Month: August 2011

Turtleducks are oddities, there’s no getting around that. Awesome as they are, they don’t quite fit in. I would hold that they are awesome partly because they don’t fit in. As is natural for such odd creatures, Turtleducks turn up in odd places. Normal places may see them too, but odd places bring them in flocks. One such place this Turtleduck likes to flock is Valley of the Moon (on Facebook here). Billed as “an historic fantasyland,” it’s a great place to go and act odd and have people like it.

Continue reading

Two weeks ago, I started feeling really bad — almost like a flu bug but not quite: I was run down, severely dizzy, couldn’t think straight, and my head hurt a lot.  For a week I battled this until I found something in the back of my mouth: a little bump that hurt when I touched it.  It reminded me of previous bumps and what they were — jaw infections — so naturally I freaked out. First, let me back up just a bit.  When I was 15 (for those of you playing along at home, that would be twenty years ago), I had extensive jaw surgery to correct severe TMJ.  In order to hold everything together while it healed, my surgeon put in 28 pieces of hardware: plates, wires, and screws.  And unfortunately, as of right now, I’ve had two surgeries to remove the hardware from the left side of both jaws.  Because they got infected and would have (most likely, not being dramatic here) killed me.  And the infections were almost impossible to cure because they were both on the metal, not in tissue.

Continue reading

Yesterday, my husband and I attended the local Scottish Festival and Highland Games.  This was a third – twice, out in California, we attended the big one at Pleasanton.  We both have Clan Campbell shirts – everyone in California had a clan shirt (in comparison, we were the only ones who had them here, and had several people ask where we’d gotten them). While on the bus, I had a woman sit in front of me, take one look at my shirt, and say “Oh no, I’ve got my back to a Campbell!”  

Continue reading

My mother is one of my heroes. Let me tell you why. When I was very ill as a small child, and doctor after doctor couldn’t determine what was wrong, she refused to stop digging until she found the answers herself. (I was celiac, a disease that was almost unknown then.) She went against convention and social pressures to raise my two siblings and me.

Continue reading