You don't want to know what I'm thinking right now

I just spent about twenty minutes on an entry that was totally deleted by a pop-up from my web sweeper service. Heaven help me. The difference between what ? Natives and Aliens (I feel more like an alien than an immigrant). It's a culture thing. Some people take to a new culture easily, some are not so easily assimilated, and some resist completely. Age doesn't matter except in the sense that if you grow up in a new culture, you don't really know how the previous culture functioned, the benefits or difficulties. I have friends older than I am who love all of the new technological advances, I am a little overwhelmed by it, my son finds it both stimulating and relaxing ( I can think of nothing relaxing about it), and my husband thinks you carry the mark of the beast if you can navigate all of this stuff (although recently he has acquired both an Xbox and a Playstation). The students I work with have no idea that people actually got along very well without video games, or digital media altogether, but I have noticed many of them enjoy reading. One of the young men in the class actually ordered The Count of Monte Cristo from the book club. It is a huge tome. I showed some amazement at this and he replied, "I really want to read it." Bless his heart. Actually many of my friends who enjoy the techie stuff are actually very prolific readers. Well there it is, culture, or maybe I didn't answer the Alien/native thing at all.
My daughter left a phone message for me today. My seven year old granddaughter Zoe now weighs 43 pounds. This may not seem like such a great achievement to most, but Zoe has Cystic Fibrosis. Every pound is a milestone. CF was a pretty scary thing to us at first. It is what you do not expect and you know nothing but the worst. Then you learn and everyone goes on living. Life is a fatal illness, some of us are more critical than others. That may sound pessimistic, but it's not. We have a greater appreciation for life because of Zoe. We count each day as particularly precious. Zoe has missed a lot of school. She only attended two weeks of first grade. Not because she was sick, but she developed something many disabled kids face, school phobia. Her teacher made her share her gastrointestinal tube with the class. A G-tube allows Zoe to receive nutritional fluid when , or should she become to sick to eat. It looks a little like a plug on a beach ball. We call it her plug. You have to have a sense of humor about these things. Well anyway the response was not good. Kids threatened to pull it out and were inordinately curious. This action by the teacher actually put Zoe at risk for her physical safety. Please, please, please, as teachers do not bring attention of any kind to a student's disability. In a happier year Zoe is learning to read, last night she spelled the word "read" to me. Of course her favorite author is Theodore Giessel, (Dr. Seuss). I like reading the poems of Shel Silverstein to her. She just looks up at me like I am the craziest person she knows, she may be right.
Cystic Fibrosis=a hereditary disease of the exocrine glands, usually resulting in respiratory infections and impaired pancreatic function.
Exocrine glands= duct system which functions to move secretions through the body.

http://www.cff.org

I got to watch some Chaldean students practice their dance routine during lunch at the high school yesterday. They will be dancing in the school's cultural program in a couple of weeks, I could watch them forever, simply marvelous. So get out from behind the machine some time and attend a cultural fair. So you are ordered by the mean one.