craft book

Lazy Crafternoon by Stella Fields
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lazy Crafternoon by Stella Fields
5 stars

This is a great book for a young crafter. The directions were clear and easy to follow. The needed materials are relatively inexpensive and the vast majority or the crafts can be done with minimal adult assistance or supervision.
My only area of concern is that nearly every craft in the book is geared towards girls. Many boys like crafts just as much as girls and so using girl nearly everytime the crafter is mentioned may discourage boys from wanting to do even the gender free crafts. Most of the crafts themselves are gender free or can be used as gifts. I did a couple of the crafts with my nephew and he had a great time. He had no trouble reading the directions and following them.
I would recommend this book to anyone with crafty kids or anyone looking for simple crafts. There a few that I plan to use and I am an experienced crafter.

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Bullet Riddled: The First S.W.A.T. Officer Inside Columbine ... and Beyond
by Grant M. Whitus with Thom Vines
5 stars


This is  an impressive collections of stories about being a police officer and S.W.A.T. officer. It is amazing that the writer survived these encounters alive and well. I was also impressed by the degree of fact checking he did. Every chapter had many footnotes. Most memoirs do not fact check and note where they did the checking. He wanted to get his facts right.
I was impressed that the author was able to be so self aware. He stated at various places that looking back he was  too hard on this or that person. He does not try to assign reasons to the actions of other officers. He takes both credit and blame for the results of each police action.
This book not only gives answers on things such as Columbine it also talks about what was learned and how the author changed how he responded to situations. The author talks honestly about his beliefs and views. He makes no apologies for working to create the best S.W.A.T. team humanly possible.
This is not a book for anyone who is strongly against shoot first to protect other lives or the death penalty. The author is plain speaking when discussing his beliefs and why. Even though I don't share his beliefs I was able to see why he had those beliefs.
I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in the development of present S.W.A.T. methods and anyone interested in Columbine and other police actions that the author was involved with.
I received this book free, in return for a honest review, from Netgalley.com.

discoveries. New plans hopefully being done with my grief process.

I just discovered something else about having a TBI. There are several posts I wrote that never made it further than drafts. Since they were a few years ago I don't know if they were things I decided were more journaling so shouldn't be shared but didn't want to delete them they were unfinished or if I clicked the wrong button.

It has been a very long time since I last posted according to the dates. Yet another problem that confuses those who look at me and sees ... the me that hasn't existed since 1990. So many people that knew me prior to my first TBI are still seeing the me that no longer exists and are still waiting for that that person to come back. My family still has their daughter but in many ways they also lost their daughter. Just like I have to grieve all the things I have lost mt family has to grieve and for them it is harder because they have been in denial for so many years. They could say I was exaggerating, or just using it as an excuse until I started getting services and suddenly it was the state and various professional who were explaining things to then so they could understand. The Community integration counselor made it real. But even still Every so often I catch a little bit of them still looking for that girl to walk back through the door.

If I have known for years she wasn't coming back yet I still couldn't completely accept it how can my family who really never understood what had happened to me. I was never in a coma, I was only unconscious a short time with each of my TBIs. I was confused afterwards but only for a few hours or days as  far as they knew. I was living on my own, at college, with a roommate or alone when I received all of them. The lucky people can say "I had a concussion" Then there are the people like me that have to say "I have a TBI from a concussion." Even people who work in the field can be in denial. One of my aides was in a car accident and had a concussion. The Dr. pulled her out of work for a week. When she came back, after just a few hours I told her she needed to go back to the Dr. that she wasn't talking right or acting like herself and she needed to get further evaluation. She asked her family and they told her she was just tired so she didn't go for the reassessment. She used to be one of the top in her field now she has a reputation for calling in, no shows, being unreliable, just sitting around, doing nothing, the fact she is likable  keeps her in a job but eventually everyone has to put what they need ahead of wanting to help her out. I know I did. Had she received the rehab she needed in the first few months after the accident she might have completely recovered.

I look like I always did. For the most I sound like I always did though I never ever talked as much as I do now. But, I will never be the person I was before. That Gina, the musician, the girl with the eidetic memory, the champion multitasker,  the girl who picked up new languages like it was simple, the girl who just knew the answer to a math problem when she looked at it, kept a running tally, including tax in her head, when shopping, That Gina is gone and there are small bit and pieces of that Gina that have been found but they are much smaller.

I'm started performing again. I sing. I'm no longer as good as I once was but I don't have to look at the words all time just some of the time. I remember fingerings on the flute and can help my nephew though I don't remember exactly which note goes with which fingerings. I can read music in the treble clef again but very, very slowly. I'm teaching myself mandolin and my nephew guitar. I've found my ear hears when chords and notes are out of tune. I am still basically fluent in Norwegian but French (which I started when I was 8) I only remember the very basics. I often have trouble with word finding or using the wrong word in English so I may really be messing up in Norwegian and not realize it.

I miss that old girl but with some of the returning pieces as well as the fact that my family is finally not waiting every time they see me for her to walk in the door I can finally feel something more than grief more of the time.

YA Blog tour with great prizes

Jordan Dane has a blog tour going on right now for the release of her YA book On A Dark Wing sponsored by Harlequin Teen. Grand prize is a Kindle fire with several other prizes. Begin at YA Bound
http://yabound.blogspot.com/2011/11/blog-tour-schedule-on-dark-wing-by.html?showComment=1324330037666#c7095581396672

Good luck all!

kids sports

Haven't written in a while but started a blog post on young player with a concussion last week and got distracted so didn't finish.  First of I should probably tell you I took a fall recently and was diagnosed by my neurologist as having temporal and  possible frontal damage. I'm doing better but still having more bad days than good.

Last week a boy on a rookie baseball league team showed up late and was really off in his playing. Towards the end of the game he was starting to feel nauseous but wanted to continue playing so was allowed by both his mom and the coach. The boy was 9 or under. Turns out he was late because he had been at the ER getting staples in his head. The ER doc was told he had a game that night and said it was fine for him to play. How are can we expect coaches and players from pewee leagues right up to professional to take the dangers of playing with an unhealed concussion if ER doctors don't.

I was having a bad time last weekend so my family got to see up close the reality of mTBI. I've never been in a coma, never been unconscious more than a minute or two so they thought they knew what mTBI did to you.
It never occurred to them I lived in CA when I got the first one and was living with a roommate or alone for the other so I only had contact with them on good days.We went to camp this weekend and so I had no way to hide the fact I couldn't follow simple directions over half of the time, I was starting sentences and conversations in the middle thinking I had said the beginning. I was having trouble talking in complete sentence sentences.It was a bad time so I sort of have been isolating since then I am now positive my nephews will be protected . I was already pretty sure since my Grammy's first fiance died after being hit in the head with a ball during a game.

Service animals and hidden dis-abilities

This is an issue that i have been doing a great deal of reading up on recently and to be honest getting more than a bit ticked off with the government. People with hidden dis-abilities frequently get hassled about having their animals with them now. once this change in the law goes into effect I know people who will be totally home bound. I have always used rescued cats as my service animal. I train them myself or maybe they watch and train me or maybe we train each other. With a cat you can never be sure. I don't take my cat every where with me and to be honest the reason I take him when I visit family is because he is very high energy and without me there to keep him occupied he pulls my decor off the walls to play with the nails and pushpins. He also has a bit of separation anxiety being that someone dumped him in my cousin's truck at a work site when he was barely weaned. He is also only 7 months old so is still a kitten. My animal helps with PTSD and dissociative symptoms as well as alerting me to needing to take meds in the evening at a reasonable hour so I sleep at night, prompts me to eat and to drink. When I am around people they can help me with those things but when alone I forget those things more often than not. With dissociation and getting grounded I can honestly say I have found cats easier to train than people.
I have one friend who also has several hidden dis-abilities and she is on her third cat. She has to travel with the cat but does to need to bring him inside unless it is overnight, she is in particularly bad mental shape, or she is at high risk for exposure to an sunlight. Among other things she has an extreme sensitivity to sunlight which, not only causes her to start blistering after only about 30 seconds of exposure,it causes her to lose consciousness after 20 minutes. She has no family of friends in the state she now lives in and has been refused services multiple times due to the DSS decided she was just malingering. She provided them with documentation from all her past drs., documentation from present docs, hospital records from the time prior to her moving there and she is on SSD and has been given the designation of permanently disabled not expected to recover. Social security does not just hand out that designation. But it means nothing in the new state's DSS since they have decided she is just faking. They have even gone so far as to put false information into the electronic records that make her out to be a violent fraud. Her cat alerts her to the sun's movements. Forces her to move if the sun is getting too close, cues her to go get her mail when the sun goes down, and many many other things including his most recent trick which is opening the front door to let himself back in so she does not get even that tiny bit of sun.

Starting the new year right

My apologies for being MIA for a the last two weeks. Unfortunately I forgot myself and allowed another to make me feel I was a bad person. worthless. unlovable. I think we've all felt that way at some point and often it has been someone we cared about who put us in that place. A guy put me there but this morning I was flipping through my CDs looking for something to play and I found my copy of the Eurythmics that has the song about walking out the door of some guy who doesn't think she will actually leave him. Can't remember the name right now. In my 20s.... pre-TBI (Traumatic brain injury) my mom used to say that was my theme song. If a guy didn't treat me right I walked. I did it more than once from relationships where the guy thought I should be a doormat or be under his control.
Guess at this point I should admit I never dated before college really. was too busy... school, jr year exchange student to Norway, sr year spent doing 2 yrs. studies at once and taking chorus during my lunch period, vioce lessions, flute lessons, bass clarinet lessons, chorus, band, concerts, teaching myself multiple instruments, practice for lessone before school, during my lunch period, folk group at church and the list goes on. I did a lot and didn't really have time plus I was extremely shy. Once I got to college I didn't date anywhere near the number of people the campus gossips had me connected with but that was when I had my first relationships and I was the one who walked everytime... even the times I let the guy think he was the who had the idea of breaking up.
In the last 20 years I'm had a few relationships and I have walked from a few of them but more I have put up with bad treatment because my sense of self worth has fallen with each new hidden or not quite so hidden dis-ability I have developed or sustained. When you have a hidden dis-ability it is those who know you best who do the most damage to your self esteem and self image on top of what you do yourself. I've had to lose many friends over the years for self protection because they couldn't handle the changes but the damage I have done to myself is among the hardest to heal. I have more than one hidden dis-ability and with each there have come new losses of abilities. Losing abilities that defined you in many ways is very difficult to get past. You lose your sense of self when all the things that have defined you disappear like smoke.
BUT.... this morning I woke up and looked for some music to put on. the first CD I stopped on had the song "Would I lie to you?" by the Eurythmics. That song reminded me of who I really am under all the other "stuff".
Maybe I can't remember how to make change any more but I am still a great person who has a lot to give and  I am not going to allow anyone to take that away from me.I'm done trying to get him to see I am still the same person he knew, trying to get him to understand anything. If he can't see that I am a great person and have a lot to give it is his loss so This year I am starting out with the affirmation:
I am a great person with a lot to give and I don't need people who can't see that in my life.