(no subject)

Last night, I called my half-sister and my half-brother and told them the news. My sister was pretty calm about it but has decided to make an appointment for a physical so that she can ask a doctor what this means for her. She's twenty five, so I don't think she'll be getting a mammogram yet, and we are only her half-sisters, so I don't know. She sounds like she's doing well. She and her boyfriend (who is also named Scott) are going to Argentina as soon as her summer job ends. She's been helping run summer camps.

My brother took the news a lot better than I expected, given what our sister thought was going on. It turns out that he hadn't called her because he thought she was still too fragile to receive calls. He expected her to call him to let him know when it was okay for him to call and/or visit. He promised me that he'd call her right away.

So far, the electric car is working okay for us. It's not recharging completely overnight, however, so Scott's very concerned about how things will work out on Friday when he has to go in early and the car has four hours less time to charge. He says there's a charging station at the AAA in Canton (maybe ten minutes from where he works), and he's going to look into using that. The other option is to go to a downtown parking structure and use one of their charging stations, but that would be kind of expensive and would leave Scott stuck downtown for a couple of hours.

I slept poorly last night. I definitely slept, but it was the sort of dream where I was running over and over a list that kept changing as I tried to understand it. Also, I was just awake enough to be aware that my head hurt a lot and to keep changing position in hopes of helping that. I got up around 3:00 and took an Amerge, just in case it was a migraine. That helped some but didn't completely kill the pain. Lying on my back instead of my side seemed to help, so I'm wondering if there was a sinus component. I woke at 7:30, and usually, I'd just get up then, but I was so groggy that I went back to bed and ended up sleeping soundly for another two hours.

My local friend, Leah, just let me know that her mother died this morning. She fell while watering the plants at a vacationing neighbor's house, and nobody found her for quite a long time. She was gone when they did. Leah is also known as nakkinomiko, but she hasn't visited LJ in many, many years, and I'm not sure how many of you know her.

I went through my list of library books I want to try (there are hundreds, spread across about ten different lists) and put holds on a bunch of romances. I probably won't read more than a chapter or two of most of them, but maybe I'll find an author I like enough to try more of their books. I've been trying to articulate better what it is I'm looking for in romance novels because I don't think it's necessarily the same thing other people are looking for. I haven't gotten very far because it's pretty darned nebulous.

I recently tried to read a Joan Smith book because she'd been recommended to me as like Heyer. I didn't get very far because the whole situation at the start was sheer misery with no way out or way to mitigate it. The book's a romance, so I'm sure things get better. A happy ending is, after all, required for the genre. I just can't wade through misery to get there. Maybe I picked the wrong book, and it isn't typical of the author's work. I don't know. The library doesn't have any of her books, so I picked one at random on Amazon and bought it used (the only way any of them are available in paper).

I think I'm not keen on big misunderstandings. They'll often make me put the book down permanently. I don't want the hero (or the heroine, but usually it's the hero) to be an asshole, not even if he gets better later on. I can handle amoral and/or manipulative characters to some extent as long as they treat people with some level of courtesy even when they're pissed off. I like a plot external to the romance that lets both hero and heroine show their strengths, and I want both of them to have strengths.

(no subject)

My sister thinks she's identified the environmental factor that led to our cancer. Apparently the statewide PBB contamination in 1973 has led to a massive increase in breast cancer for women our age. It may very well be the cause of our family's widespread thyroid problems. Our brother wasn't born then, but the effects apparently get passed on for generations. My nephew is eight and already starting puberty which is probably from this, too, and may result in him being a lot shorter than he ought to be. Cordelia hit puberty at eleven which is reasonable for a girl, so she may have less carry over.

At any rate, if you're female and were a child in Michigan in 1973, get a damned mammogram every single year regardless of what the guidelines say and do breast self examinations regularly. The stuff got into all forms of animal derived foods. (People who were vegan at the time may be safe but not necessarily because of how the animals which died were disposed of.)

PBB is a flame retardant. Somehow or another, a large amount of it got mislabeled as a feed additive and given to all sorts of livestock all over the state. A lot of animals died, but it took about nine months for anyone to figure out what had happened, and by that time, pretty much everybody in the state had been eating contaminated food for months. The company responsible went bankrupt a long time ago, so it's not like we can sue them now or anything.

The state has apparently decided that they don't have the money to investigate all of this, so, from what my sister can gather, the current research is all in the hands of a guy at Emory who's operating on a shoestring and mainly collecting anecdotal evidence.

http://michiganradio.org/post/researchers-find-serious-health-effects-toxic-pbb-mix-michigan#stream/0

(no subject)

Hm. I'd say my current headache is absolutely and utterly stress/anxiety related. Scott came home, and my pain cut in half. I still have a headache, but it's nowhere near as bad. I think I need to talk to my psychiatrist about something I can take every day because I can't function like this. I've only done a small fraction of what I needed to get done today because I've been feeling so utterly terrible.