CathyNY

I had really begun to wonder, these last few years, whether Nicky would ever interact in any kind of significant way with his peers. Most kids are just too noisy or unpredictable for him to be comfortable around them. And now they're old enough to realize how different Nicky is, which doesn't help matters either. Every few months I would ask his teacher whether he seemed to like any of the other children in the autism classrooms, and the answer was always no. Not very surprising as most of them ...

Had a conversation with F A C E B O O K friends about beauty makeovers and the fact that women need to take care of themselves as well as everyone else. Made me think of this morning when Nicky didn't finish his raspberries. (He eats berries for breakfast most mornings.) I had the baggie with me in the car and thought "Raspberries don't last too long. I should eat these." Then I actually caught myself thinking "Oh, they're 'way too expensive for me to eat. I'll save them for ...

Present bought.

Flowers bought.

Cards bought.

Cake bought.

Groceries bought.

Dinner cooked.

Nick encouraged to sign his card (and actually did not do a bad job).

I'm pooped. Off to do the dishes (of course DH doesn't do dishes on his birthday), and get to bed early. Tomorrow I have a bunch of stuff to do for my upcoming weekend at the Sheep and Wool festival.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8302535.stm

There is a wonderful video, but it is NOT for anyone spider-phobic--consider yourself warned.

"Veggie Spider Shuns Meat Diet"

By Rebecca Morelle
Science reporter, BBC News

A spider that dines almost exclusively on plants has been described by scientists.

It is the first-known predominantly vegetarian spider; all of the other known 40,000 spider species are thought ...

An example of the viral nature of youtube.com went on in our house last night. Shortly after 11:00 I went downstairs to find DH, who was updating a computer in the basement. I told him I had received yet another rejection of a short story, and while he was commiserating I sang an adulterated version of an old song by Johnny Paycheck.

Cathy (sings): Take this story and shove it/ And don't send us any more.

DH (laughs): How does the song go from there?
...

I don't know if this got a lot of publicity outside the New York/New Jersey area (well, I know it got a bit as it was on the Yahoo headlines for a while) but a week or so ago there was a horrific crash on the Taconic Parkway north of New York City.

A woman driving a minivan with five kids got on the Taconic going the wrong way, drove two miles wrong way dodging cars (in spite of the fact that there was a grass verge and she could easily have pulled off), and finally hit another ...

Some of you may not know that there is a strong correlation between parents who are computer scientists and/or mathematicians, and autistic offspring.

We just got back from a weekend in Pittsburgh for a bar mitzvah. The father of the bar mitzvah is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon and many of his close friends are also computer scientists. My DH started off as a computer scientist before getting into the financial sector. There were about 80 people there, and of the 80 ...

Napoleon Dynamite. Apparently this is a real polarizer, it's almost impossible to predict whether people will like it, and people tend to either love it or hate it. (Kind of like My Dinner with Andre.) Well, I loved it. I watched it a few nights ago and will watch it again before returning it to Netflix.

And I let myself idle away a couple of hours this afternoon in the kitchen, rather than bashing away fruitlessly at this latest story. I'm trying out a banana bread recipe ...

"How are you doing?" I'm getting a lot of that lately, and the answer is okay, not great. I'm up and down. Still lots of problems with focus. I had to call my best friend yesterday and tell her I had found her son's bar mitzvah invitation (I had totally forgotten to RSVP) and yes we would be there. I found another invitation in the mail bowl, completely forgotten. Need to call and offer an apology. My writing is totally off-schedule, I doubt I'm going to meet my self-imposed deadlines ...

I knew I was going to be depressed and sad but what's surprising to me is how darn scattered and forgetful I am right now.

I'm losing things, forgetting things. I have a list of things I really need to accomplish and I just don't seem to be able to get any of them done. I read an item, like "make reservations for our trip," think "Yeah, I should do that," and then a moment later it's gone.

I'm not a superwoman but generally I manage to get ...