Many furry thanks to Diana who provided fresh, homemade, catnip toys to Kit and Kat!

So. Depression, blah blah blah, upped my meds, blah blah blah.

Same old song and dance there.

What’s new is that Thursday I have an appointment to see if we can figure out what the hell happened to put me in the ER Monday night.

Yes, I feel fine. I felt fine Monday night actually. But I’d like to make sure that this incident was an aberration and not something that is going to need further inquiry.

Also, after following the various medical trials and tribulations of my friend Shawn, I am very glad that I have excellent health care providers, and live in an area where there are a variety of doctors–both general practice and specialists–that I can see.

Sure you don’t wanna move to Morgantown Shawn?

It’s Wednesday, so it’s time for word association.

In honor of my adventures Monday night, today’s word is: emergency

I was looking for a new cookies recipe to try, and when I ran across this one, I remembered that I’d frozen some blueberries this summer, so that meant I had to make the recipe, right?

The recipe was straightforward, however, the cookies took longer than expected to bake, and although they are delicious, they’re sticky and fall apart when you pick them up. But they are really really good, so I’m going to play with the cookie size and baking times to see if I can get things to turn out better.

And definitely use the lemon oil–the lemon flavor makes these cookies.

Blueberry Hill Oatmeal Cookies
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp lemon oil
2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup toasted coconut
1/3 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp salt
1 cup semi-frozen blueberries

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Blend butter and sugars. Add egg, vanilla, and lemon oil. Add baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

Fold in oats, then coconut, then flour.

By hand, fold in blueberries.

Scoop 2 tbsp balls of dough on baking sheets, at least 3 inches apart (the cookies spread a lot).

Bake 14 minutes.

Cool on the cookie sheets for 10 minutes, then finish cooling on a wire rack.

As I said, they were very delicious, but extremely sticky, and completely fell apart. I’ll have to play with the recipe to see if I can get the next batch to hold together better.

From A Passion for Baking by Marcy Goldman

Spent the weekend making Christmas cookies (most of which are frozen/refrigerated in dough form).

Any requests before I finish up next weekend?

For those who may use and RSS feed for this place (there are legions of you I’m sure), I’ve been tweaking the layout for the site.

I’ve added a temporary snowfall, which was a lot of fun to create I must admit, and I created a new set of banner headers. Refresh and you’ll see a new header (Michael created that php file for me a couple years ago, and is willing to share it if anyone is interested in it.)

All the photos in the headers are mine, and all the manipulations are mine.

This is one of those songs.

Yes, Kit really is that much smaller than Kat.

I came across an article discussing at the results of a study of antidepressants.

The study found that the anti-depressant Paxil (and in theory all SSRIs) do more than alleviate the patient’s depression, it found that the anti-depressant actually changed the personality of those taking the drug.

In the study, people who took Paxil (paroxetine), a selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), had a drop in neuroticism, which is a tendency toward emotional instability and negative mood. They also had an increase in extraversion, which is a tendency toward outgoingness, compared to similarly depressed people taking placebo.

As someone who takes anti-depressants, am I unsure how I feel about this.

The drugs I am changing may well be changing my entire personality, and not just alleviating my depression? Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

Part of me is disturbed by the idea of a personality change, but the greater part of me enjoys being more outgoing, and I definitely prefer being emotionally stable to the alternative. (I’m prone to mood swings anyway, and if they annoy me, I’m sure they’re far worse for those around me.)

So emotional stability is a good thing, and for me, an increase in extroversion is a good thing. But is it possible someone could decide that introversion itself is something that should be treated? Would it be acceptable to treat someone with an SSRI because they are introverted, even if they aren’t depressed? Would an SSRI even affect the introversion of someone who was not depressed?

As usual, I have no answers, only more questions. But for me, I’m pleased with the effect that the anti-depressant I am taking has upon both my mood and personality, so I’ll take that as a good thing.

New poll today – best Christmas song. This does not include hymns or carols, but rather the songs you hear on the radio.

But I’ll take comments for hymns and carols.

What does it say about me that upon seeing the following in my Inbox:

I immediately thought, I hated HIGHLIGHTS! Why do I want a radio station for it?

You should know the rules by now.

Today’s word: code

I’ve learned something new! MUAHAHAHA!

I’ve modified the search resultsof my library database search so that for most search results, you can sort the results by clicking on the heading.

If you aren’t a geek, you’ll want to go and play with the search, rather than read than read the code bits that follow.

I got that using “switch”

if(isset($_GET[‘sort’]))
{
switch($_GET[‘sort’])
{
case ‘a’:
$order_by = LastName ASC, FirstName, Series, Year’;
$a = “{$_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’]}?sort=b”;
break;

case ‘b’:
$order_by = ‘LastName DESC, FirstName, Series, Year’;
$a = “{$_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’]}?sort=a”;
break;

default:
$order_by = ‘LastName, FirstName, Series, Year’;
$sort = ‘a’;
break;
}

$sort = $_GET[‘sort’];
} else {
$order_by = ‘LastName, FirstName, Series, Year’;
$sort = ‘a’;
}

Isn’t that nice?

But even better, I managed to get a more accurate sort for my “title” results. I got it to ignore a, an, and the when they start a book title. Which means the title results are now truly alphabetical.

ORDER BY trim(LEADING ‘The ‘ FROM trim(LEADING ‘A ‘ FROM trim(LEADING ‘An ‘ FROM Title))) DESC

Isn’t that lovely?

You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to find that. Most of what I came across wanted me to modify the book title to place the definite articles at the end of the title followed by a comma, or in a separate column, or even create a separate column for sorting, all of which were overkill for what I wanted.

But trim(LEADING ‘The ‘ FROM trim(LEADING ‘A ‘ FROM trim(LEADING ‘An ‘ FROM X))) DESC worked like a charm.

Michael made bourbon balls this weekend (I helped). The thing about bourbon balls is you need to make them ahead of time and let them sit. We usually make them around Thanksgiving, but that didn’t work out this year.

Bourbon Balls
1 box Vanilla wafers
1 cup confectioners sugar
1 cup chopped nuts
3 tbsp corn syrup
1/2 cup bourbon
3 tbsp cocoa
1 tbsp espresso powder
Confectioners powder and/or cocoa powder

Crush the vanilla wafers.

Dump all the ingredients together in a mixing bowl. Mix until you have a dark brown gooey mass.

Allow mixture to stand for several minutes. This is a good time to make the second batch of “dough”.

Form dough into small balls. Roll balls in powdered sugar. Place bourbon balls into waxed paper lined tin, placing a layer of waxed paper between each layer.

Place tins aside for several weeks.

In theory, you can use stale/toasted cake instead of vanilla wafers, but I never have stale cake on hand.

I’m serious about setting them aside for several weeks. They’ll be much much better if you wait.