7 quick takes

1. Today is the 2nd day of December and NaBlPoMo has been over for a couple of days. I was feeling a bit inadequate (as these damn self imposed goals of blogging often make me feel) and I realized I posted 5, yes FIVE, times in one month. If you view my previous months of blogging since the last NaBlMoPo you will see the standard is once a month. I posted five times my usual output; I refuse to feel like a failure over this, HA!

2. Today is my birthday and I am sad to leave 42 behind. I loved being 42. Last year I declared it the year of “the meaning of life the universe and everything” and it gave me a little jolt of geeky delight every time I told someone how old I was. I carried around a towel in my car and I Note to add: I am still about 10 years old on the inside so I purposely told people how old I was just so I could tell them I was 42, strange I know.

3. Thanksgiving falls on the last Friday of the month of November. My school makes us make up the day off for Thanksgiving on the following Friday. This means that I will not have a day off for my birthday until 2012 and it will fall on a Sunday, then it I will have to wait until 2017 to get it off again. I am not happy about this. Hopefully by 2017 I will be done with school and teaching at a proper University and have the day off because we don’t have to make up the time. (the real reason I want a master’s degree, my birthday off)

4. I got an Archos 5 internet tablet palm PC for my birthday and I think I want to marry it. Not only is it WAAAAAYY less expensive than an IPad or even a Kindle but also it has expandable memory, it runs on the Android platform, it has a built in reader program so I can use it like a Kindle, it has a speaker, a microphone, a camera and I can access the internet. Oh and there are apps which I can download AND there is a fun game called Angry Birds that I believe I am addicted to. Oh, I can also do work stuff from it and keep my calendar on it and it will even sync with my PC. It must be love, love, looooovvveee.

5. I have started drinking hot tea again. I love tea, especially hot tea but here in Texas it is just too darn hot in the spring, summer and early autumn to think about drinking something hot. Now that the temps have dropped to the 60s and 70s I am back in business. I really like Constant Comment and Darjeeling teas, what kind do you like?

6. I am going to Austin to visit my friend Phil this weekend. He and I have been friends for years and years and he moved to Texas about a year and a half before I did. Even though we only live about 3 hours apart we don’t get to visit nearly enough. I am really looking forward to this.

7. I read an interesting article on a technique used to treat post traumatic stress disorder called “Tapping”. It deals with the hippocampus and creating a disassociation with the event and emotions that caused the trauma similar to” when one wakes up from a nightmare and realized that one is safe in bed”. The technique calls for tapping certain parts of the face, hands and body while dealing with the emotional arousal of the remembered incident. It has a lot of success in treating post war PTSD. Pretty interesting, if you want to know more check out this website: http://www.hgi.org.uk/archive/PTSD_Trauma_Treatments.htm there are others but this one is rather concise.