July 2, 2014

Since Saturday, I have had these little flutters in my chest.

Imagine that those times your eye flutters without control and to the point of nauseum

were happening somewhere else in your body.

Cool right?

No, in no way are the flutters cool!

Scary?  Definitely

Annoying.  Distracting.  Weird.  Scientifically inexplicable?  Embarrassing?  Painful?

Yes.  Yes. And so on. Yes.

So there is always the "take me out back and shoot me" solution but it awefully messy.

Off to the doctor, I go again today looking for a solution with

a million "ah. hmmmms" 

resounding through the office.

The good news is that general agreement suggests that I am not dying

right now

of flutters in my chest

They need more time

to study the metamorphosis going

on in my chest.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Here it is!  My first in the series of "pieces of my brain" blog as inspired by Joyce.  I am hoping that I will regularly come up with interesting topics for other people to read too.  I am also working on a series of short stories about people that have had large impacts in my life over very short periods of time.  We will see how that collection of stories turns out and every now and then I might add a story from the collection here too.

Today, I wanted to talk about who arrived from the east on North American land first.  Of course, our first history classes in seventh and eighth grade taught us about Christopher Columbus and John Cabot and the like.  The English, French and Italians came over and began trade and war with the Native Canadian and Americans who were originally here.  From at least 1980 until this year 2014, history teachers have been telling the same stories of the first peoples coming from Europe and "discovering" a land that already had people on it.

On Friday, Dad shared his reading from a book called, "Who Discovered America?" by Gavin Menzies.  His theory that comes with many more accurate facts suggests that the Chinese were here many years before the Europeans.  They came over with huge armadas, landed, settled and quietly went about searching for minerals and natural resources that they needed.  There was very little conflict with the Native Americans or Native Canadians because they were independent and quiet.  Occasionally, the Natives obliterated the Chinese because the huge number of Chinese people was a little daunting and the Natives were concerned that if war broke out there were too many people on the other side.  This was, however, very rare.  The natives make many references to the yellow skinned people with the small eyes.

This is not news.  This information has been around for a while and yet the school system continues over 40 years and probably more to teach information that is, if not inacurate is certainly incomplete.Why do we allow this to continue?  Is there no concern at all for the quality of information that we are teaching our students?

So here's the piece of my brain that I'm sharing today.  Perhaps as we all read and share more of the information that we come acrosss, the children are more likely to learn the facts instead of what old texts say!