Since Brian will not be homeschooled this year, I have found myself suffering from a malady peculiar to former homeschooling moms: curriculum withdrawal. Every trip to a bookstore was once an opportunity to see what we'll teach this year. Every time we log onto eBay we wonder what curriculum finds will be waiting fo us. And every time I go to the post office, I pass Eraser Dust, the teaching supplies store that I could spend hours in. But no more. Instead, I feel a pang of disappointment that I have no reason to enter that store. I can't troll eBay for school books. And I have to pass by the homeschool section in my favorite used book store.
I liked putting a curriculum together! It gave my life meaning and purpose. Now all I have is library school, and it just isn't that motivating. I mean really, the most exciting book I've bought for any of my classes was on Indexing and Abstracting.
Oh, and I'll be closing the eBay store soon. Ebay is raising their rates, and I have been losing money like crazy. I just can't afford to wait for other people like me to discover my curriculum. So I won't even have that (sigh). What I really need is a job!
A couple of links brought to you by The Boy. The first is an entry on his favorite website Stuff on My Cat. He has entered Oliver, and he needs your vote. Scroll down to Cat: Oliver (kind of a dark picture). Vote for him by scrolling down to near the bottom.
Boy Brian (he just insisted I use his name) has also created this very cool flash cartoon. It's a loop, so it can go on forever.
Like I said, he's been busy.
So it looks like I may have meniere's disease, one of those quirky conditions that nobody is quite sure about. There isn't even a test for it, just a process of elmination. My MRI came back negative, and I have a hearing test next month and a follow up with the Ear/Nose/Throat specialist. While I really like my doctor, this ENT guy did not impress me much. He saw me for 3 minutes, said I was probably just losing my hearing, and scheduled this hearing test on the other side of town.
I have actually considered the possibility of meniere's for a long time. But, I'm something of a hypochondriac, and tend to distrust my own diagnoses. Still, when the tinnitus started, I came back to it in the sypmtom book. Then, two weeks ago, I had such a vicious attack of vertigo that it scared me (I had never felt like that before). I was asleep, for pete's sake! I woke up and the bed was spinning to hard I thought I would fall off. I continued to be dizzy into the morning, to the point where I made my husband come home from work so he could take me to the hospital. Fortunately, he was thinking more clearly than I was, and took me to our clinic instead. The nurse was very cool, and told me exactly what it was - vertigo. But, when I explained about the tinnitus, she remained comvinced that one had nothing to do with the other. I remained skeptical, but took the meclizine which helped a lot. Then last Saturday, I was speaking to a doctor friend of mine who's daughter has meniere's, and she was convinced that's what it was (she actually mentioned it a few months ago in relation to the tinnitus). So, I spoke with my doctor, and he agreed that I probably have the disease (or syndrome, depending on who you talk to.)
Meniere's is incurable, and there aren't any effective treatments, aside from disabling surgery. The symptoms can be treated with meclizine or other drugs. My biggest hope is that this doesn't turn into something completely debilitating. Many people manage to live with it because the symptoms are intermittent. So far, I have had no more dizzy spells, but I have felt that near dizzyness when I spend a lot of time at the computer. I don't hold out any hope that the ENT doctor will have any new or effective ways to treat this. In fact, I don't feel like he'll be of any use at all (I could be wrong, of course.) We'll just have to wait and see.
So, the boy will be starting public high school in August. No, I'm not thrilled by the prospect, but he is old enough to make his own decisions in that area, and he has the right to have the "high school experience" as he calls it (sigh). I'm not worried about his academic success - he should coast along quite well just as his father and mother did, and still get As and Bs. I worry about the atmosphere of high school. I worry about him being bullied, or getting mixed up with the wrong crowd. He has this silly notion of being duct-taped to a bench (!) which he thinks is "cool." My son has some very strange ideas. However, that is one of the reasons I don't worry about that whole "peer pressure" thing. He is very much an individual, and I believe I have given him the knowledge and the tools he will need to make the right choices at school. I just hope he is not terribly disillusioned too early on. High school is not like it is on TV, and that's really all he has to go on.
I had originally wanted him to go to my alma mater, but since that is in CT and we are in TX, and just applying would have cost us a mortgage, we just couldn't do it. I was rather depressed by that for a while. My high school experience was damn good. I never had to deal with drugs, drug dealers, gangs, bullies, or creepy principles (there were a couple of questionable teachers, but they will always be lurking on the fringes.) And I should qualify the drugs issue - I didn't smoke pot, but I had a friend who did to her detriment for about a year there. But pot was the only thing I ever heard about. Our school was full of future lawyers, doctors, company CEOs, university professors, computer software engineers, and the like. Then there's me.
The DH is not thrilled about this decision to go to school. His objections stem from his problem with government schools in general, which I generally agree with. But the boy is old enough now and has enough real education under his belt that I don't think it will be detrimental to him. At least, not academically. DH thinks he will not get the proper classical education that he always wanted him to have, but he has hopes. The DH and DS actually had a bet that the school would offer Latin courses. Both the boy and I figured they have enough trouble teaching English let alone Latin. Seriously, this is a school where the Mexican kids take Spanish as their "foreign language" and get a C. Anyway, boy is sporting a nifty iPod until his dad asks for it back. Yeah, he lost the bet.
Well, a combination of vacation, illness, school work and disk space issues have kept me from blogging for a while. I will return as soon as I finish indexing an entire book in less than a week!