I have a friend from college who left Illinois after she graduated and moved to Colorado. She always wanted to live there; she loves being able to live in snowy areas where she can go skiing. As much as she loves to ski, she is very near-sighted and has to wear glasses everywhere she goes. It can be such a hassle having to find eye gear that covers up her glasses, and then have to spend all this time wiping them off when they get foggy from the cold air. She doesn’t like to wear contact lenses either because she says her eyes are so sensitive that any contacts she wears hurt too much to keep in for very long. She’ll only wear contacts on special occasions. She went online recently to look into Lasik in Colorado, to see what kind of doctors out there practice it and at what price. After a few phone calls, she made an appointment with one eye surgeon and weighed all of her options. She’s so much happier now that she’s had the surgery. She no longer has to deal with wear glasses that she doesn’t want, or hunting for oversized eye gear when she wants to go skiing.

My friend is driving me crazy.  She is having a nightmare of a time getting through her last semester in college.  She has just come to a point where she seems to be burned out.  There is no more push in her.  I thought she needed a break, so I took her along to Grandma’s for an afternoon of relaxation.  But she decided she would stay in the room and rest.  Then she got a whiff of food cooking in the kitchen and decided to come join in.  After a while, she was laughing and enjoying herself.  Grandma said she knew that cause of hair loss was just too much stress, and my friend needed to take better care.  Grandma was right of course.  My friend decided to start by handling one thing at a time.  She decided she felt renewed and would get through this last semester of college.  Then she would see what she wanted to do.  She realized she had been trying to decide her future before she even got out of college, and was torn between staying here or going out West where some of her family has moved.  I don’t think she really wanted to go.

I grew up in a time where you built everything by hand. There weren’t any kits for a walk in closet organizer. My father calculated out the whole closet and went to the old lumberyard and had the gentleman cut the lumber to his specifications.  From there we would go to the hardware store to buy screws and fasteners and other necessary equipment to complete the task. I was too young to understand what was going on but my father always treated me as if I were a man. My dad called me his “inside guy” but really I think I was just in the way.  Being the “inside guy” had its perks. I was allowed to hold the lumber while my dad drilled. I swear it felt as if this took all day. I guess when I think about it it really did.  We were at the lumberyard even before it opened.  My father had a list ready before we even got there. I still remember the smell of the lumber. It had rained the night before, and some of it was wet to the core.  You could smell all of the wet wood.  My father loved that I tried to help, he smiled at me a lot when I was asking questions.  He told my mother afterwards that I had been the main reason the project was completed. She smiled. Years later I asked him about it.  He still claims that he really did need my help that day.

For all of the years that I lived in my house with my parents, we had an alarm system.  I know that at least once during my childhood we had a new alarm system installed, and that I had to learn a new code.  As a child, for all I knew, the guy just came and put in a new alarm system.  I never thought that I would have to be faced with the decision of choosing a home security company.  Now that I have a home to call my own, I am forced to make all sorts of decisions, about things I never realized grown people have to deal with.  This includes decisions like protecting my new home with a security system.  It also includes decisions like what cable provider to have, and making sure I pay all of my bills on time.  At least I had experience paying the bills while I was in college.  Some of my roommates never had any idea that I was paying the bills every month until I told them they owed me money.  Another thing I never realized I would have to deal with is paying taxes.  It is nice to have a disposable income, but having to get everything together to file my taxes was a huge hassle. 

The personal injury attorneys are legal experts dealing with the cases where physical injury has been caused due to negligence or carelessness of another party. The attorneys in these cases generally help their client to acquire compensation from the party that has caused the damage. They also help towards getting compensation from the insurance companies. There are several legal firms that host these attorneys. The process in case of personal injury involves heavy legal technicalities thus the legal expert has to be well versed with law guiding the process. The Personal Injury Attorneys conducts thorough research of the whole incident. This helps the Personal Injury Attorneys to evaluate the amount of compensation that has to be demanded. Based upon the findings of the investigation the rest of the case is being placed before the court. There are several sources to find these legal experts, as they are available very easily. The legal firms must be contacted in this regard as they host most of the attorneys. The attorneys can be searched upon on the Internet as well. While choosing them their past record must be considered. The other thing that is to be considered is the trial cost quoted by them. 

When people think of culture, particularly of high culture and society, they almost always naturally think of the works of William Shakespeare.  In fact, it can be said that having read Shakespeare, being able to discuss the plays and quote them, and also having attended actual play performances is a high water mark for high culture.  The classic image of a Shakespearean aficionado is that of a well-manicured man wearing an expensive suit and tie, neatly groomed with an old-fashioned timepiece in his pocket.  He sits front row at the play, politely applauding the ends of the acts, his closed umbrella sitting by his knee.  Somewhere close by, a woman in a long, elegant dress with her face demurely made up also claps. 

            Somewhere else, a gangly couple in old jeans and torn t-shirts throws themselves down into seats at a ratty old movie theater, the very definition of being unrefined and lowbrow.  They’ve heard of William Shakespeare, every single person in the world has, but have never seen a play and couldn’t quote any of his works to save their lives. 

            Of course, this is all looking at Shakespeare’s work in hindsight after centuries have passed and people have discovered and rediscovered these plays and lauded their genius.  Back in Shakespeare’s day, however, he and his troupe were the very definition of unkempt, gangly, and coarse.  They traveled around the English countryside, often performing outside on the dirty grass even in the rain and wind if it came to it.  Occasionally, they played in theaters, such as the infamous Globe, but all types of people came out to watch them.  Even the dirtiest and lowliest field workers grabbed seats at the back. 

            Royalty commissioned plays and had private performances and Shakespeare’s troupe would clean themselves up for that, but not their plays.  For the time period, Shakespeare’s plays were utter filth, constantly making sexual innuendos and jokes, often relying on black sexual humor that today we’d think only the most lowbrow would find funny. 

            And look at the plays themselves.  Romeo and Juliet is considered by many to be the greatest, most tragic love story of all time.  People today don’t think about how both Romeo and Juliet were probably no older than 14 or 15.  When he first appears in the play, Romeo is even mooning over another girl, then later on becomes infatuated with Juliet at Lord Capulet’s ball.  This isn’t the greatest of all loves.  This is a young, immature couple getting caught up in themselves and their emotions and then acting impetuously.  That’s what led to their suicides.  They were young and stupid. 

            Othello is another well-regarded play by the bard from Stratford.  Yet, even though Iago schemes against Othello and manipulates him, there’s a massive amount of sexual tension built between him and Iago throughout the whole play.  It’s simply dripping with homoeroticism.  And William Shakespeare was too able and experience a playwright not to know what he was doing writing it. 

            It just goes to show that time and context have a lot to do with anything you read and appreciate. 

There are some great monitors for testing blood glucose levels which have large screens to read the numbers on to aid if your eyesight is aging as you age. Even a digital readout on an ultra glucose unit can be a very difficult thing to do. But, it is essential to check your blood sugar often, and then record it for you and your physician. There is another great option. You can get the talking unit. Yes, the unit actually will talk to you whatever number you got on the unit. You therefore will only have to take your reading by listening. This can make your life very easy. Even if you are hard of hearing you can have the unit save your past numbers and then bring the monitor to your physician and they will record it for you. Some names to remember are the One Touch monitor for your glucose. There also is the Precision extra glucose meter. So even if you are a veteran of the diabetes testing crowd you will find that it is worth your time to stay on top of the latest testing units as research is being done every day to make sure that you have the fastest, most comfortable, and most accurate glucose testing unit available to you. The things that may have worked for you in the past are being rapidly fixed. Just imagine the One Touch glucose meter, which does not ask you to jab your finger and then milk a drop of blood out of it every day. You would not have anything sore. It would really make you want to test yourself more often.