Belly scratcher

Automated back and belly scratcher/ US Patent # 6994680

I have this shirt that needs a tank top under it. When I wear it, I wear this tank top with lace on the bottom. I thought these tanks were cute on everyone else, but I hate wearing it myself. The lace on the bottom and the tanks longer length drives me crazy.

The long length emphasizes my short body and the lace is just-bleh. Whenever I wear this shirt I end up wondering what to do with it. Should I pull it down over my bottom? Should I scrunch it up around my waist? Does it look bad if the lace is crumpled? I spend the whole day adjusting it and then readjusting it. I hate wearing it. So today while I was getting dressed I had an epiphany. I tucked it. Problem solved.

This might not seem like a big deal to some but, I haven't tucked a shirt for ... O.k. I never tuck shirts. I hate tucking shirts. I hate tucked shirts because they require un-tucking and tucking every time you go to the bathroom. That's way too much work as far as I am concerned.

And so, after 20 years of not tucking, I tucked. And I must tell you, it was great. My shirt didn't bother me. The lace did not bother me. It was wonderful. Well at least consciously since, I caught myself. Well as long as I am being honest, it was just my right hand. I caught it trying to untuck my shirt while I was reading some sciency stuff. It wanted to untuck my shirt so it could give my belly a better scratch. So there you have it. I tried something new and in the process I learned something new about myself.

Hi my name is Angie and I am a belly scratcher.

And since I know everyone is curious about the picture above I inserted the patent abstract for this wonderful invention. Try not to giggle while reading it. And yes "I sure do hope Santa gives me one for Christmas this year!".


Automated back and belly scratcher
Document Type and Number:United States Patent 6994680

Abstract:
An automated back and belly scratcher having a telescopically adjustable shaft and having a hand-shaped portion attached at one end of the shaft. The hand-shaped portion has fingers that may be used for scratching or massaging the back or belly of a user or of a pet such as a dog or a cat. The shaft has a plurality of segments which may be telescopically positioned within one another, in order to maximally extend the shaft, or alternately, to retract the shaft into a storage position. The back and belly scratcher is provided with a motor in mechanical contact with the fingers of the hand-shaped portion, thereby enabling a user to selectively move the fingers by activating the motor. The motor has two modes of operation, one that produces a repetitive finger motion comprising successively and sequentially tapping each of the different fingers, in turn, and one that comprises simultaneous in-and-out finger motion of all of the fingers.

Anniversary's

I took Cassidy and Tanner to the doctor for their yearly checkup. I learned a few things:
1) I have healthy kids. Yes!
2) The next apointment I make will not be directly after work. The kids were DIRTY and we did not have time to stop and clean up. Poor doctor.
3)I have not been very good at the whole "yearly checkup" thing. Our last appointment was almost exactly two years ago when Cassidy was prescribed with pneumonia. Which made me remember.

Below is a letter I started when Cassidy and I were staying at Primary Children's Hospital.

Cassidy has been fighting an infection since the beginning of March. She showed symptoms when we visited DisneyLand. Her symptoms included shoulder pain, side pain, shortness of breath, a fever and an overwhelming urge to sit in the hotel. Missing Disneyland altogether.

We could not get her to leave the hotel. Nate and I took turns taking Tanner to Disneyland while the other stayed with her. Occasionally I could get her to go outside and sit by the pool but she prefered staying indoors. In her bed. She was so tired.

After two days of this, Nate took her to an instacare. They gave her a perscription for an inhaler and suggested we have her checked for asthma. Does asthma cause fevers, shoulder and side pain? They obviously did not know what was wrong with her and so dismissed the majority of her symptoms in order to focus on the one they knew; the breathing issue. We went against their advice.

The next day her symptoms relaxed and her fever broke. We were able to spend the last day of our trip to California in Disney Land. Nate and I took turns pushing her around in Tanners stroller. We flew home that night. It was a Thursday.

A week later, Nate went out of town for work and Cassidy complained mildly about being tired. Not knowing what to do, I waited. But by the end of the week, Friday, her shoulder and side pain came back and I took her to the family doctor. He prescribed a chest xray before diagnosing her with pneumonia. Apparently shoulder and side pain is a symptom of spinal or lung infection. I also learned that Utah has an agressive strain of bacteria that tends to evolve into pneumonia. The California instacare, perhaps, didn't know the symptoms of pneumonia to diagnose it properly. We started antibiotics on Saturday.

She then experienced a short lived relief of her symptoms, from taking the antibiotics, but by the middle of the third week her symptoms returned. I called the doctor again and made an appointment. He quickly looked her over and suggested we go to Primary Children's Hospital. I was relieved Leah had offered to take Tanner for the night.

Primary Children's admitted us quickly after a chest x-ray confirmed pneumonia. The week of antibiotics she took had no visible effect on the infection. At 12:35 am, on Friday (3/23/07), we entered her assighned hospital room and once again, I thought of Tanner. Happy he was well taken care of. Cassidy and I feel asleep for a few hours.

The next 18 hours felt like days. Cassidy went into sergery to have a chest tube inserted into her lung, Nate found a flight home, Family visited, and I played the role of parent; supportive, strong, understanding and hidden beneath a thin layer; scared. Scared not for her life but for the pain she was in. The pain I could not take for my own. It was hers and she handled it well.

At one point I went downstairs to eat and for the first time in days, I noticed other people; doctors and nurses, people visiting and parents of sick children. Parents identified by messy hair, wrinkled clothes, glassy eyes, and a florescent pink arm band for security. It was with the later that I noticed the most and took sympathy for. And then I realized I was one of them.

I wrote the letter late one night while Casi slept. The worst of what she would go through was over. I finally had time to deal with my own emotions and so I wrote a letter to help me sort things out. I guess I needed to talk about it. But, I found as I reached the emotional portion of my letter I could not write. I signed off the computer I was using in the common area and went to the bathroom and cried. I could, finally, allow tears. Cassidy came home 6 days later on March 29th, Her 10th birthday.

Today I celebrate healthy kids.

Vernal Equinox

"cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up"

Today I woke to the songs of Robin. It was still dark outside. Two hours before dawn. At my home, the American Robin is always first in the dawn chorus. As I sat there listing to the robins song I was reminded of a friend. A friend of birding and spring time.

Beth and I sat one morning, in our car just outside of Jordan River Parkway. We were waiting for dawn and a few hours of birding before work. As we sat there talking, we heard the American Robin's song. We paused our talk and listened. Its song melodiously interrupting the silence of night. After the robin was silent, she informed me that the American Robin song is always the first heard in the dawn chorus. She then spoke of a study regarding the sequence of morning bird song and why one bird will predictably sing before the other. After a brief google, I found one scientific paper describing such a study.

"The concentration of avian song at first light (i.e. the dawn chorus) is widely appreciated, but has an enigmatic functional significance. One widely accepted explanation is that birds are active at dawn, but light levels are not yet adequate for foraging. In forest communities, the onset to singing should thus be predictable from the species' foraging strata, which is ultimately related to ambient light level. To test this, we collected data from a tropical forest of Ecuador involving 57 species from 27 families of birds. Time of first song was a repeatable, species-specific trait, and the majority of resident birds, including non-passerines, sang in the dawn chorus. For passerine birds, foraging height was the best predictor of time of first song, with canopy birds singing earlier than birds foraging closer to the forest floor. A weak and opposite result was observed for non-passerines. For passerine birds, eye size also predicted time of first song, with larger eyed birds singing earlier, after controlling for body mass, taxonomic group and foraging height. This is the first comparative study of the dawn chorus in the Neotropics, and it provides the first evidence for foraging strata as the primary determinant of scheduling participation in the dawn chorus of birds."

I found it strange to read what I interpret as art, music, and emotion described through the eyes of a scientist. Although, from the first sentence of this abstract, I feel the authors also struggled to remove themselves from the emotional feelings they have regarding the songs of birds.

"The concentration of avian song at first light is widely appreciated, but has an enigmatic functional significance." The definition of appreciate is to grasp the nature, worth, quality, or significance of something and the definition of enigmatic is to resemble an enigma, perplexing, and mysterious. I think these words perfectly describe the value of the robins song and what I felt this morning as I drank my coffee and listened.

"cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up"

So after all that, what I really want to say is happy spring!
Now go out and plant some peas in celebration!

Super Star

Tanner and Cassidy had a piano recital last Saturday. Both kids played pretty well. It was Tanners first recital. I loved how he announced himself as "Tanner William Branch". He always uses his middle name for formal events. LOL! Then after he played he forgot to bow so he went back up and bowed dramatically three times. No one else bowed after their piece so it got a chuckle from the crowd. Here he is playing the first of three pieces.

On Monday, Tanner came home with a slip of paper announcing he was "star of the week". He was so excited! He showed his classmates a poster about himself that he made at the beginning of the year. When I asked how showing the poster went, all he said was " I don't really like spaghetti anymore".

The next day, he brought the class monkey, George Jr., home for the evening. George helped Tanner do his homework before spending the remainder of the evening playing Lego Indiana Jones on the Wii. George helping out the best he could. It was nice having George over.

Tanners special week ends with receiving the "star student" award from the principal. All the kids get one throughout the year.
As expected, the kindergarten students are a lot more excited about receiving the cone-shaped plastic trophy and colorful certificate announcing their personal qualities than the sixth graders. Cassi's classroom, through the random event of one student leaving the cone shaped trophy on the shelf above the coat hangers, has chosen to leave their trophy's in the classroom. Now the shelf is decorated with rows of red, blue, yellow, green, and orange cones. Cassi plans to add her trophy to the silent protest once she is awarded. Lovely!

Tanner was awarded for being a good listener, hard worker, for being kind, and doing quality work. Cassi might argue one or two of these qualities.

Home 4 Sale

Finally. I agree with Nate...about moving. Nate has been on board, this decision, for over three years now. But, I could not leave my home. Until one day I walked into my home and realized I was ready to move. I don't know what changed, but it did. So we put a sign up, cleaned our home (for us a three week project), and invited a photographer to come over. For those that have been over this is what our home looks like clean!
Our Home. Check out the sign! The day the realtor put it up the wind was really bad. The next day and it snowed. Thats right folks! Six more weeks of winter.








The living room is my favorite room. I have spent many mornings sitting in here reading books and drinking tea or coffee.








Birds eye view! When I showed Casi the house pictures this was the first one that came up. She said "Thats our house!". She didn't recognize it. Note the vacuum lines.








The kitchen! We changed the colors with new paint, new tile, and new counter tops (finally!).







The dining room. Note the 1 Liter graduated cylinder on the wine cabinet. Opps! I forgot to pack it before the pictures were taken.













Here is the main bathroom. Some may not recognize it. It was only about six months ago that we decided we were not moving. Instead we would fix the areas we did not like. We put this plan into action with the main bathroom in the home. Then after two months, $7K,a bad image of Home Depots customer service department, and two tired people later we were finished. This is also why we hired out when we tiled the kitchen. I included a close up view because it looks so good!










The Master bedroom. Pretty boring really. We we never got any pictures up. Its probably no surprise that I love the paint in this room.


Tanners room. I had to totally repaint his bedroom and we didn't put his pictures back up afterwards. So its a bit dull. I just hated to put holes in a perfect wall. I also boxed up 80% of his toys. With the remaining 20% of his toys we play House Nazi. "Ahhh! Don't touch your toys! Your rooms all clean. Why don't you go watch TV?" Poor little guy, but look how clean his room is!

This is our multipurpose room. The computer that needs a desk, the exercise equipment that rarely gets used, and the piles of boxes we use as a file cabinet, the sewing machine that I can kinda work, and the plant that occasionally gets water (usually after the leaves start dropping). As you can see this room took a bit of cleaning to get it to just two of those items.


This is Cassidy's room. Probably the largest bed room in the house. Its very important to her that her room in our next home keeps this description.








Cassidy's bathroom. We also did the tile work in this room a few years ago.








And our yard. I don't think this picture does it justice and I still hate the idea of leaving it. *Sigh*









OK there it is. Now all we have to do is keep it clean till someone buys it and find a home that Nate and I can both agree on. Haha!

OMG! (part 1 of possibly 3)

Gurp. Its whats for breakfast.

The other day I reviewed the terms people search that leads them to my site. I get quite a few people who find this page and this page. But the one that surprised me the most was someone who searched "gurp". The name I chose for my blog. This word (I thought) was my word. Ive owned it for 15 years. No one else knew about it. Its meaning was me. I was gurp (or so I thought). How could someone search something that only existed in my mind. So I did what any person would do. I googled it.

The definition of Gurp on the online slang dictionary defines it as: To nearly throw up. Origin from the sound or the feeling of gurping. They also have this beautifully written example sentence: "My gurp tastes like the cheeseburger I just ate". Thats good to know. I too have had that happen and was not able to describe it so perfectly.

But the Urban dictionary uses it in relation to "gurp sauce" which means "A very ugly woman thats high on methamphetamines". Here is its example sentence: "That gurp sauce neighbor stacy was looking through my yard at 3 in the morning last night again..." God! I hate it when that happens. Gezzz Gurp sauce woman, mind your own business and keep your over the fence look'in to daylight hours.

On a side note: Gurp also means Georgetown University Retirement Plan (GURP).

So back to the reason this person searched for "gurp". He/she was looking for these lyrics from "Come Gurp With Me" by Z-Man. Yeah! Ewwwww! It seemed rather obvious that I needed to changed my blog name back to "Managed Chaos". So Gurp. Is NOT for breakfast any longer nor does it define me. At least I don't think I am an ugly meth user or worse, something you burp up after a heavy meal. But this post is not all sad. A new vocabulary word was discovered. Go ahead. Give it a run. I did.

"Dude! Dont touch that! I just gurped it."

"Ewww! I just smelled my gurp."

I don't know why but Mr T just entered my head "I pity the fool that gurped that! Sucka!"