Releasing Abed: The Power of Friends

"This time you'll never get out!"

One of my favorite TV shows

   is NBC's Community.  My family doesn't understand why, and my friends don't seem to find it.  It's on Thursday nights, apparently opposite some show with dancing and celebrities?
  The premise is a bunch of diverse misfits attending a community college and melding a friendship.
  Most of them are, quite honestly, jerks.
  Rarely does an episode not involve a group meltdown.
  But.
  They all learn something from each meltdown.  Each episode sees increased self-awareness from one or more characters, and personal growth.

Abed, the character with Asperger's syndrome

  The reason  Community rates a post on this blog is Abed.
  The reason for the post now is the recent episode, "Virtual Systems Analysis," which shows Abed more autistic than he has previously been shown.

Escaping the Hypnogourd

"Technology is not your friend."
                                    ~~Eustacia Cutler

  In Piers Anthony's novel Ogre Ogre, Anthony depicts treacherous gourds.
  Each gourd has a hole in it, and, if you are foolhardy enough to look into the hole, you become trapped

Wordless Wednesday: Make Reading a Habit

Cultivating  a Reading Habit Early -
It is a Reading Habit, Right?

7 Tips to Win at Your Case Conference

Who is the winner?

If you thought of an adult or group of adults, you need to rethink.

Why two sides of that big table?

You are not on opposite sides of the table to indicate you are on opposite teams.
  A round table would be nice, but realistically, illustrating the equality of those at the conference table is surely not the best way to spend educational funds.
The photos below illustrate metaphorically how you see a different view of the wonderFULL kid.
  Two of the views are directly across from each other.  Two others seem totally unrelated.  One even totally misses the big issue.  There's even a lovely rainbow.  Many, many more views are possible, some similar and some different.

Fairly Odd Neighbors

Appropriately Posted on Earth Day

  With .99 acre of ground grass you'd think there would be compelling reason to NOT replace the deceased gas pushmower with this Fiskars model.
  Especially when the euphemistic term for the condition of the ground is "rolling," and it's kind to say that the length of said grass SOMETIMES gets away from us.
  And a gas mower could've been had for fifty bucks less.
  BUT
  i can do a row or two with this  more often than i can go out with the gas mower, what with suiting up (long sleeves & long pants; hat, ear, &  breathing protection; cleanup; waiting for the mower to cool down after i've recovered from the half row - yep, outta shape)
  AND Max is pleased to take his turn with this, while we couldn't get him outside when the noisy mower was going.
  Actually, he's mowed more often than Boom since we've had this, which is not to be confused with having covered more ground.
  We may yet need to buy another power mower.  It would be cool to have a rider for this mini estate.  And we may need to hire someone occasionally for when it gets away from us.
  But if the neighbors can still stand us, we think it's the right decision for now.
  An extra worker and no two gallons to get the job done - sounds like a good deal.

Max takes a turn

A Date with a Phlebotomist

  Max's new doctor is definitely on the ball.  When i said i didn't remember when, or if, Max had  ever had bloodwork done, the doctor said we need a baseline lab.
  So Max and i went in for it today.
  Now Max is always the first one up in our house.  He gets dressed and goes downstairs to have his bowl of cereal, and settles in for TV until the bus comes.
  i talked to him about the bloodwork and how he needed to not eat.
  And there was The Sign.

Friends

We want to fix everything for our kids, but there's a lot of things we simply cannot.
Much of that is because we are their parents.
Not that we ever felt that way.
Someone unrelated, or  a sibling can express the same thought better.
It's the old saw about how dumb the parents of an 18 year old are.
Peers.  Now they can say exactly the same thing we say and really get through.
Take a look at what my friend, fellow mom Anne Higley has to say about the power of an invitation made by one of her son's friends.
Thank you, Anne, for sharing your gift with words.

Photo shows Boom and Max

Not Quite Wordless Wednesday

The bonnet hides a very impish little girl. She taught her lamb to be very naughty.

A Doctor for Max

  When Max was tiny, a doctor for him was simple.
  We brought him to his brother's pediatrician.
  Later we found a neurologist for him also, because Max needed medication that the pediatrician did not feel qualified to dispense.
  We never got in with the local autism doctors, but the neurologist was an older man and knew autism as well as other areas of his field.  He became our autism doctor, and the pediatrician was our generalist who was willing to learn about autism along with us.
  We need qualified doctors like this.

  Then Max turned eightteen.
  While our pediatrician sees adults, it shouldn't have surprised us that he discharged both our young men at that point.  He is an urban doctor, a black man, whose clientele is primarily black.  Later i read that he originally became a doctor to serve underpriveleged black babies.
  Which my big white young men definitely are not.
  No hard feelings here, but a definite problem for us.

  Which became more of a problem for Max when his neurologist suddenly passed away a few months later.
  People with autism love things to be the same.
  And i have a problem with forging ahead.

Life on the Computer Farm - Hacked! and DigiSignatures

Hacked!

Someone "borrowed" my main email address a couple weeks ago, offering work at home schemes and, i hope, nothing worse.  

It is, of course, a fact of life in the computer age, annoying enough when you get one, worse when someone steals your name.

Then i got an email from a friend with a similar thing & wondered if it came from the virus or whatever that infected me.

And i wondered if i got it from the phishing attempt from awhile back, even though i didn't bite.

Trying to Prevent 

MyGuy, the computer pro, said that i really ought to digitally sign all my emails.  It will help prevent this.

Yeah, right.

i'm sure it is additional protection.  i also know now why so many of us do not use these digital signature keys.

What Goes into a Saturday Sister Meditation

  In case anyone is interested in how i write these:
  Many of the ones i'd previously written were for a group, and had an element of committee editing.  But none of them seemed suitable, or at least quite what i wanted to offer for Easter.
And no Biblical woman is so associated with Easter as Mary Magdalene.
 She is often thought of as a sinful woman, but, if so, that is not explicitly stated in Scripture.  Wikipedia's article on her places the first mention of her as a harlot about 500 years after Jesus.
  What Scripture does tell us is that He cast 7 demons cast out of her.
  i was reminded of another place where 7 demons were mentioned, and went searching for it.  The passage tells of 1 demon cast out.  He found no place to rest, and, like the prodigal, thought to return.
  The demon in this parable found "home" clean & empty, as good as a welcome. Instead of simply returning, he brought 7 other more wicked than himself to move in.
  Which was all fascinating.  Could Mary have gotten in this state because  she had previously had one demon, someone else had cast it out, but her cleaned-up life had no new passion?

  Like i said, all very fascinating, but not where i wanted to go.
  The Saturday Sisters series is not about discussing theology or  demonology.  i might have the genesis of some sort of fiction here, but the numbers don't add up.
  Biblical fiction must not contradict Scripture or what is known about life in Bible times.

  So, what is message of Mary Magdalene?
  You may well get as many answers as you have people writing about her.
  It's fashionable to write about her as Apostle to the Apostles.  There's a body of work about her as Jesus' wife and appointed leader after Him.  (no comment here on that - you can read me elsewhere to see my opinion.)
  i like Liz Curtis Higgs' novel Mad Mary, bearing in mind that it is fiction.

  But back to the question, i had to find MY message to you about Mary Magdalene.

  And that is the start of the process of the writing. . . .

Saturday Sisters: Mary Magdalene

One of the occasional series~~~

Yes, everything else is worthless when 

compared with the priceless gain 

of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

I have discarded everything else,

counting it all as garbage,

so that I may have Christ.

                                        --  Philippians 3:8 NLT

  Mary Magdalene is one of those Bible people about whom we don't know as much as we think we do. 

   In Luke 8:1-3, she is first mentioned as one of those "on tour" with Jesus, one of the women supporting Him with their resources. Here also, along with the resurrection account in Mark, we learn that Jesus had cast seven demons out of her.

  These are the only mentions of her early connection with Jesus, but how powerful that connection must have been. 

 No longer incapacitated, she used her new life in service of the Life-Giver.

  She was among the few at the foot of the cross and one of the first at the empty tomb. John's gospel records her sorrow in not finding her Lord's body as expected, and her joy when He appeared to her.

  Jesus commissioned her to tell the disciples of His resurrection. She wanted to stay, and she didn't understand it all.

  Still, she obeyed 

  She obeyed, even though the men didn't believe her far-fetched story.
  Guys coming back from death, you know, that's not the normal human experience.  Obviously the dear woman's grief has deranged her.

  There are tantalizing bits of Mary's story that we might like to know, about her earlier and later life, but we do know what we need to know.

  She met Jesus.
       She decided about Jesus.
              She followed through
                       without looking back.

  What about us?  Can we say the same?

But don’t begin until you count the cost. . . . 

no one can become my disciple

without giving up everything for me.

                        --Luke 14:28, 33NLT

Yes, everything else is worthless when 

compared with the priceless gain 

of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

            --  Philippians 3:8a NLT

Reputation & Reality

The Reputation~~

i've heard it said that i'm a very intelligent person.  i share this, not because i care about the reputation, but because the reputation is already out there, and because i do want to share ~

An Afternoon with Eustacia Cutler

  Last week, in a hurried post listing several bullet points, i mentioned being about to leave to hear Eustacia Cutler speak.

   While daughter Temple is very much a celebrity in the world of autism for the functional life she has achieved. Eustacia is only now, mainly through a film about Temple Grandin's life, becoming known as the woman behind the celebrity.

  Again, as so much i present here, there is more to say than this space would permit.  i was continually feeling as if i'd missed so much by not having seen the movie or read Eustacia's book ahead of time, as most of the audience seemed to have done. 

  Here, i will not try to present the family story, only give my impressions and key points.

Too Many Words on Wednesday - the Current Reading List

  i'm going to try something new here.   i've got 9 or 10 books, and a fair amount i want to say about each, so i'm going to use a tool called a Jump Break to keep the initial, home page read from being too long.  Leave a comment to let me know if you like the practice or not!

Here is the simple list:

•  Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking
• Imagine
• Twelve Ordinary Men
• Tiger Lillie
• the NT book of Hebrews and a highly unusual study guide
• Buzz and Split
•  i've included two other books in the photo that i plan to begin soon.

And here is the Jump  Break , after which i will share a few lines about each.   (If you come to this blogpost on its own page, you probably won't notice the Jump Break - i'd like to hear about that too, please!)