My sister had a heart attack.

My brother called me last night to tell me my sister was in intensive care in the hospital after having stent placement to remove a 100% blockage in an artery that goes to the back of the heart. They removed a blood clot too.

I called her today on her cell phone because all the lines in the coronary unit at the hospital were busy. I was surprised but happy when she answered the phone. I asked her what happened and she told me that she had been doing some beadwork three nights ago and her chest started hurting. She attributed it to sitting in one position for too long. The pain was in the middle of her chest, not on the left so she didn't think it was her heart. She went to bed. The next day it was still hurting but she went to work anyway thinking she would work through it and be okay. At some point it hurt bad enough that she went to see a staff nurse at her place of employment. Her blood pressure was high but what did that mean? She went back to her desk. The pain then got a whole lot worse so she drove to her doctor's office. Her doctor sent her to the hospital in an ambulance. She had had a heart attack.

It's a reminder that women's symptoms of a heart attack are very different from men's. For one thing, they aren't as clear cut.

Sometimes you have to say goodbye

Being in Birmingham, Alabama, one is always happy to find a friend who is also liberal. I met someone my age who is the mother of one of my son's friends a couple of years ago. I really didn't get to know her until the last 12 months or so. She is fun to be with and I enjoyed her company.

But my friend, we'll call her "Lisa," has some issues. Like me, she is not religious, but unlike me she is anti-Christian. She has often posted stuff on Facebook that is offensive and most of my friends are Christian. But these are minor compared to the drama she has inflicted on my family and others. On four separate occasions that should have been celebrations for other people, Lisa, somehow managed to get her 'feelings hurt' and ruined the celebration. Two of those times were celebrations meant for my son. The last thing that happened happened this week. My son's godmother gave him a week vacation at her condo on the beach for his graduation from college. He invited several of his friends but had trouble getting anybody to come during the first few days because of work schedules, etc. He posted something on his Facebook page telling his friends he had room for them at the beach if they wanted to come. Unfortunately, Lisa thought this included her even though she is 50 years old and my son is 23. She called my son at the beach and asked him if she could join him. He was very uncomfortable with the request but told her no. So she 'got her feelings hurt' again and once again caused a big drama by crying and carrying on until her daughter, one of my son's best friends, said she would stay home with her mother who was sad. I was very angry.

Lisa had done this before. It happened at my son's graduation dinner which both Lisa and her daughter were invited to but apparently in that case, the invitation wasn't early enough to suit her so she held her daughter hostage by making her feel sorry for her which means of course that one of my son's best friends didn't come to his graduation celebration. He was very sad. And now, at the beach, he once again in the same position. Lisa had a meltdown and prevented his best friend from coming down to the beach. I let Lisa know how angry I was and she left the barbecue we were both attending on July 4th. She then got her daughter to write me a lengthy email explaining how I was wrong to be mad and that her mother was sad and it was all mine and my son's fault. I feel sorry for Lisa's daughter, I truly do but the fact is that it is weird for a 50 year old to call a 23 year old and invite herself to share his vacation at the beach.

So my son was going to be at the beach alone for a few days until other friends came down but then suddenly, Lisa's daughter and her boyfriend showed up at the condo where my son was staying at the beach. But it didn't end there. Lisa had come to the beach too and got a hotel down the beach from where my son was staying.

Lisa wants to be friends/peers with her daughter and her daughter's friends. I think this is a dangerous thing but basically, the drama that surrounds everything Lisa does was enough for me. I ended our friendship. I will miss Lisa but the benefits of having her as a friend are not worth the pain she has inflicted on me and my family not to mention other friends.

Did I mention the chipmunk story? No of course not. A couple of months ago, Lisa decided that the chipmunks in her backyard were so cute that she would make pets of them and so she started feeding them and babying them and told everyone all about it. Then she read on the internet that chipmunks can become pests. Her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend told her they would use livetraps to capture the chipmunks and relocate them but Lisa said no, that they would just come back so she set up some boards leading to a bucket with water in it and drowned them by luring them with food.

Goodbye Lisa. I hope you will get help.

The spirit of Christmas is alive and well on eBay

I listed a beautiful Reuge music box on eBay on December 1. It ran for 7 days and didn't get a bid. So I lowered the price and ran it again.

I got a question from an eBay member asking me if the song was the one that they were looking for. She gave me the lyrics. Since it's a music box, I couldn't tell if it was the song she was looking for or not. The woman explained that her mother's health is failing and that the song she is interested in is the song that their father sang to her on their wedding day and before making a bid on the item, she wanted to make sure it was the right song. It reminded me of when my mom's health was failing and I would have done anything to sweeten her remaining days.

So I got my digital camera out, took a video of the box and posted it on youtube.com. I sent the link to the interested bidder. She informed me that indeed, that was the right song. So she put a bid on the music box. Then she wrote again a couple of days ago asking if I thought it would arrive in time for Christmas. I told her I wasn't sure and agreed to stop the auction so we could ship it sooner and hopefully her mother would get it for Christmas. I stopped the auction. I don't like to end auctions early because it isn't fair to other bidders but I had already run the music box for an entire week without a bid and besides, I wanted to help the woman. I imagined her mother's smile while her health is failing would be a sweet one.

After I ended the auction, another ebayer wrote and asked me what happened to the music box. He said he had been waiting to bid on it and that he wanted to complete his collection. I felt bad about it but I also wondered why he didn't bid on it when I ran it two weeks ago. I wrote back and explained about the woman's sick mother and apologized for stopping the auction. I suppose I should have lied and told him it got broken or lied and told him it got lost but for some idiotic reason, I told him the truth and thought he would understand.

Here is what he wrote back to me:

"This box was not listed just a couple weeks ago as I've been looking for these for two months straight every day 4 to 5 times a day. It had a bid on it as well which I was watching to outbid before bidding was over. My bid would have been higher as I really wanted this box. I've just outbid 5 others on 5 boxes in the last 3 weeks so I know this was not out there or I would've given you a bid & won. I was not given the chance to bid which is a violation of eBay policy. One is not allowed to pull an item with bid(s) to sell to the only bidder before the time is over. I sell here as well so I know sellers can see how many bid as well as how many are watching. As I was watching this, it would have shown you that fact. This woman you pulled this for is responsible to wait until bidding is over, so she canceled her bid against eBay rules, too. I'm sorry to say, I've reported this to eBay as required.

- 281gem"

So Merry Christmas to me. I tried to do something nice for someone and this is what happens. The guy is wrong of course. I listed the box on December 1 and sent him a link to it so he could see for himself.

'Tis the season.

Ebay condones blackmail

I sold 3 pamphlets to a buyer in Italy. We sent him an invoice but he didn't pay. He said he never got the invoice and wanted another one. We made up another invoice and after a few days, he paid.

Then he wrote and said he would "vote for me" if I left him positive feedback. I wasn't sure what he meant by that but I didn't feel I needed to leave positive feedback for him. It wasn't a positive experience but eBay doesn't allow sellers the privilege of leaving truthful feedback. As a seller, you can only leave a buyer positive feedback or no feedback. So I didn't leave him any feedback.

Then I got an email from him telling me he was going to leave me negative feedback because I didn't leave him feedback. He blackmailed me. I should have left him positive feedback even though the experience of selling to him wasn't positive. He left me 3 negative feedbacks because I didn't leave him feedback and because I issued a non-paying bidder alert on him.

I wrote to eBay and told them that he had blackmailed me and when I didn't comply, he retaliated by leaving me negative feedback and they told me that their rules don't allow them to remove feedback for blackmail or retaliatory reasons unless you're a buyer.

So there you go, eBay does it once again. Screws as many people as it can. No wonder they are losing business.

First they take away the ability for a seller to say that they accept money orders and checks from buyers. We've lost a lot of buyers who refuse to use PayPal.

Ebay did this for one reason and one reason only: GREED. Ebay is double-dipping. First they get fees from the seller through their fee structure on eBay when an item is sold. Then when they force the buyer to pay through PayPal which they own, they get paid even more in fees.

Now that Ebay all but has a monopoly on the internet auction business, it's easy for them to do whatever the hell they want to do without anybody being able to do a thing about it.

A few years ago, Yahoo and Amazon both had auctions that were not as lively as eBay's site at the time but were doing reasonably okay. Now neither of those sites, sites with the ability to compete with Ebay is offering auction services. It's a shame. Because eBay is running its own customers off.

Big Love

Spoiler Alert: If you haven't watched the latest episode of Big Love, you might not want to read this because it gives away plot, etc.

I watched the latest episode of Big Love tonight and was really struck by what a powerful story they spun into one hour. The family goes on a vacation together. Bill has planned a sort of holy pilgrimage of sorts for his family, going from one Mormon monument to another across the nation. Everything about the trip, from the station wagon to the afternoon sun slanting into the windows, to the cheap wood paneling on hotel or motel walls evokes what many of us, especially those of us with large families have experienced at least once before: the sacred family vacation.

The whole trip is planned to bring the family closer together by sharing an adventure on the road, and bonding along the way.

But like most perfectly planned family vacations, the Hendricks family vacation is full of disappointments, things gone awry and family not cooperating with the ideal family adventure.

First Margene announces to Bill that she wants to take a side trip to restore her mother's ashes held in an urn to her mother's relatives in Illinois. It's a 300 miles jag out of the way. And Margene discovers that Bill is taking Viagra. She promises that his secret is safe with her.

Barb thinks that Nicki and Margene are mad at her and insists on accompanying the on their side trip to Illinois to take Margene's mothers' ashes to relatives. On the drive, Barb is trying to suss what the other two are mad at her about and Nicki reveals that she (Nicki) isn't mad at Barb but at Margene. In defense, Margene accidentally tells the other wives that Bill is on Viagra.

By the time the wives reunite with the rest of the family, all three women are mad at Bill for taking Viagra and not telling them.

Nicki's crush on her boss continues as she buys a cardigan like the one he wears and gets Bill to wear it. Ben's crush from last season on Margene comes out again when they accidentally see each other nude.

Every stop along the way brings some new disappointment and Barb is upset because Sarah isn't including her in her plans for going to college. Of course Sarah can't tell Barb she's pregnant.

At one point, Bill gets angry because one of the children has left a sticky wrapper on top of the time capsule which is integral to his idea of the ideal family vacation.

Margene accidentally leaves her mother's ashes on top of the car and it falls off and breaks on the sun beaten boardwalk and Margene watches as the ashes simply blow away.

Barb is talking to Nicki and comes across Nicki's birth control pills. Barb thinks they're Sarah's. Nicki doesn't want to admit the truth but finally does to the other two wives and Bill. But this is the night of the special show they've come across the country to see together as a family, a Mormon re-enactment that Bill had hoped would be a special bonding experience for the entire family where they would bury a time capsule that their descendants would open some day to discover what their own ancestors were like.

But nothing has gone right on the perfectly planned vacation from the beginning. Bill is finally at his wits end and sends the others off to watch the re-enactment show without him. He kneels in the grass where he has buried the time capsule and talks to the lord. He tells him that he has looked for him all along the way and hasn't seen him anywhere. He expresses his doubts about keeping his family strong and safe and we see him in a vulnerable state as he mourns for the control he knows he has lost.

You can't help but feel bad for Bill in this scene. We've all had those vacations where nothing went right and we are left questioning how strong and close our families really are. It leaves us vulnerable. I thought this would be the end of the episode.

But then in the next scene, Nicki wakes up and looks to see that the other bed in her hotel room is empty. She hears weeping coming from the bathroom. It is Sarah. Nicki knocks and the door opens. We see Sarah sitting on the toilet in obvious distress and she says, "I'm losing my baby."

The next scene shows a distraught Sarah riding with Nicki in the car and Nicki trying to persuade her that they need to tell the others. Like any other 18 years old, Sarah is reluctant but finally agrees. It's the sort of catastrophe that is a blow to any family but especially one so steeped in religion.

They stop and Barb goes to her daughter and hugs her and Sarah clings to her weeping. She finally looks at her father and shrugs as if to say, 'it is what it is, I can't change it...' and her father goes to her and she really clings to him weeping and he comforts her.

So this is a little synopsis and I really hadn't meant to write one. But without it what I have to say wouldn't make any sense. The episode was powerful because of the nearly hour long tale of a woeful disappointing family vacation that leaves Bill doubting the bonds and closeness of his family. And it takes a tragedy, the tragedy that is Sarah, the young and innocent, being pregnant and having a miscarriage, to bring the family close again. It's really a story for the ages. It's been told before, but maybe not even as one story, but a series of vignettes that are disconnected and maybe you never reach the conclusion so expertly as this episode of Big Love did.

Will the end of the world be on December 12, 2012?

I don't think so though I've heard some people say that if Sarah Palin wins the presidential election that year, it will.

The Mayan calendar was only calculated until December 21, 2012. Conspiracy theorists are delighted about it. The same people who stored bottles of water and bought generators in anticipation of Y2K, the millennium are just as excited about the idea of the world ending in 2012 as they were about a world wide blackout and chaos in 2000.

The Mayans developed a 5,126 year calendar cycle. The Mayans were rather clever but not clever enough to predict the end of their own civilization which disappeared sometime around the year 900. But the Mayans weren't predicting the end of their own civilization, much less the end of the universe. They were ingenious when it came to astronomy and they were proficient in preparing their calendar to account for centuries to come. If the Mayans had accurately predicted the end of the world, it is much more likely they would have predicted what to them would have been the end of the world, their world, the Mayans, which disappeared around 1100 years ago.

If Microsoft had been as far thinking as the Mayan scholars, it would have prepared its computers for a calendar year beginning with a 2. It wouldn't have been that hard. They were still building computers in 1995 that weren't programmed in anticipation of the year 2000. That they weren't thinking five years ahead doesn't mean they weren't capable of doing so, it simply illustrates that in our consumer driven society, it was expected that computers would be obsolete in three years.

According to some Doomsday theorists, there will be solar storms that will trigger volcanoes. Since there are solar storms in almost any given year, it's likely that there will be solar storms in 2012. Solar storms occur in 11 year cycles. Sometimes they cause brief power outages. Since there are 50-60 volcano eruptions every year, it is likely that there will indeed by volcano eruptions in 2012. If there were no volcano eruptions in a year, that would indeed be remarkable.

Some doomsayers predict that there will be a reversal of poles that will make the Earth spin in the opposite direction. There is geological evidence that shows that polar reversals have occurred in the Earth's history. But polar reversals don't happen in a year or even ten years. Polar reversals occur over a span of about a thousand years or more. The reigning theory on polar reversals is that the inner molten core of the earth's chaotic motion changes through time which causes the poles to reverse.

Scholars who have made the Mayan civilization their life's work dispute the claims that the world will end in 2012. Scientists dismiss the 2012 doomsday conspiracy theories with facts. But seemingly ordinary people completely dismiss scientific evidence and cultural knowledge of the Mayans in favor of a doomsday scenario.

So the question then becomes, what is it about disaster, catastrophe and doom that so fascinate people who are otherwise rational people? I suspect that it is derived from the apparent human desire for drama and excitement. Humans love a mystery. The Mayans are mysterious because their civilization was so advanced. It's often hard for people to put people from ancient civilizations into any real context. The people who lived 2000 years ago had the same brain capacity that we have and they did remarkable things. They built pyramids. Even 200 years ago people built magnificent bridges and dams while today it is easy to think of the crumbling infrastructure of our country and be unable to conceive of how such engineering can be replaced. We built canals and railroads without the aid of computers and those remarkable feats seem long ago in a dim and mysterious past already. In a thousand years, our descendants will deem it remarkable that we built skyscrapers and roads with the limited technology we have.

Yes, the Mayan civilization was remarkable. They were clever enough to create a 5000 year calendar. Our own civilization has been remarkable too. The ancient Egyptians were remarkable too. They built pyramids. Ancient people in Britain created Stonehenge, managing to move tons of rocks and manipulate them into a circle without the aid of cranes and trucks. The Roman empire was remarkable too. To date, none of the great civilizations have been able to predict the end of our own civilizations, much less the end of the world. The Mayans had to stop somewhere in their calendar calculation. That it happens to be in 2012 means they felt comfortable enough about their own civilization to predict that their descendants, 5000 years later, would be able to continue their calculations. They had to stop somewhere. Even if one brilliant Mayan mathematician and astronomer spent his or her whole life calculating a calendar, it would have ended sometime.

Top Chef this week

Spoiler alert: If you haven't watched Top chef this week, and don't want to know who had to pack their knives, don't read!

I was glad to see Carla finally win one. I like her but she definitely hasn't really shown her talents in the season so far. Last week, she was the team member that had the worst food but Rhadica got sent home because she was the leader of the Restaurant Wars team. I think Rhadica is a much better chef than some of the people still in the running. In fact, I think that Rhadica, Stefan and Jamie are this season's best chefs.

Even so, Rhadica made a terrible mistake in not choosing Stefan to be on her team just because she didn't like working with him. He's the best chef this season whether we like him or not. Personally I don't think he's shown himself to be too much of an ass really even though the other chefs all seem to hate him. This season's chefs are much nicer overall than in many seasons past. No one stands out this season as being the one we love to hate.

I think Stefan will win the season. He could have been cut tonight but wasn't. The judges chose to send Jeff home. They didn't particularly care for his dish, but in the cook off wars between previous season chefs, one of the judges chose his food over the previous season chef. None of the judges chose Fabio's dish over the other guys dish so I can't understand how they didn't send him home.

Two episodes ago, they made it clear that they don't consider what the chefs have done in the past in choosing who will go home that night. That is when they sent Ariane home even though she had won several challenges. She had been the team "leader" for the night and Leah and Hosea threw her under the bus. In that episode, Leah should have been sent home.

But I don't believe for a minute that they don't consider previous cooking challenges before choosing who to send home. Everyone agreed that Fabio's dish was the worst but when they got ready to send someone home, they sent home Jeff. Jeff hasn't won too many challenges if any this season while Fabio has won at least one. I like Fabio and they probably do too. He's the consummate entertainer so they probably want to keep him on board for as long as they can.

But the most thrilling thing that happened tonight is that Andrea from a previous season beat Stefan across the board. I happen to think Stefan is the most talented chef this season...well he or Jamie is anyway. But I always liked Andrea and think she was underestimated tonight. Stefan thought she would be easy to win and he referred to her as the vegetarian chef. That she tries to incorporate healthy cooking into her recipes doesn't mean she's not a strong chef. She is one of my favorites from all the seasons. Go Andrea!

Cheney swears in a new congress in the epitome of irony

Did anybody besides me find Cheney swearing in the new Congress just a little bit ironic? Part of the oath is to "uphold the United States Constitution." To have Dick Cheney swearing in the new Congress is protocol, he is still the vice-president. But after his blatant willingness to set aside the United States Constitution during the Bush presidency and his eagerness to accept responsibility for condoning and okaying the use of torture of prisoners just makes the whole swearing in ceremony a tad bit ridiculous.