Oh no. She figured it out.

[conuly]

As you know, I babysit two boys for an hour in the afternoons. Several months ago I lost the four year old's backpack (actually, he might still have been three) and so I bought a new one.

It's a pretty awesome backpack, actually, and he loves it. But I wasn't about to tell his mom "Yo, I bought your preschooler a $40 backpack", so instead I just said I'd budgeted $10 for it, which was the truth. I just went a little out of budget to get it.

Well, she saw it in a store yesterday going for $50, so now the jig is up. LOL. She wants to repay me, and I'm trying to back out of that one. If I'd wanted repayment, I'd've told her how much I really spent!

***************************************************************

So What Does A Deep-Fried Grasshopper Taste Like? ("Not everyone is a fan of the idea — for the obvious reasons." Wait, what obvious reasons are those!? I thought it was just cultural conditioning not to eat a widespread, easy protein source that millions of people worldwide enjoy.)

The Original Gotham

Ants build sinking Eiffel Towers when trying to escape

First Object Teleported from Earth to Orbit ("Object" is stretching a point. It was a photon.)

Science education on a transphobic post (she's casting her pearls before swine there, but good luck)

Why It Took Scientists So Long to Figure Out Where Babies Come From

At 56, a ‘Light Bulb’ Goes Off and a Firefighter Emerges

Plate tectonics may have driven the evolution of life on Earth

“When you used to say ‘farmer,’ you wouldn’t have me as the picture.”: Urban farming in Sacramento

The British View the War of 1812 Quite Differently Than Americans Do

Political liberals display greater happiness, study shows

The Hidden Rules of the Puritan Fashion Police

Pope Francis creates fourth pathway to becoming a saint ("Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.")

The Timelessness of Millennial-Bashing

The 10 ways recipes are undermining your cooking

The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity

Does Commercial Zoning Increase Neighborhood Crime?

A village amid skyscrapers: how long can Kuala Lumpur's enclave hold out?

Arkansas' Ten Commandments Monument Lasted Less Than 24 Hours (Does this man have a fund for his legal defense?)

Trump Can't Reverse the Decline of White Christian America

Trump's environmental rollbacks are hitting major roadblocks

Republicans increasingly say colleges have negative impact on U.S. (This explains so much)

Iranian women spark debate by defying hijab rule in cars

When Anxiety or Depression Masks a Medical Problem

Slaves no more, but freedom brings new struggles

Russia steps up spying efforts after election

‘Category 5 hurricane’: White House under siege by Trump Jr.’s Russia revelations

Election to obstruction: The many tentacles of the Trump-Russia investigation

Civilians shouldn’t have to de-escalate police

How severe, ongoing stress can affect a child's brain ("A 2009 study found that adults with six or more adverse childhood experiences died nearly 20 years earlier than those with none.")

Comments

[zesty_pinto]

Got to be honest: if people can't handle grasshoppers, I can only imagine how they'd feel about Chinese roach farms.

I mean, I am aware of the history of their usefulness too though, as I was oft told that in old days, roach tea was an immunity booster back in the old days of New Orleans. It'll take some time for me to get over that though.

[johwee]

I wonder if the urban farmer guy had anything to do with the repainting of the giant water tower. They changed it earlier this year to declare Sacramento the Farm to Fork Capital, but it used to be City of Trees. Caused a whole stink, cause they changed it without telling anyone.

[james]

Tell her you had a coupon! ;-)

[conuly]

Shoot, too late.

[siderea]

When Anxiety or Depression Masks a Medical Problem

This article would make me more furious if I hadn't exhausted myself spending all day helping a family member with an effectively untreated anxiety disorder through the most challenging day of her life.

Therapists aren't doctors. Therapists have little to no leverage with doctors. When doctors refuse to take patients medical conditions seriously, there is approximately fuck-all therapists can do about it. Telling therapists it is their job to suspect medical causes to psychiatric symptoms is simultaneously needless, because we all do it, and utterly pointless, because then there's nothing we can do about it except write a letter and pin it to the patient's sweater before sending them to their doctor – which letter the doctor will probably completely ignore because it was writen by a mere therapist.

In Massachusetts, we are generally, by insurance companies, and certainly by Mass Medicaid, required to contact all patients' MDs and ask them to let us know if there's anything physical going on that might explain or exacerbate the patients' psychiatric presentation. They regularly don't. They regularly just never reply to the letter, or fail to do even the most rudimentary checks.

It also seems to me, in my experience both professional and personal, that non-psychiatric physicians tend to be completely oblivious to psychiatric symptoms especially as signs of other disease processes.

RIGHT NOW, I am working with a PCP of a patient who has developed a psychotic disorder. One of the most venerable hypotheses about the development of schizophrenias is that they have something to do with the endocrine system – because the age of onset for men is adolescence, and the ages of onset for women are adolescence and menopause. Since the patient is not in a life stage characterized by fluctuating sex hormones, but the patient has a history of endocrine problems... I had to nudge the PCP that psychosis can be a sign that something could be changing in the patient's hormone levels. AFAIK, until I explained this hypothesis to him, he'd never heard of that idea. It certainly hadn't occurred to him on his own to check in on the patient's hormone levels, which haven't been tested in 18+mo.

It's really, really, really not the job of a master's level therapist to tell a PCP "this symptom suggests you should check the patient for testicular cancer".

[archangelbeth]

*fistbumps*

My fanaticism is Thyroid Conditions. It's entirely possible that my maternal grandfather's death -- and prior dementia -- was untreated hypothyroidism. Undiagnosed, unsuspected, because he was a dude...

*sends supportive thoughts for at least getting the PCP to look at things*

[siderea]

OH GOD THE HYPOTHYROIDISM STORIES I COULD TELL.

[stardreamer]

Re toxic childhood stress: The toxic stress theory has become mainstream, but there are skeptics, including Tulane University psychiatrist Dr. Michael Scheeringa, an expert in childhood PTSD. Scheeringa says studies supporting the idea are weak, based mostly on observations, without evidence of how the brain looked before the trauma.

What if the hypothesis really is wrong, and we end up helping thousands of kids have better home environments FOR NOTHING?

(IOW, this is something we should be doing anyhow, whether or not it has medical implications further down the road.)

[conuly]

Well, yeah. City of Trees is a much better name.

[conuly]

So this article should definitely have been directed at oblivious doctors, not therapists?

[archangelbeth]

Ooo, stories! (Here, here's mine! So, like, my mom -- having no actual medical care because finances hahahahah -- was being a lab rat for various medical studies, for money, and apparently one of the preliminary tests happened to also test thyroid (presumably to exclude thyroid conditions). She reports that the lab people called her up and were practically crawling through the phone to make sure that she made a doctor's appointment. She says the doctor saw her results (she forgets the number but thinks it was three digits (!!!!)) and asked her how she was walking and not in a hypothyroid coma.

She nagged me to get tested, which I eventually did -- having written off every symptom as Something Else for probably over a decade -- and I was a "mere" TSH 10.8. Now I am a fanatic!)