and our trusted copy of Tangled.

3) Even though you JUST walked through the door coming home from McDonalds, don't think for a moment that nobody's hungry.  Plan on having easy-to-make meals ready to pop in the microwave. You might even get a little crazy and set some things out to thaw ahead of time. Crazy, right?! Planning ahead..pfft!  Ramen reigned at our house this week but I did go the extra mile once. Yup..I made Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Booyah! Dad of the year!

All-in-all, we are having a wonderful time. Wifey returns tonight with one daughter. The final two return Sunday.  With the help of Mommy's Goodie Bags (she made one for each day, each child, and hid them separately), some fast food outings (being careful to only pick locations with playgrounds indoors),  our trusty Netflix account, and the newly assembled Kid Carwash in the backyard...I'd say everyone had a great time.  Especially if having a great time is judged by the amount of empty, worthless calories consumed. Winning!

Using Nuclear Medicine to Determine Brain Death

Nuclear Medicine Exam for Determining Brain Death

I learned something new at work the other day: how to determine if a person is brain dead.  No, there's no punchline.  This isn't a joke. I work in Radiology and a co-worker was doing a study on a young lady that partied a little too hard on her birthday.  So hard that she ended up in our ICU (Intensive Care Unit) and was completely unresponsive to external stimuli.

Turns out, there is a medical test to determine brain death.  I remember not too long ago they used to do EEGs (electroencephalograms) to examine brain wave activity.  You've seen the pictures on television most likely. A bunch of wires gets hooked up to electrodes on a person's head and the electric impulses are displayed on a machine that draws big wavy lines on paper.

Well, in this particular case, a Nuclear Medicine Brain Scan was ordered. For this test, a particular radioactive chemical is injected into the patient using an IV (intravenous catheter).  This particular chemical is taken up by the brain and carried around or perfused throughout the brain during normal brain activity. In a person with no brain activity, the chemical simply does not show up in the area of the brain.

For this particular type of test, the chemical shows up as a dark color, much like the outline of the body in the picture below does.  Therefore, in the following picture, the area of the brain showing no dark colors indicates that this patient has no brain activity, ie brain death.

This is a delayed image test meaning that images are taken every five minutes or so to "track" the flow of the radioactive chemical.  You can see the flow appearing darker throughout the body (shoulders, neck, and face) but none shows up within the brain cavity.

Here is an example of normal brain perfusion:

Notice how the brain becomes darker colored as does the rest of the body? That is a sign of normal brain perfusion. Here's a larger version:

The brain above is noted as "robust cerebral and cerebellar profusion".

I've been in healthcare for a long time and I had never seen one of these studies. I looked it up and in the four years my current hospital has been open, we've only done four of these. Coincidentally, three of the four were young females.

So, now you know one-way doctors can officially determine brain death.

Help Identifying a Garden Critter

Click on the pic to enlarge. Critters are on the middle stalk.

I can't make much of it but maybe you can. A friend of Wifey's (hi Emilie!) sent these pictures to her a few weeks ago asking if we knew what was invading her Tomato plants. The top picture shows the critters (you have to click on the picture to see the magnified version). They are on the middle stem and look like little aphids or something.

The bottom picture is showing how her plant was dying and she wondered why?

Do any of you Master Gardeners have any input on these pics?