California – Life and Lims

Soon I can hop the Hogwarts Express to L.A.

In book-related news that is the thrill of my day, I read that Universal is definitely going to expand its theme park in Los Angeles, a project which will finally bring Harry Potter and Hogwarts to California.

Having lived East of the Mississippi for years, I visited Florida for most of my theme-park needs: Disney World (ah, I miss you, Epcot!) being the biggie. And then as soon as I moved to California, a mere three hours from L.A., the Universal Studios theme park in Florida added the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. And since then, I have been jealous of every friend still back East who’s gotten to visit Hogwarts in person. Sure, I’ve concocted butterbeer using Internet recipes (whoa, is it super-sweet or what!), but that is not even close to being able to replicate the experience.

What cracks me up in the article from the L.A. Times is the notion that Universal was hoping at one time to build houses on the backlot. What the heck kind of shortsighted notion is that???! Muggles.

Thank goodness, that uninspired idea was shot down, and we get Harry instead on the West Coast.

Construction begins this summer. Only question is: HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO FINISH? Let’s hope someone waves a wand and gets it done speedy-quick. This will be almost as big as a book-release midnight party.

Look to the sky

Unfortunately, thanks to being a busy mom and writer, I do not keep up on the news just as it happens. So I was not informed ahead of time that the space shuttle Endeavor would be flying around California, perhaps even over my own area. Otherwise, I might have been one of those people standing outside waiting and watching for it to pass by. Perhaps it’s for the best; I simply didn’t have the time to do it.

space shuttle — Photo by Shari Vialpando-Hill, Las Cruces Sun-News

But reading about the retired shuttle’s fly-by over the state afterward and looking at pictures absolutely warmed my heart. It made me incredibly nostalgic for an era that started in my childhood and has now ended.

When I was probably around seven or eight years old, my grandparents gave me a subscription to the National Geographic children’s magazine, called the World at the time. I remember so clearly where I was living and the room I had when an issue arrived explaining all about the new shuttle program. The issue had a poster, I think, and it included — COOL!! — a cardstock model of the shuttle that I could assemble. I put it together and looked at it in awe. What a neat concept: a new series of “rockets” that would take intrepid explorers into space and then be able to come right back into the atmosphere and glide to landing much like an airplane.

Over the years, I watched the shuttles launch and return with fascination. I have always loved the idea of traveling into space. I will say right now that I would NEVER want to be submerged deep in the water or explore the seas in any way, but I would LOVE to go into space. If I had a spare quarter-mil, I would pay to go on a rocket once those private flights become available. No question. Just think about the fantastic view. I love to fly, and going even higher to be able to see the earth from space would be incredible.

Yes, I remember distinctly when the Challenger exploded. It was a shock to my system to just see it break into pieces in the sky, knowing those astronauts were aboard. We were watching it on television in our school’s cafeteria, and it was so sad to see that tragic event as it unfolded.

But even knowing that those risks were involved in space exploration, I still have a soft spot for the program. There are always risks and dangers involved in new things, and the things we learn outweigh those risks.

So it just broke my heart when NASA announced a few years back that the space shuttle program would be discontinued. I understand its reasoning, but it’s always sad to see an era come to an end.

I told my oldest yesterday that what excites me now is that private enterprises are now leading the way to get more people into space. The federal agencies are working officially on getting people further out into space, which is definitely very exciting and a logical next step. But the idea of finally having the possibility of us normal people being able to go into space, just far enough to get a view of the earth and its continents and landmarks from that far up, thrills me. I’m not a mechanical person; my talents just don’t lie in designing things other than newspaper or web pages. I don’t build space ships. But there are some brilliant engineers out there who do. With all my heart, I say, Go for it! I’d like to get to space before I die.

Latest discoveries

It’s going to take a whole lot of posts to cover my life and experiences in this department. So I started at the beginning, but I’ve been jumping around since that first post. I’m going to try to explain a bit where I am now.

We moved to California in late summer of 2008 from Alabama, where we had lived in one town for 10 years. We were pretty well settled there, even though we hadn’t expected to stay there for so long. But our children’s needs, primarily, induced us to move cross-country. Though I had some time to plan and prepare for the move, the whole thing didn’t go nearly as smoothly as I would have liked. It took ages to get into a house of our own, during which time we lived with family and had all of our possessions in a storage unit. Then we waited and waited for our house in Alabama to sell, and after a year of waiting and one very low offer that fell through, we decided to rent it out. The stress of all those things, combined with the financial stress of paying two mortgages for a year, made life very difficult. I just felt depressed and frustrated and irritable pretty much all the time.

I had been seeing a psychiatrist in Alabama for a year or two, during which time he’d put me on an antidepressant that seemed to help fairly well. But with the move, it just wasn’t doing enough. So I started surfing the Web one morning and found a site that turned out to be very useful. It’s just a very simple-looking site by a psychiatrist who has shared many of his insights online. He also wrote a book called Why Am I Still Depressed? I pored over the site and then ordered the book. I decided that it was time to see a psychiatrist in my new town, rather than having my general doctor keep writing scripts for the old antidepressant.

The site had really struck a chord with me; its information led me to believe I was experiencing what this doctor (James Phelps) describes as bipolar II. Armed with this bit of information, I found one of the two psychiatrists in town that my health insurance covered and made an appointment. My new doctor and I talked, I shared my opinions, and he prescribed a new medication; he called my condition “atypical bipolar disorder,” but it’s just a slightly different name for what Dr. Phelps called bipolar II. The new medication seemed to work fine, and just knowing I had new information and a new medication gave me hope.

Three years later, this is still the diagnosis I’m working with. I’ve tried some different meds and a different doctor (I’ll write other posts on those topics), but we’re still going with that. Honestly, though, I still wonder how many other factors are at play. Dr. Phelps’ website talks about how thyroid disorders are sometimes tied in with bipolar II, and since I’ve been hypothyroid for about 12 years now (well, that’s when my doctor and I discovered it), I can’t help but think it may play a part in what I experience, even though I have been on thyroid replacement medication for all that time and it’s supposedly controlled (according to blood tests that my current doctor administers every year: and THAT, again, is a whole other topic). I also have noticed that I feel particular sensitivity to hormonal fluctuations, during pregnancy and postpartum and my monthly cycles, and those must be factors as well. I’m fascinated by how things work, and the complex interplay of hormones in the body is so interesting to me (I even wrote a paper about hormones for a research project in English in high school before I knew how personal it was). So I would love to figure out exactly how all these things work together to create my particular issues. Doctors, however, basically don’t seem to care about this (How could they not? Do they not have any curiosity?), at least when it comes to treating me. They just want to know that they’re finding a good medicine to treat me, and that’s all that matters. They have a point, I suppose, but I’d just love to know how all this works inside me. As far as we’ve come in being able to treat mood disorders, it still feels like we’re kind of living in the 19th century treatment-wise compared to all the other feats of medicine that exist.

So I could say now, “Well, this is it. I’m almost 42, and I’ve finally figured out what’s going on with me.” But even though I feel fairly confident that I’m on the right path — and it’s a big relief, I must say — I still wonder if in 10 years my diagnosis might change and I’ll look back and say, “Gee, we were close but not quite there.” At any rate, this is the best we have right now, and we’re going with it. It’s something, and something is better than nothing. I suppose, when it comes down to it, this is really just an extension of my previous post, “What’s in a name?”, because we have a name but that name could very well change. It’s just nice to have a name; it helps me to wrap my mind around what I experience, it helps me on occasion to explain to others if I feel so inclined, and now it might help you.