I Know, I Know, My Blog Has Turned Into a Vlog

It's just that I'm too tired to post and vloging is the quickest and easiest way to get posts up everyday, in one day. A well thought out written post could take an hr, while posting a vlog takes like 5mins. I can really bang them out. Sunday's through tomorrow's posts were all posted on Saturday. I'm glad a lot of them are captioned for my Deaf/HOH readers.

I'm taking a quick break from vloging to bring you a bit of AWESOMNESS, because it is a short-ish bit of news.

At my internship last week I started a project that's developmentally appropriate for elementary school kids. It involved pulling pictures of disabled people (tried to keep to kids as much as possible) out in the world doing active productive things. I got things like wheelchair basketball, a young woman with down syndrome in a chef's uniform (complete with food she just made, in a professional kitchen), I was looking for 40 in all. The thing was, I didn't even get half way through when I realized my pictures were incredibly biased towards physical/visible disabilities--a few wheelchairs, a kid with a blind cane, another with a prosthetic arm climbing playground equipment, but I was clearly lacking in representation of invisible disabilities.

It is rather hard to find pictures of invisible things. So I had to get creative and took a picture of 2 girls taking a test, putting the caption "Kids with learning disabilities sometimes need extra time to finish tests." I still had trouble with autism in particular, dead set on staying away from the ribbon.

What I did in the end was go over to amazon and pull off covers of children's books. Taking Autism to School and Let's Learn with Teddy About Epilepsy. Me being me, of course I want to include something about bipolar. I didn't find anything that sufficed when shrunk to 1.4in X 1.4in, but what I DID find was ELI, THE BIPOLAR BEAR, which I am not using, but still, HOW COOL! I am waiting very impatiently for it to arrive via interlibrary loan, and alerted my shrink that she should buy. It's pretty new.

Anyone peruse it? What'd you think?

Screw you WBAL!

I don't own a TV so last night I went online to check out the predicted snow fall for today (seriously, 80in isn't enough for a winter?) in the hopes that it won't impact my trip to Annapolis for a bunch of budget hearings, and found a video featured lower down on the main page of the local NBC station, Coming to Terms with Depression. Hmmm... I thought, and clicked. The segment was an interview with author/blogger Therese Borchard who just released a book that has the same title as her blog, Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression & Anxiety and Making the Best of Bad Genes. I so have to order this book. It sounds like a keeper. And yes reporter, back to back blizzards CAN impact the "winter blues." Everyone that made it to OOO on Friday was really feeling it, including me.

WBAL, why won't you allow me to embed your video so that I can share it with the world? And WBAL, why won't you provide a transcript of your video below it? You're discriminating against Deaf/HOH viewers.

I will begrudgingly post the link to the video as I think the interview is great and could help some readers. http://www.wbaltv.com/video/22562424/

I did a youtube search in the hopes that some viewer uploaded the interview there, but nope. Here is another interview segment from some other station.

Search Therese Borchard on youtube. She has A LOT of GREAT videos on there that she shot in front of her fireplace. My next few posts will be my comments on some of them.