We’ve just gone over the 6,000 followers mark. Makes me think about the beginnings of the Trial Balloon, then the Trail Baboon, Dale, Jim Ed and TLGMS.
Do you have a favorite Balloon or Baboon memory?
Category Archives: Family
Twilight Time
Have you ever been waking up in the morning and hear the phone ring, then become fully awake and realize you just imagined it? If so, you may have experienced an auditory hypnagogic hallucination.
In August of 2015, Dr. Laurence Knott of the UK wrote: “Hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations are visual, tactile, auditory, or other sensory events, usually brief but occasionally prolonged, that occur at the transition from wakefulness to sleep (hypnagogic) or from sleep to wakefulness (hypnopompic). The phenomenon is thought to have been first described by the Dutch physician Isbrand Van Diemerbroeck in 1664.[1] The person may hear sounds that are not there and see visual hallucinations. These visual and auditory images are very vivid and may be bizarre or disturbing.”
And Wikipedia describe it this way: “Hypnagogia is the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep in humans: the hypnagogic state of consciousness, during the onset of sleep. Mental phenomena that occur during this “threshold consciousness” phase include lucid thought, lucid dreaming, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis.” As you can see, there are several other “conditions” mentioned, that I don’t have the time to explore here.
I love what is sometimes called the “twilight time” as I drift off to sleep, and frequently have little vignettes play out before my eyes. Rather than thinking of it as a medical condition to be “treated”, I often wish they would last longer.
Do you experience any sort of hallucinations upon waking or falling asleep?
Phishing
The deadline for renewing our State psychology licenses looms large this week. Husband and I sent in all our papers and fees for renewal a couple of weeks ago. Imagine Husband’s surprise yesterday when he received two notifications from “Google ” telling him that he had better renew his license immediately, along with a link to do so.
I am happy to report that Husband didn’t fall for this apparent phishing attempt. He had already received confirmation from our Psychology Board office that everything was in order, and that any communication from the Board was directly from the Board, not from Google. I contacted the Board office to report this scam attempt.
It amazes me how clever scammers are. It also surprises me how easy it is to fool people. Our State Government IT office sends State employees fake emails at work to try to teach us to spot suspicious communications, and a special button to click to report an email as either fake or suspicious. It is pretty easy to spot them, I think. Our agency IT guy told me, though, that 50% of the fake emails are actually opened by staff who don’t suspect a thing or are too trusting. That is a big concern given how devastating it would be to have our system, with all our clients’ confidential information hacked or compromised.
I hope none of my fellow psychologists are duped by these phishers. It is an anxious time around the renewal period, and anxiety makes it hard to be wise sometimes.
What are your experiences with scammers or hackers? How do you keep yourself safe?
Spoiled
I am an only child. When I was younger, I cringed when I said that to people, as I invariably would hear the same phrase “Oh, you must be spoiled”. It always made me want to apologize.
Spoiled, to me, brings up images of the nasty girl from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I think that people can be spoiled in good and not so good ways, and I have tried to spoil my children and the people I love in good ways.
Our daughter is coming home for Thanksgiving. We haven’t seen her for six months. Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday, and she has great expectations for her trip home. Every year we “spoil” her by letting her plan the Thanksgiving meal. She has old favorites, and likes to try new things as well. She doesn’t help prepare the food, but leaves it to us. This year she has requested French bread, an apple crisp for desert, cranberry salsa, a basic turkey dressing, butternut squash casserole, mashed potatoes, a simple turkey that is covered in cheese cloth and basted with herb butter, and, of course, green bean casserole. She also wants cranberry mimosas.
Daughter has also asked that she gets a down comforter on her bed, and has other favorite food requests for the 10 days she is home. I think this is a very good way to spoil her.
How do you spoil the people you love?
Spiralize – A Verb Whether We Like It Or Not
I often feel like I own every kitchen toy possible. Then I get another catalog in the mail or see an ad on the internet. My latest acquisition is a spiralizer. Dreadful if completely accurate name.
It has 3 different blades so you get 3 different widths of spirals and you can use it on a wide variety of fruits and vegetables (zucchini, onion, potato, pears, apples, carrots, beets). Pretty much if you can stick it onto the machine, you can probably makes spirals. Before I bought it I checked out several books from the library to see what kinds of dishes could be prepared – ended up purchasing two cookbooks as well (and yes, I did get rid of two old cookbooks when the new ones arrived).
Of course, the day I had time to mess with it, I didn’t want to go shopping so I just made up a recipe using ingredients I already had in the house.
Sherrilee’s First Spiralized Chilied Potatoes
1 large yellow onion, spiralized
3 large Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and spiralized
2 T. butter
1 can of Chili Beans
1 can of tomatoes w/ chiles
1 pouch of Taco sauce
1 T. chili powder
1 T. cumin
Salt & pepper to taste
2 c. shredded pepper jack cheese
Saute onions in butter until translucent in oven-proof skillet. Add potatoes and cook for 8-10 minutes until they get soft. Add beans, tomatoes, taco sauce and spicing to taste. Top w/ cheese and heat in 350° F oven for about 15 minutes until cheese gets nice and melty.
YA loved it. Good recipe for a cold, rainy weekend even if I feel badly for participating in “verbing”!
What new verb do you detest?
It’s Just Not the Same
Today’s post comes to us from Occasional Caroline.
Occasionally, I start writing a comment on the Trail and my comment gets so long that I think I should just make it a blog of its own. So here goes. This started out as a reply to the 11/7 Old Favorites post from BiR.
Something that happens quite a lot, is that I “discover” something in its early stages, when it’s free-to-inexpensive, and easy to get seats to. Then it grows and grows, until it’s expensive and you have to get tickets well in advance or buy a whole season if you want to get in at all, and finally it’s out of my price range and a long term commitment.
Two examples are Talking Volumes and the Music at the Zoo concerts. I know that if they hadn’t grown, they probably would have been gone long ago, but I liked being in the little group who appreciated what they did and the way they did it and that they appreciated everyone who was there and we knew it.
In the early years of Talking Volumes, they had 5 or 6 events per season and they were spread out between about September and May. Now there are 4 or 5 and they all fall between October and early December. Too much, too close together. It feels like a job to go and they commit a lot of seats to huge book clubs. It’s just not the same.
When my sister and I started going to concerts at the Minnesota Zoo, tickets were $12-$15 and the hard wooden bench seats were labeled for approximately 20 seats per row (that’s an arbitrary number as an example, I’m not sure of the actual numbers). Several years in, prices started going up but all the seats were still the same price and if you purchased early enough, you could get one of the boxes at the top of the amphitheater if you purchased all 4 seats in the box. You had a good view and a chair with a back. Then one year they renumbered the bench seats and a row that formerly had 20 seats, now had 25. Fine if everyone on the bench had a 12-inch or narrower rear-end, but pretty cramped if there are even 1 or 2 plus size folks in the row. And prices continued to rise. My sister started getting the standing room only passes which was a good deal and it was easy to decide at nearly the last minute to take in a show. Now, when you buy a SRO pass, you have to choose your concerts when you buy the pass. None of this is terribly out of line, but when you started when it was simple, spread out, and cheap, it’s just not the same.
I hope to discover some new start-ups to support until they price themselves out of my range. I did hit on a promising one with daughter #2 last Saturday. She lives in Lakeville and had spotted an interview with Lorna Landvik interviewing Lakeville’s own Loretta Ellsworth at the Lakeville Area Arts Center. Tickets were free and since we are big Lorna fans, she asked if I’d like to go with her. It was fantastic! The book Loretta had written (Stars Over Clear Lake) takes place partially in the 40s and features the Surf Ballroom. We were expecting a Talking Volumes-type event, which would have been fine, but this far exceeded our expectations. First, a chorus from a Lakeville high school performed a variety show of WWII-era music. They came out in different size groups, ranging from 1 to 20 members and almost all of them were excellent and all of them were well-rehearsed, enthusiastic, and charming young people. Then came the interview which was good and made you really want to read the featured book as well as Ellsworth’s earlier, young adult novels. Then, there was an excellent concert by the Hoplions Westwind Swing Band. They played a rousing set of big band, 40s tunes that was excellent. Great musicians and singers and a fun playlist. It was a wonderful show and we will keep an eye out for others like it in Lakeville, until they get to popular, too much in demand, and too rich for our blood.
Anything just not the same for you anymore?
The Odd Couple
Today’s post comes to us from Jacque.
Sometime this last summer I saw the strangest thing—a male peacock crossed the road in front of my car in hot pursuit of a turkey hen. They disappeared into the woods at top speed.
“HMMM, I thought. Did I really see that?”
When I got home I told Lou about it and we had a good laugh, labeling the pair “The Odd Couple.” They were kind of the Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett of the bird world. Remember that one? Two mismatched, high profile celebrities that impulsively got married then inevitably they divorced.
In September before I left for Ireland, I saw a blurb about a similar thing somewhere else on the news or on the internet. I searched YouTube, that faithful documenter of daily life, for similar henomena and came up with an impressive visual library of involvement between peacocks and other fowl. It turns out that peacocks “sleep” with anybody. Apparently, peacocks and peahens are the sluts of the fowl world. I suppose if you have all that impressive featherage, it cannot be wasted.
Here is a YouTube of a news report of a peacock in Victoria, Canada and a domestic turkey .
What sight causes you to say, “Did I see that?”
Fall Back
It’s that time of year again; Daylight Savings Time ends tomorrow and we all (well most of us anyway) in the U.S. get to fall back an hour.
Apparently in all the years that we’ve had DST (starting during World War I and then reinstituted during World War II), no one has been able to do a definite study that proves one way or the other that DST saves energy. It’s a bit of a pain; way too many clocks if you count all the electronics and the clock on the stove is very finicky. Last spring it took me almost 5 minutes to get it changed.
There is one big benefit of DST at our house; we use it as a reminder to change the batteries in our smoke detectors and our carbon monoxide detector. Because of this we know that the batteries are always in good shape.
What are you going to do with your extra hour? (apologies to Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, USVI, Guam and Samoa)
Trick or Treaters?
I love Halloween. Not the original All Hallow’s Eve, but what it has morphed into: the costumes, the candy, the jack-o-lanterns. Even as an adult, I love to dress up (today I dressed as the Crocodile Hunter, complete with a large upholstery foam crocodile that draped over my shoulders). I have a lovely decorative flag of a full moon with bats, a wonderful huge ceramic jack-o-lantern with the letters of our last name as the mouth and a whole bunch of Halloween luminaries that YA and I made when she was younger. (I’m not crazy about all the gory horror films that get trotted out at this time of year, but that’s another story.)
Unfortunately the reality of the trick-or-treat experience these days is not as much fun as I would have it be. I live on a busy street with a lot of folks who don’t leave their lights on; this keeps the foot traffic down. This year has a couple more strikes against it: it’s a school night and it’s REALLY REALLY cold. I normally only get about 25 trick or treaters. This year I only got 15 before I finally closed up shop. The last 5 kids got a huge handful of candy each!
When has a holiday disappointed you?
Strange Happenings
When she was a little girl of about 5, my best friend took piano lessons. Her father was the hired man who lived with his family in a small house on the farm yard next to the farm owner’s house. The owner’s house was a very old, very large, well-appointed, two-story farm house with an enormous attic. It had been in the owner’s family for several generations. My friend didn’t have a piano, but the elderly farm owner did, and he let my friend practice on his piano in his parlor.
My friend complained to the farm owners’ wife that she wished the old woman who came and listened to her practice would just go away, as she found her presence kind of upsetting. The owner’s wife asked my friend to describe the woman. Friend did so, and after that, the owner’s wife came and sat in the parlor while Friend practiced, as the old woman my friend described had been dead for many years and was the owner’s grandmother. Friend had never seen a photo of the woman, and everyone assumed she had seen her ghost. I am not making this up.
Strange things happen. What have you had trouble explaining?
Trail Baboon 