Lift Up Your Hearts!

Among all the changes in the lives of females over the last 50 years, I rate the improvement in clothing options as one of the best.  It may be my autism spectrum tendencies coming out, but to me the comfort factor in what I wear is of utmost importance.

Until my senior year in high school, girls were required to wear dresses or skirts to school.  Even after the hard-won change, jeans were still out of the question.  Because I have loathed wearing dresses since my earliest memories, this did nothing to make my school years more enjoyable, even though my mother, God bless her, did her best to make my dresses from comfortable material.

By the time our girls were of school age, the situation had improved dramatically.  Pants, and even shorts, were acceptible school attire—so much more practical, especially for active elementary school students living in Florida.

I do know families who insist, even today, that their girls wear dresses.  I would never do that to my children, but I'll admit that if such dresses as they generally wear had been an option in my day, perhaps I wouldn’t have minded so much.  In addition to accepting pants appropriate apparel for women, we seem to have become much more tolerant of a wide variety of dress styles and lengths.  When I was very young, dresses for little girls were stiff, scratchy and frilly—a nightmare for a touch-sensitive girl—and by my teen years skirts were uncomfortably short and getting shorter.  Practical dresses of a decent length and comfortable material might have won me over, but they were nowhere to be seen.

Even so, pants are the very best for climbing trees, and I never wanted to wear clothing that tied me to the ground.

I’m very thankful that today’s girls—and women—have more choices.

Taking a slight diversion from my Good New Days series, today I am thankful for cooler weather.  Fall has been terribly late in coming this year.  In our early years in Florida we sometimes turned the furnace on at the end of September—those  were the days when Climate Change meant the series of unusually cold winters that destroyed the citrus industry in Central Florida—but this year we needed the air conditioning right through the end of October.

But for the last few days I have been able to enjoy wearing jeans again.  I have put a blanket on the bed and dug out my winter pajamas.  Lows in the mid-40’s and highs in the mid-60’s, with bright sunshine and a pleasant reduction in the humidity:  that’s my kind of weather.  It makes me feel alive, and happy for no particular reason at all.

This morning when I woke up, the inside temperature was 60 degrees.  Normally that's cause to turn on the furnace, but by Wednesday we’re supposed to be back up into the 80’s.  So for now I’m thankful for the joy of wrapping cold fingers around a hot cup of tea.  I may even break out the oatmeal for breakfast, and enjoy a steaming hot cup of cocoa!

 Healing through Exercise:  Scientifically-Proven Ways to Prevent and Overcome Illness and Lengthen Your Life, by Jörg Blech  (Da Capo Press, 2009)  Originally published as Heilen mit Bewergung (S. Fischer Verlag, 2009)

We all know exercise is good for us, right?  So who needs yet another book telling us so?

Knowing what we should be doing is one thing, but actually doing it is another, and Healing through Exercise provides motivation in spades.

Beware the cure that is marketed as a panacea, we are told:  if it claims to fix all ills, it’s probably a fraud.  That’s sound advice, but Jörg Blech makes a convincing case that simple, regular exercise is as close to a cure-all as we’ll ever find.  Whether the issue is heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, cholesterol, hypertension, Alzheimer’s disease, back pain, cancer, impotence, ADHD, depression, brain development, immune system health, stress overload, or “old age,” moderate, regular exercise is essential—and in some cases even sufficient—for preventing illness and restoring health.  We’re more familiar with the preventative side, but Blech cites study after study showing how exercise can even reverse existing damage.  It’s never too late to take advantage of the benefits of exercise.  (Note to self:  this should be incentive to get started at any age, but never an excuse for procrastination.) (More)

When I was a child restaurant meals were very rare, the stuff of vacation travel and anniversary dinners.  My father carried a homemade lunch to work, just as we children carried ours to school.  When we did eat out, the food was rather ordinary—though I'll admit I thought a Howard Johnsons hot dog followed by their special peppermint stick ice cream was the highlight of many a vacation.

I wouldn't trade our homemade meals and family dinners for any five-star restaurant, but what I love about eating in the 21^st century is the great variety of food now available from cultures and traditions all over the world.  From Indian to Korean, Ethiopian to Moroccan, Thai to Lebanese—this is a great time to be eating!

 No More Christian Nice Girl, by Paul Coughlin and Jennifer D. Degler (Bethany House, 2010)

No More Christian Nice Girl?  Yuck.

Don’t judge a book by its cover—or title—I told myself; there must have been a reason why I accepted this book from the publisher for review.

Flip to a random chapter.  Yeech.  If the title made me gag, this chapter nearly made me lose my dinner.  Well, accepting the book is a promise to review it, which implies I must read it.

I didn’t care much for the beginning, either, but fortunately, it got better.  I don’t like the authors’ style, so it helped to separate that from the content.  They do have some good points to make. (More)

I’m thankful for the progress we have made in welcoming people with handicaps into the mainstream of society.

If you’re a baby as yet unborn this is not a good time to be handicapped, as you have a good chance of not surviving till birth.  But if you get that far, it’s better to be here and now than in an earlier time.  Here are just a few of the improvements I’ve witnessed:

• Major advances in neonatal medicine
• Amazing prosthetics
• Braille signs in elevators and other public places
• Acceptance and promotion of American Sign Language for the Deaf
• Wheelchair cuts in curbs—which are also a great help with bicycles and strollers
• Ramp access to buildings
• Handicapped parking spaces
• Specially equipped restrooms
• Integration of handicapped students in regular school classrooms
• Special Olympics and similar events that encourage sports participation for the handicapped
• Greater understanding of and openness about mental illness
• Computers, with their ability to open the world to people with many different forms of disability
• Laws against unfair discrimination

If progress remains to be made, and it does, it's good to remember how far we've come, and to be aware that gains achieved can subsequently be lost.  I've seen hints of a disturbing backlash against handicapped children, on the grounds that "they should never have been born."

I am thankful for the baby formula that is available today.

I know.  Me, the Notorious Despiser of Artificial Baby Feeding, thankful for infant formula.  But it’s true. (More)

On the day after Election Day^* I felt some commentary to be necessary, so I struggled to find something about our political system that is better now than in the past.

I considered the 19^th Amendment:  that’s a significant improvement.  But I’m not so old that I was ever disenfranchised because of my sex, so it doesn’t really count.

The 26^th Amendment did make a difference in my life, but I have mixed feelings about that one, seeing as extending the voting age downward corresponded with an upward movement of the age of responsible maturity.

Much about our political system has taken a turn for the worse during my lifetime.  (I’m not saying it was always better—we’re not longer literally tar-and-feathering our opponents.)  But one positive change I am thankful for on this third day of November is openness. (More)

Continuing with the Thanksgiving/Good New Days series, today (and every day) I am thankful for smoke-free restaurants, homes, airplanes, offices, grocery stores, and even bowling alleys!  This is a societal sea-change that is most definitely for the better.

You youngsters simply cannot imagine what it was like. (More)

Liz at Smithical has issued a challenge to honor Thanksgiving by blogging about something we're thankful for each day of November.  It will be a bit of a trick to accomplish, as I already have more posts in the pipeline than time to work on them, and I hope to liberate myself from my computer for several days this month.  But it's a grand idea, so I'm going to plunge in.  She didn't say the posts must be long, or profound.

The concept fits nicely with an idea for a post I was in the middle of constructing:  The Good New Days. (More)

Temple Grandin (HBO, NR)

Why are you reading this post when you could be rushing to your nearest video store (is that phrase as passé as "dialing a phone number"?) and grabbing a copy of Temple Grandin?  It would be trite to say that this is one of the most amazing and inspiring movies I have ever seen, though it is.  It would be understatement to say that Temple Grandin is an incredibly amazing and inspiring person.

"Highly functioning autistic" doesn't begin to describe this brilliant visual thinker—and university professor—whose humane designs have revolutionized livestock handling.  My introduction to Temple Grandin was through her TED lecture, The World Needs All Kinds of Minds.  That's a good place to start, but don't miss the movie.  (As far as I can recall it is completely grandchild safe.) (More)

I don’t remember exactly when I started feeling uncomfortable about Hallowe’en; I think it was when adults wrenched the holiday away from the children.

As a child I loved Hallowe'en.  Costumes were by and large homemade:  by parents for the youngest, then by parents and children working together, then by the children themselves.  Our elementary school had a costume parade for parents and neighbors, with judging and prizes.  Creativity was high.  I was by no means the most inventive, but some of the costumes I remember making were a cuckoo clock, a salt shaker (my friend from across the street was the pepper), a parking meter, and a knight—complete with a wooden sword my father and I made together, and which was a favorite plaything for many years thereafter.  The hours of creative activity and of parent and child working together were priceless. (More)

Stella Sung: The Phoenix Rising
Chausson: Poème
Tchaikovsky: Romeo & Juliet
Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending
Stravinsky: The Firebird

This concert was pure pleasure.  Five gorgeous works, two new and three old favorites.  Plus I found a new and much easier way home. 

This passage from David Allen's Ready for Anything blew me away, and deserves its own post.

We recently raised some prices—because I didn’t want business to go away.  Let me explain.  One day, I recognized a subtle internal danger signal:  There was the tiniest bit of an “uh-oh” feeling inside me each time we were asked to do more and more of a certain kind of work for a favorite client.  It was almost imperceptible, but it was there:  I didn’t want the phone to ring.  After many years of watching this dynamic, I knew that if I allowed those feelings to persist, indeed, the phone would stop ringing.  This client would go away.

I confronted the feeling and discovered the root of the problem:  We were underpriced for the amount of time and attention we had to commit to do our standard quality work.  I had to challenge myself with this question:  “What do I need to do to make me positively excited about the phone’s ringing again?”  The answer was simple:  Raise the price.  Then I could feel good about dedicating the time and energy we do to this client—and the more time, the merrier.

When your front line feels overwhelmed, watch out for resistance to new … opportunities!  When a ringing phone creates stress at the spinal level, though the words may be “Can I help you?” the underlying communication is, “Go away!  I can’t handle you!”

I'm certain there is application here far beyond the business model, and that many families, friendships, projects, and resolutions are suffering because we fail to heed that internal danger signal and then do the often difficult work of figuring out how to arrange that we embrace, rather than avoid or resent, a situation. (More)

From a BBC News story of the latest Nissan recall (H/T Porter):

Nissan said there had been no accidents reported due to the fault, which can cause the engine to stall while running.

Just what I needed, something more to worry about.  The nighmare scenario had never occurred to me:  We're peacefully asleep in our beds, our car resting in the garage, apparently quite comfortable—but unbeknownst to us suffering an episode of stalling while the engine was not running.