What the Heck are They Talking About: Neurological CFS: Pay attention now: you hear

Like life, this blog can seem a little complex until you catch mah rhythm. So here is a fraction of what you need to know:

1. Nothing is sacred. Laughter is my way of dealing with having my well-planned life totally demolished, as in obliterated. As I love to say, "Life goes as life goes and nobody asked me" which may not have the rhythm of an explosive string of potty words, but it can be said in front of my mother.

2. A brain with a neurological disorder is like having the thinnest, the biggest, the swankiest TV on the block in a power outage. No, seriously, what is the point in that?

Power on: I post.

Power off: I post anyway and it just doesn't make sense to anyone but me and the cat on top of the computer and she's reading upside down anyway. Okaaay, one, two, threeee upssy daisy. Better? Oh goodness I forgot about your vertigo. Stupid me, I never seem to remember anything. No, no, don't worry about it. We're good. The cat does the same thing all the time. I keep a rag for on hand for just such an emergencies. Rinse?

3. Since I understand how hard it is to know what someone else is actually living, particularly when they just look a little tired to other people, I don't relentless edit for perkiness. In particular, I try not interfere in with the flow of the whole, "What on earth is she talking about now" experience. That's how I feel when talking to you most days. dun dun Duhnnn, My life on encephalopathy coming to a blog near you. Run, run while you still can, run like the rabbit of Caerbannog is after you.

4. I know not everyone likes to follow links, but whether for a cathartic laugh or access to original sources or documents, I provide them for your edification or just a quick snicker. So click already! I mean, please, pretty please with sugar on top. In the meantime I will read the blog manual again and try to figure out how to have links pop up in a separate window. Oh yeah, I also can't figure out out to get the contents of my archive folders to list out on the sidebar so for now you either have to check the permalink at the bottom of each post or click and look. Most annoying.

5. There are spelling errors and grammatical errors galore in this blog, some intentional and some a brain fart. Please, don't anyone tell retired Mizzou Professor Patty Atwater. She'll think a slept through her entire class. Thank goodness for journalist Marilyn Cummins, she steered me to the online version of the AP Style book. My extremely battered 1996 version was on its last legs and the editions before that, that and that were given decent burials with full ceremony years ago.

6. It is slightly harder to be a good journalist when contending with aphasia, specifically anomia; orthographic dsygraphia, acalculia etc, not that I'm complaining mind you, the impossible just takes a little longer, or so, the ever popular,they say. So while this may look easy, it really really does takes me hours and days and weeks to write these posts. Unlike hit and run posts about the peanut butter sandwich I'm eating, I do try to incorporate rational thought and a synthesis of widely scattered information into my posts.

Most importantly, if I say it, no matter how firmly my tongue is wedged in my cheek, I have fact checked it with every resource I have access to and link it back to the appropriate source for user verification somewhere on this blog. If you cannot find a link just ask, its in this mess somewhere.

Hey, I even watched the streaming video for the FlyBar 1200 AND read the user manual so I'd know what I was talking about. Well, actually I watched the videos ten more times just for fun, but I really did read the manual trying to figure out if the thing was composed of titanium or aluminum. I can now explain the hydraulics thingy, but I couldn't find the materials list anywhere there or the manufacturer's website so I ended up fudging it anyway with "silvery stuff." I guess fudge is the only thing they give ingredients lists for nowadays.

And as a former and very rusty wordsmith, I love word play, which is kinda like golf, but more fun. I also love pop culture of all kinds and all eras. What can I say, I'm easy to amuse. Note the completely unprofessional design attitude toward the color palette? Same thing.

Even more importantly, however, I try not to assume that every word that pops into my brain is an actual word. I look up every other word some days to make sure I mean what I say, and say what I mean.

You will notice I sometimes provide the actual dictionary definition(s). LOL. Try doing that when you can't even decide if the appropriate word you want is no or know. Those are homophones and the inability to tell the difference in spelling is part of orthographic dysgraphia and I'm not just making this up. It's simply to bizarre to come up with on my own.

This isn't an insult, I just want to be very clear with readers exactly which definition I am using. There is enough obstufacation regarding neurological CFS and fibromyalgia as it is. I'm trying to cut through it not add to it. Being knee deep in "brown" is a dairy farm thing, not mine.

Unless noted otherwise all definitions come from:

I know, I know this is not the official journalistic dictionary, but it comes packaged with my Microsoft Word software and it is more than a little handy on days when I can't even figure out alphabetical order without constantly singing a childhood rhyme, much less able to use the 15-pounder or even look someone up in the phone book for that matter.

Life goes as life goes and boy I wish I had Bill Gates life right now, at least until my pittance of a social security disability check is allocated to me. Actually, I'd settle for his home library.

Even if I can't have the library, kudos to the Gates Foundation, a philanthropic organization established by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his wife, who are scheduled to annouce a gift of nearly $11 million to public libraries in 37 states and the District of Columbia to buy computers and software and pay for faster Internet connections. January, 3, 2005.

For those of you who were really hoping I'd give hard information on what a blog is, how you can use one, and how to sign up to read my new posts without having to manually check I'm a gonna supply some of those fancy blue underlined hotlinks. If you want to sign up to get updated on posts take a look under mah photo and click to be added to my typepad people list or on the XML syndicate feed link below it. This is also known as an RSS feed, a wonderful way to keep your intellectual or even your sports thumb in many different pies at once. Since multi-tasking with ME/CFS is a joke, I'm all for anything that makes my life easier even if I have to learn new technology. The above hotlink will take you to a great explainer and this one from cNET even has purdy pitchers!

Everyone has a different syndicated link feed they prefer. I'll just pass on a few recommendations.

This just in from Typepad:

Visitors to your site can subscribe to your syndicated site feed (your RSS feed) in a desktop or web-based news aggregator. This allows your visitors to automatically know when you’ve updated your site and to read your content in a variety of different applications.

This link can then be dragged and dropped into a news reader to subscribe to the feed.

TypePad and Aggregators

An aggregator or news reader is an application (desktop, web-based, plugin) that allows you to subscribe to “feeds” of weblogs and news sites. Usually, these applications are scheduled to check and see if any of the sites you have subscribed to have been updated and if they have, the new version of the site (usually a post) will appear for you to read. Aggregators are great because they bring weblog updates to you, instead of you having to actively look to see if your favorite reads have been updated.

There are a number of popular aggregator clients that run as desktop applications. On Windows, one of the more popular desktop clients is FeedDemon (feeddemon.com), which makes it easy to add feeds and view them in a newspaper-style view or as individual entries. A similar view that can be integrated directly into Microsoft Outlook (not Outlook Express) is available with the NewsGator (newsgator.com) plug-in. NewsGator can also be configured to allow posting directly to TypePad from within Outlook. This one is free Sharpreader. This one has nothing in common with neurasthenias own Michael C. Sharpe, but the coincidence was too silly to pass up!

On the Macintosh, most users prefer NetNewsWire (ranchero.com) as their desktop aggregator, and NetNewsWire Pro adds the ability to post to TypePad directly from within the application.

In general, any desktop or web-based aggregator which reads RSS feeds is appropriate for use with TypePad, and we recommend trying a few to find out which aggregator client best complements the way you work with TypePad.

That's all for now. Po w e r i n n n g d o o o o w ww wnn nnn nn.

What the Heck are They Talking About: Neurological CFS

Pay attention now: you hear

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