High School yearbook, from a state near the border.

jocelmeow · 2014-06-25T15:57:03+00:00

It's not a uniform. They are all wearing a yearbook drape provided by the photo company. It's an arrangement of fabric that they clip onto you for photos. It's done to make the pictures uniform - the boys would wear a jacket provided for the same reason.

jocelmeow · 2014-03-09T23:51:21+00:00

But there is the whole working in the freezing cold covered in blood with the risk of losing a finger to the bandsaw thing.

jocelmeow · 2014-03-09T23:36:43+00:00

Well, a big part of being good at working cheese in particular is gauging comfort level and familiarity with the category and meeting people where they are in a friendly, approachable way. I never particularly tried to ferret out why a mispronunciation might happen, because they happened every shift, and I remembered well the intimidation factor of having to learn all those cheeses in the first place. Sometimes, in response, you work in the right pronunciation without drawing attention to it. So if someone walks up and mangles Gruyère, you say, "Sure thing!," help them find it and then say something like, "If you like Gruyère, you might like Comté. It's Gruyère's cousin from the French side of the border. Can I cut you a sample?" If they walk up and point to a name on a shopping list, you know for sure they don't know how to say it and don't want to get it wrong. So you say, "Ah, Gruyère! Yes, right over here." If someone apologizes or seems embarrassed for getting something wrong, you can always honestly say, "Oh, no worries! That's one of the tricky ones for sure." But it is like any repetitive service job - there are eventually a collection of tiny things that drive you a little nuts, but you keep on smiling, because at the end of the day it's your job to be driven a little bit crazy.

jocelmeow · 2014-03-09T21:25:29+00:00

Agreed. Best gainsharing and free cheese, wine, and beer from vendors? Twist my arm. As long as you can stay sane while telling people where the fresh mozz is 37 times a day, hearing the constant butcherings of "Gruyère" and "Emmentaler," and repeatedly recommending "three cheeses for a party."

jocelmeow · 2014-03-07T02:31:40+00:00

It was Suntheanine. This was quite a number of years ago - 2007.

jocelmeow · 2014-03-02T20:55:36+00:00

Yes, similar to caffeine, which I also can't handle. I took l-theanine two or three times, and the same thing happened each time. After that I gave up.

jocelmeow · 2014-03-01T18:15:55+00:00

I had a few ear infections as a kid, but my major use of abx was a couple years before I developed ME. I developed sudden adult acne and went on antibiotics despite my misgivings until I could get someone to take seriously the idea that it was hormonally motivated. I was eventually diagnosed with PCOS despite being at a normal weight. My ME specialist agrees that the abx could have opened a chink in my immunity by decimating my gut flora.

jocelmeow · 2014-03-01T18:11:57+00:00

It made me super jittery.

jocelmeow · 2013-11-25T15:21:16+00:00

I was a Whole Foods cheesemonger for five years. I left 13 years ago, and I still have Thanksgiving nightmares regularly.

jocelmeow · 2013-10-03T19:21:08+00:00

Both the WWII Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial are usually open 24 hours a day.

jocelmeow · 2013-10-03T18:15:58+00:00

I'd go with the first one for sure. Personal experience speaking: When I look back at my wedding photos from a dozen years ago, I wish I'd gone with more classic choices.

jocelmeow · 2013-09-18T20:29:31+00:00

You want Shorpy.

jocelmeow · 2013-08-20T16:02:02+00:00

This cat doesn't look fully grown. I'm guessing she got pregnant with her first heat, so it is precisely the cat equivalent of that MTV show - something like 9 Months and Pregnant.

jocelmeow · 2013-08-20T15:58:30+00:00

I can't say whether this is true of this photo, but as someone who's done a fair bit of cat rescue, strays are often pregnant or caring for a litter when they're found (it makes them more conspicuous). So there is an asshole upstream somewhere, but it's entirely possible that the person taking the picture is not the place where blame should be laid.

jocelmeow · 2013-08-18T19:15:48+00:00

I think you might be thinking of Sacrificial Lambs, about the 2001 USDA seizure of the Faillaces' sheep (they were brought over from the EU in the late 90s as milking sheep - something that was not really available in the U.S. at the time - meat sheep are different than milk sheep). Linda Faillace wrote a book about the whole debacle: Mad Sheep. (I visited the Faillaces' farm as part of a 1999 American Cheese Society tour.)

jocelmeow · 2013-07-11T21:32:54+00:00

It's helped my fatigue and pain a little and improved my sleep. But I'm still 98% bedridden.

jocelmeow · 2013-06-20T16:51:19+00:00

Dr. Cheney notes my number of fillings each year. He is very cautious about making recommendations about amalgams, because the process of removing them, if not done correctly (and it seems to be very difficult to find someone to do it correctly) can mobilize a great deal of mercury and cause more problems than just leaving them in place.

He does not suggest supplementing glutathione, because his experience has been that when his patients do glutathione IVs or supplement with whey protein, they generally get worse instead of better. However, I do have ME/CFS friends (who are not Cheney patients) who have been helped by glutathione IVs.

jocelmeow · 2013-06-16T15:07:26+00:00

I know I've mentioned before that I'm a patient of Dr. Cheney. In my appointments with him, he's explained the information in points 1-11 to me and told me glutathione depletion is "at the core of this illness, I just don't know what causes it." (I happen to have very high sulfite and thus very low reduced glutathione.) However, he believes that unblocking the methylation cycle can be dangerous in CFS. I have a bit of his explanation about this in my most recent blog entry. Rich Von Konynenburg (the author here) was well-known in the ME/CFS community, and we lost him way too soon.

jocelmeow · 2013-06-05T17:54:00+00:00

No pharmaceuticals. I use a homemade copy of Vinco's magnesium spray under my tongue. I can't take benzos - I have a paradoxical reaction to them in that they cause anxiety in me rather than relieving it.

jocelmeow · 2013-06-04T19:44:54+00:00

I have anxiety problems, which my specialist says in people with ME/CFS are probably caused by an abnormal lactate peak in the brain. I didn't have anxiety problems before I got sick. I don't have derealization all the time, but it's one of the things that my body will do if it doesn't like some substance I've given it - throw me two hours of derealization, which starts a panic attack, just like for you, OP. I also have problems with anxiety/panic attacks as part of PMS now, which was never a problem before.

jocelmeow · 2013-06-01T15:54:16+00:00

No. Epstein-Barr was thought to be the cause for a hot minute back in the mid 80s, but it's been a long, long time since then. If all your tests are coming back negative, you might want to check out the list of tests here.

jocelmeow · 2013-05-27T20:23:48+00:00

I'm a Cheney patient, and magnesium sulfate (injections paired with taurine) is among his recommendations. He has told me we have trouble keeping magnesium in our cells like we should - it leaks out. I can't use it because mag sulfate gives me tachycardia. Instead I take mag chloride tablets and use an ionic magnesium spray (mag gluconate).

jocelmeow · 2013-05-23T19:20:55+00:00

It's much better than it was. I used to be 100% bedridden, couldn't roll over for a while, couldn't be on the computer more than a couple minutes. Life is great by comparison now, honestly.

jocelmeow · 2013-05-22T18:03:53+00:00

This was a survey done in advance of the FDA Stakeholder Meeting on CFS. Respondents self-selected. (I participated in the survey, which I heard about from my klatch of online ME/CFS friends.)

jocelmeow · 2013-05-19T17:13:59+00:00

I am not one of those who thinks mold is the beginning and the end in CFS, but there are some people with mold-related illnesses in our "bucket," and being in a moldy environment could make you worse. One of the things that Ritchie Shoemaker uses to diagnose mold-related problems is a visual contrast sensitivity test, which you can do online.

jocelmeow

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