Electromagnetic sensitivity

Would you like to live inside of a microwave? That is what protesters say of the new 'smart' meters that the local energy company is installing that will keep tabs on ones energy consumption by radio waves. These things are outside the house as opposed to our cellphones and wireless routers that are inside the house. These will make meter readers obsolete, which is fine by me. I am still angry at one who wanted to trounce through my flowers rather than walk 20 feet farther. Rather than do that, he just estimated our energy use resulting in  a bill 4 times normal leading to lots of phone calls. Yeah, I can do without that.

This was the subject yesterday in our pseudo newspaper. It made me sad how ignorant people can be and how this newspaper spread their brand of pseudoscience. Instead of interviewing medical doctors or electricity experts, they interviewed a psychic and a so-called environmental doctor who believes that electromagnetic radiation is the root of all evil. He said it causes 100% of cancer cases. Did cancer exist before cell-phones and TV and radio? Not in his mind. The psychic particularly interested me. Apparently she has electromagnetic sensitivity. I used to live in a house with her years ago. Another of our cohabitants ran into her about 15 years ago at a psychic fair. The psychic stared at her and said something about her looking familiar.


Well you're the psychic. This should be easy for you.

Maybe too much cellphone radiation in the room interfered with her psychic ability though this was before cellphones were so prevalent.

In the past week, three of my family members have gotten new jobs. Julia also received her master's.Shanna's family arrived safely in Boston. All seems well.

Yesterday the early morning temperature was only 24 rising 40 degrees during the day. We finally could take our many houseplants outside decluttering the place considerably. Later we had dinner out with Josh and Julia, which was pleasant as always.

I ran between thunderstorms this morning. The local soil around here is clay, which when  very wet forms a slippery layer (in my pottery class, we called the stuff 'slip'). It was hard to get good footing in spots on the dirt road I love to run on. Usually it is kind of spongy as it goes through wetlands which is good for my legs. I saw a few pairs of pretty gold finches and one turkey vulture. It has been a while since I have seen a deer. I would have thought the easy winter would have increased their numbers.

photofunia

My triple negative tumor is different from your triple negative tumor

Classifying breast cancer as triple negative just tells you what your tumor is not. It is not sensitive to estrogen, progestins, or does it over express the Her2 oncogene. It is akin to classifying an animal as something that does not have feathers, does not have antennae, and is not green. One is left with a whole bunch of animals that it could be.
The greatest recent advances in cancer therapy have been in targeted therapy (versus early chemotherapy in which all fast growing cells are killed in the hope that the cancer cells will be killed too: this is what was offered to me). What should be targeted in TNBC? Recently scientists tried to characterize 100 tumors from 100 different TNBC patients looking for gene sequences in common in hopes of finding something to target. They found very little in common. Even worse, the tumor cells were not the same even in a given patient. In the recent past, PARP inhibitors have been used successfully in some patients, notably ones who have the BRAC1 gene deficiency which is associated with some cases of TNBC. But they have not been effective against all TNBC patients with  mets. Various researchers have had conflicting successes with identifying a factor that may in the future give us quadruple negative breast cancer (or at least the name): androgen. Healthy breast cells are sensitive to androgen as are cancer cells that still haven't differentiated too far from the original tissue. Initially TNBC seems more aggressive as defined by growing faster that are androgen positive but it is not clear if androgen positive tumors have a greater tendency for metastasis. As far as I know, there have been no clinical trials for this though the drug itself should be easy enough to find. Perhaps the androgen blockers used against prostate cancer could be used.

I LOVE TO GENERALIZE FROM ONE EXAMPLE

I saw this on a T-shirt recently. So easy to fall in this trap though usually I use more than one example. To soothe myself over the past few years, I have tried to look for evidence that TNBC is not as fatal in post menopausal women as it is in premenopausal. There have been no specific studies I can find. There are studies that indicate BC in general is more deadly in younger women giving the reason is that it is more likely to be hormone negative but nothing that compares pre versus post with the same tumors. Frustrating. So I am left with anecdotal evidence which is this: ladies with TNBC and are postmenopausal who blog are still all alive. The younger ones who blog are not all still alive. Drawing conclusions from blogsphere can be misleading. I could conclude that most TNBC patients are white because I haven't seen many blogs from African-American patients but according to statistics, this would be very wrong.

My dogwood out my window

A record cold today but hopefully this should be the end of frost for a while. My legs are exhausted from so much running. I hope to have enough energy to tackle more projects today. Meanwhile, Shanna's family slowly inches home. When we had two toddlers, we would travel long distances at night because Josh during the day would become intolerable if confined for more than a few minutes. Throw a baby in the mix and one has the  recipe for not a fun time. They have just one more trip to endure and that will be a toughie as moving all their possessions will be involved.

Grandbabies

Oliver about to go down the big slide

Ms. Tess: now 1 month old

Daniel on a slide

Oliver is to the left hoisting himself up. I bought another pass to this place in anticipation of their return

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Daniel not sure about sharing space with Maya

Trying to get all 4 kids together: mission impossible

Maya trying to kiss Daniel

Feminine scientists fail to motivate girls

This was the title of a bizarre article in our local on-line paper. Initially I thought it was a misprint; didn't they mean female, not feminine? But no, they did mean 'feminine'. So what would that be? Women dressed in pink and wearing make-up apparently. Middle school aged girls were exposed to two groups of female scientists: one group dressed in pink, wearing lots of make-up and the others, plain Janes, no make-up and drab clothes. The thesis is that the girls would identify more with the pretty scientists but instead they did not take them seriously.

I was a female scientist who often spoke to groups of students of various ages: preschoolers up through grad students. Since I was usually demonstrating something, I wore a lab coat and lab glasses, which I guess would not make me look very feminine. I do wear make-up because without it, my fair, bland features would make me look washed out. I did want to interest girls in science but often found it much easier to reach boys who seemed much more engaged in what I had to say or what I was doing. High school girls in particular seemed especially bored though one became so interested, she became my lab assistant for a few months. (her twin became internationally famous when she was abducted by the Taliban as a reporter; fortunately she was released after 6 months of intense worry). But it is gratifying to know that I didn't lose my female audience because I wasn't pretty enough or because I failed to wear pink.

And just how feminine am I? Growing up, the answer would be not very. A 6th grade teacher took me aside one day to tell me that if I continued to walk the way that I do (stomping my feet as loudly as possible) I would NEVER have a husband. Feminine girls were petite and soft-spoken. I was big and loud. If someone hit me, I would hit back, which I was told repeatedly was not the proper response for a girl. Although I read just fine, I was always stronger in math and science. I was told by several adults that I had a 'man's mind'. Later I had mainly just male friends because I couldn't grasp the nuances that were involved with women. My mom once told me that I would never have a period because I was so unfeminine. But I can cook, sew, embroider, crochet..all those girlie things.  I do want to look pretty.

And for the first ten years, I was one of the few women in my field. If I wanted to have friends at work, they would have to be men. I had fun. Later, more and more women started working in my department. I actually received an e-mail from one of them yesterday needed advice for a chemical problem. It's been a while since I've dealt with chemistry.

Shanna and her family returned to Boston today. But in a month or so, they will be back for good.

Returning to Michigan...

Would be Shanna and her family. They received the good news a week ago just as they were preparing to move to a different state, much closer than MA, but not quite as 'charming'. They have been here for a week arranging details. They will go back to Boston tomorrow and then return here in less than a month for good.

So I will get to see my grandbabies grow up more regularly. Sometimes almost 6 months would go by without a chance to visit. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

 This week I've been busy between seeing my family, going out for birthday meals, running, shopping, cooking, going to Maya's therapy, going to bouncy castles, etc. Yesterday for example, I did not get to rest for more than a few minutes until after 8. I was too tired to even trot outside to see some of my new solar lights.

I've also started out some of my projects: my garden and dealing with photos. I've cleaned up some of my gardens a little bit. First thing I did was grab a stinging nettle with my bare hands.When will I learn? I've cleaned out my rock garden which is currently overrun with lilac colored phlox and snow on the mountain, which has not bloomed yet. Still lots of work to be done. Next week...

The bags of photos and the boxes that I took out to recycle

My father spent almost every spare moment taking pictures mostly with large format cameras. When I was in Boston, we watched Fur, a semi-biographical movie about Diane Arbus. I recognized her large format cameras from my childhood: the Graflex, Hassalbad, Leinhoff. The medium format cameras my father had were the Mamiyaflex, the Topcon and the Leica. He wasn't fond of 'small format' cameras such as 35 mm ones as the photos could not be enlarged to his satisfaction. Nothing was automatic. He did have a photometer to measure the light intensity. The correct exposures and f-stops had to be calculated. I was probably one of the few 8 year olds that knew the formulae.  He sold his work to various stock photography companies around the country. They kept a 50% commission but still, for some photos he would get several grand. Digital photography mostly put an end to his side business. Since his death, these stock photography businesses have been sending me all the photos he had on file. Thousands of them; all colored transparencies. Boxes and boxes and we have very little storage space here. My brother has some of these boxes too. So the other day, I put on some music and spent 4-5 hours sorting through these things. He had a few pictures of our family and of our pets thrown in the mix so I didn't want to throw those out. Most of the photos are scenery particularly of the Canadian Rockies and Vermont in the fall, his two favorite places. But often he would take twenty variations on the same scene. I would keep just one of the twenty.

Me at 5 or so. Transparencies do not scan well on my scanner though a friend has access to  a slide one so someday I can scan these properly. My mom wasn't  too interested in  hair styling as she said I had bad hair, straight as an arrow and fine. Eventually long, straight blonde hair came to be socially acceptable. Fortunately, it became thicker as I aged.

Swastika

Last week, my sister-in-law, a high school teacher, came to her classroom to find a swastika decal on her door. It seemed to be a stylized version of one; the arms were not of equal lengths as the Nazi one, but it clearly was a swastika.

What was the message here? She is Jewish as are many of the students. She has the same last name as I do as we are married to brothers, from which I guess one could infer that we are Jewish (though I am not).. She was fairly certain due to its timing that one of her current students in that particular hour put it there. She lectured the class on how odious that symbol was especially given that she lost so many relatives in the Holocaust.

She later learned that this decal was a symbol for some local African-American/Puerto-Rican rap group and that they were passing these out to get publicity for their group. Apparently these kids are clueless. They don't realize that if they were around when the Nazis were, they would have been sent to the camps too. So would the Russians, a large subset of the student population , as they were "Slavic" not "Aryan". The kids just saw the symbol as "bad-ass". The symbol is also that of some white supremacy group, so delightful. They would not be amused about the rap group using their odious symbol.

Things like this scare me. I realize that there are so many hateful people who would love to eliminate my grandchildren just due to their ethnicity.

I have warned Naomi that there are many areas in the country where she, Don'tae, and Maya would not be welcome. It wasn't that long ago when their marriage would have been illegal in many states. She could see some of this herself with the attitudes of the fans when her mostly African-American basketball team went to away games in the 'white' little towns. She wondered when we were in Philly whether we were south enough to be in some kind of danger. (south is where the racists are in her mind). I told her that Philly was founded by Quakers, the first people who went on record to say that slavery was sinful.

When I was in Switzerland 10 years ago, the inn keeper was German speaking though we were in the French speaking section. She had wondered about the origins of my last name as this 'was obviously of interest to her". Not obvious to me though. Was she trying to figure out whether I was Jewish or maybe she was thrilled to find another German descendant? At anyrate, it is NOT the name I was born with. I was already on her bad side as I had agreed to share a bed with a woman, which apparently there, one never does unless....
The word for a double bed in Italian is 'matrimoniale'. Double beds are for married people, not good friends trying to save money.

It is sunny but cool and windy. Not good for entertaining grandkids outdoors. Yesterday morning I took the boys to the bouncy castle palace so they could jump away their considerable energy. Oliver especially enjoyed it. In the afternoon, I had Ms. Maya. I tried to run in the gale force wind in between.

Big changes afloat for all of my kids. I just hope everything works out.