I called my best friend today to wish her a happy birthday.  She said that I was the first one to wish her a happy birthday (other than family) and was glad to hear from me.  I asked her how her day had been, and she said that she had to work today.  She said her feelings were hurt because last week one of her co-workers had a birthday and the co-workers threw a party for her, but no one at work acknowledged her birthday today at all.  I felt really badly about that because she is a really good person and does not deserve to have her feelings hurt like that.

Goodness knows I’m getting tired of hearing “the sky is falling” messages from people about how using cell phones is bad for you.  For years people have been trying to link cell phone usage with brain cancer, and now they are trying to link it with decreased fertility in men?  Good grief!  Get over it already!  If there is decreased fertility in men, where exactly are they holding their cell phones?

My sister sent me a link to a story on a news site that she likes to read about a story of some Danish college students who were kicked off of Facebook because they had documented with photographs (posted on the web) themselves cooking and eating a cat.  They claimed that they were doing this to protest the way that people eat animals in general, and that their cat was a feral cat killed by a farmer who was trying to control the number of cats on his land, but their efforts created such a huge outrage that they ended up getting kicked off of Facebook.

I know that there are some cultures that eat cats (and dogs) routinely, but those are two animals that I cannot imagine myself eating on purpose.  If I could arrange my life so that I was a vegetarian I would do so, but my life is a little too complicated for that right now.

In this area, summer ends on Labor Day. So a lot of people go all out and have huge weekend parties or last ditch getaway weekends to the ocean beaches, the Bay, the rivers or even lakes. It’s all about getting to a large body of water and swimming, boating, and fishing.

Friends of mine have a little cabin on the river about 150 miles south of here. They were nice enough to invite me and a couple of our friends to come down on the Labor Day holiday weekend and camp out. I’m thinking about it!

I was quite surprised and disappointed recently to learn that the people who are receiving Medicaid to help pay for their medical expenses cannot get Medicaid to pay for mental health expenses. I don’t understand the logic behind the reasoning of Medicaid not paying for mental health issues when it seems to me that so many people are suffering from poverty because of their mental health issues. When I watch television shows; it could be a news program or it could be an episode of Law & Order or Criminal Minds or some other type of television show related to crime it seems that so many of the people that are committing the crimes are poverty stricken and suffer from mental illness.  I have several close friends and even have family members that are struggling with emotional and mental problems that they can certainly benefit from receiving some kind of mental therapy that they can’t afford to get.  Paying for therapy is just not an option for them.  I am sure that a lot of people would be upset with me if I suggested that Medicaid pay for these kinds of treatments because that would probably mean that income taxes would be raised to pay for those treatments; but I think that in the long run, and society in general, would benefit if these people got the treatments they needed.