I was reading this site about some Christmas urban legend which later told of some real holiday trivia from Japanese adoption of western holidays. The Buffalo News is even featured as a source on this article in snopes.

As you'd expect in a country where less than 1% of the population is Christian (the rest is primarily Shinto or Buddhist), Christmas is a purely secular occasion, with shops and businesses remaining open for the day ... The elimination of the religious aspects of Christmas and its hyper-commercialization have led to some unique (and, to us, bizarre) ways of celebrating it ... What we do find unusual is a custom of young couples exchanging presents of expensive jewelry, heading out to high-priced hotels, and being directed by scantily-clad female elves to rooms complete with Christmas trees, where the lovebirds spend their Christmas Eve in romantic bliss. The co-optation of familiar Christmas figures - both secular and religious - in the service of mass merchandising has produced some rather curious blendings: Colonel Sanders dressed in a Santa suit (as KFC tried strenuously to promote fried chicken as the "traditional" Christmas meal) ... Santa in a graveyard accompanied by the Virgin Mary on broomstick, elves plastered on sake, and a Christmas revue featuring "stripping nuns and three lecherous Wise Men."

I slept though it pretty much the whole thing. I just thought if I kept on sleeping I wouldnt have to deal with he stomach drama, which kind of, a tiny bit, improved.

Bye bye, little tooth part
Then this morning I woke up after a 20 hour nap because my back was starting to hurt from sleeping and was brushing my teeth when a part of my tooth fell out on a sunday. Now there is a hole in the tooth and new
little pieces keep falling out.



I just hope it can hold off until tomorrow before it really falls apart because no dentist seems to be open today. You can see from the picture that not much of the tooth is real. Most of it is the white filling. I had all my amalgam metal fillings taken out and replaced with the white ones in 1997 in Canada. They said it had a 5-10 year life span so I guess I am about to have a dental emergency considering I had 12 fillings replaced at that time. Maybe I should have just kept the freakin metal ones but I couldn't get over the idea of mercury getting into my body.



It's all my fault for the amount of candy I ate as a child. Like I used to (pre-stomach thing) eat a lot of candy as an adult - but it was way worse as a child.

Where should the chemicals go?
What does everyone else do with all their chemicals? When we bought the house we inherited tons of chemicals, half empty, rusted crap, etc. I tried to put them all together in two places of the garage and basement but really it seems dangerous. Especially the one in the garage, I took them all and put them in two plastic totes.

I kept meaning to deal with it. Once we actually brought them with us to the dump but they didn't take them there. So I searched and found this erie county government site that isn't very up to date. Apparently, the next scheduled drop off day is Sept 8th, 2007. I am going to call tomorrow and find out about the next one.

Radon Gas
While I was on the site I found info about radon . I am uploading their education video to youtube so that it is a badnwidth friendly more acessible version instead of the 85Mb mpeg on the erie county site. I will post it here when it is done.

Did you know that radon is common in NYS and in Western New York.



It is an odorless, colorless gas that comes out of the soil and into your house. Luckily, in the city it looks like it isn't much of a problem but way out in some suburbs and rural areas it looks dangerous. Especially, marilla - I mean I wouldn't even want to live in East Aurora.

So I call the doctors office again and get to talk to the secretary again. She tells me they are going to put me on Asacol 3 pills/3 times a day. So I call back and ask if I could also take a gluten or lactose intolerance test and she says, "Oh we don't do that here" So I ask her where and she doesn't know. So I call my "primary care" physician and he says there is no way they could have cme up with IBS from a CAT scan. SO SOMEONE IS FUCKING LYING - WHO IS IT?

He suggests I go to see the GI doctor. Which is exactly who I was looking for when I called the first doctor (a colon /rectal specialist) and asked him for a referal. He told me to just come to him and thats how I ended up in CT scan land. Now I have an appointment set for Feb 5th. By then I should be dead or crazy.

I guess I will just take the medicine and see if it helps. (e:terry) says it doesn't seem dangerous.

Well good news is they didn't say it was cancer but it is IBS or irritable bowel syndrome. What the fuck does that really mean. We don't know what is causing it but you bowel is irritated. No fucking surprise considering I have been complaining about that for about a month straight.

My favorite part of the wiki article

Misdiagnosis
Anecdotal accounts exist of poor patient outcomes due to treatable causes of diarrhea being mis-diagnosed as IBS. Common examples include infectious diseases, celiac disease,[5] and lactose intolerance.[6]

None of which I have been tested for. Still no stool sample, no bloodwork, no lactose intolelrance test, no test for celliac.

I guess I will go on one of those crazy nothing but rice and vegetable diets and adds stuff back into my diet to see if it help. Right now basically everything I eat goes right through me after getting a little bit bloody somewhere. Ya, gross I know. There is no consistency to anything I eat and everything makes my stomach ache.

I seriously am going to go crazy. And the lack of sufficient bathroom facilities at my work make it way worse.

I am thinking it is time to switch to a natural doctor for a bit and see how that goes. At this point I am willing to try anything to make it stop.

The molson ice hot water 40oz
Last night I made a hot water bottle for my stomach out of a molson 40oz beer bottle. It really helped. Maybe I should market them with little beer cozies?