You just know that we will be hearing more about this.  I just wonder if the current state of the world economy will hamper the launch of this endeavour, or if it has already pushed things back at all?

Btw, the name Jukari supposedly comes from a world dialect and means “to play”. Huh, you learn something (or two or three) new everyday…

What is Vivimind?

Vivimind is a Nutraceutical, or memory protection therapy that is available over the counter as a pill, but it is not available in the United States - yet.  Vivimind has been available in Canada, the country where it was developed,  for a few months now but has not yet received the necessary clearances from the FDA to be sold to the public in the US.  It was originally intended to be marketed as a preventative Alzheimer’s medication but did not pass all of the necessary hurdles after the testing trials. As a result, its makers (now known as Ovos Natural health)decided to remarket it as an over the counter product and release it for sale in North America.  As I said, it is currently available in Canada and has been sold through various chains in their pharmacy sections.  In short, Vivimind is a pill that is based on a naturally occurring ingredient called homotaurine. Homotaurine is known to bind to beta-amyloid (also known as A-beta) proteins and subsequently reduce the deposition of these A-beta proteins in the Human brain.  It is believed by many that over time the excessive build up of these A-beta proteins is detrimental to the human brain and that excessive build up can lead to the death of Neurons in the brain which ultimately is a precursor of Alzheimer’s.
Obviously the potential of anything that could offer a solution to this problem would be big news and that is why Vivimind could one day soon be big news.  We just have to wait and see.

This may seem obvious and this whole post may seem like more of a public service announcement than a blog, but recent experience has me wondering just how many people are aware that - especially during these tougher economic times, a lot of money can potentially be saved by simply maintaining your existing appliances instead of just giving up on them and moving on and buying a new one? Courtesy of your local department store, there are always shelves full of shiny new things available for you to buy for your home, but is it really always necessary?

Our own recent experience is with a well known brand of kitchen appliance that is widely used in the home. My wife has been itching to start using her trusty Rival crock pot again but when she hauled it out she was reminded why she has not used it in a while: it has a broken lid.

This isn’t the first time her plans to slow cook have been foiled: this is probably the second or third time she had pulled out the rival slow cooker and realized that it was unusable in its present shape; like each time before, she went and put it back up on the shelf thinking that it would be dealt with (ie thrown out) at a later date. Thats the thing though: you don’t want to throw out a perfectly good appliance but you are not motivated enough to find a way to get it back up and running … or cooking … or vacuuming … or whatever it is it should be doing instead of just sitting in the closet or on a shelf.

Well I decided that it was time to make an effort so I went online and did a quick search with Google and found a few useful sites that had information on which Rival Crock Pot replacement parts are actually out there and available for you to purchase from various sites including the official Crock Pot site . A cut a long story short, by going and finding this information online we were able to order a replacement crock pot lid for our crock pot slow cooker and pay less than a quarter of what a completly new rival crock pot would have cost us! ($10 instead of $50 or $60) Since slow cooking is an economical and convenient way to prepare ameal in the first place, it is nice to find a way to save more money on top of that, too. I would think that you can pretty much apply this principle of timely maintenance to many other appliances in the home, so why don’t we do this more often? Maybe deep down we all need something shiny and new once in a while…

Monday, November 24th, 2008,

well I got my assignment finished in time (somehow) and handed it in this morning in class. i miss my husband. He isn’t away somewhere working - he is in the picture but he has been working so hard that I hardly ever see him. He’s been doing almost all of the cleaning and cooking. My 16 year-old daughter makes my lunch and is doing the laundry.

What a great family i have. You can’t beat having cheap labour and a lack of child labour laws around the home; okay, that was in bad taste, I admit. One of the other women in my class told me how her 14 year-old girl mostly sits around on the computer and does nothing to help the family. i am so glad that my family isn’t lazy like that. Well i have to take a shower and get ready for bed; tomorrow I have my first day of practicum during the day and then have to work at the senior facility ( a five hour evening shift). i wish i didn’t have to go but we need a few extra bucks to pay for my January tuition.

This might be the last update/entry in my journal for sometime: i can see myself just getting to busy to keep it up the way things are going heading towards Christmas. etc. we shall see.

my husband beat me to bed. ‘Good night, Dear - what? ….sorry, honey not tonight - I got a homework headache.’

The things I have to say no to sometimes…

Saturday, November 22, 2008,

It is the weekend before my practicum and I still have an assignment due. I have almost finished it but haven’t been able to touch it in the last couple of days because of the necessary studying for the final exams. We were granted an extension but i still haven’t had enough time to get it all done. Just not enough hours in the day, I guess. Sometimes I even wake up at 3 in the morning to finish my work. this is not ahealthy practice and i do not recommend it to anyone: to bed at midnight, up at three in the morning. The quality of the assignment that I have completed so far is way below my usual standards. I kind of regret having to hand it in when I still feel this way about it, but it has to be marked before I am allowed to go to practicum in a couple of days. I cant help but wonder though if this essay is really going to affect any of my skills while at practicum. I dont think so. They tell us when faced with an unreasonable work load to just say ‘No’. I wonder if anyone else is laughing quietly inside at the irony of that instruction?

Friday, November 20th, 2008,

On of our head instructors handed out our practicum assignment locations today; I wasn’t able to get my first choice of practicum location. This is a big deal for me because of location. in fact I got one that will make my commute almost three hours long - one way! To get to it on the North shore, I will have to take the West Coast express Train, the seabus, and then a bus up the hill to the facility. That is a lot of transfers to make there and back everyday. The instructor didn’t even consider my request for re-asignment. Gee, thanks. Even though I know people in the class who live closer to that North Shore location they were not assigned there. It makes no sense. Why didn’t they make the location requests by postal code or something? It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not so great to have an instructor that doesn’t seem to have any empathy or understanding. It’s like 50 km from my house - I don’t even have a car. I used to but not anymore. Why not? i had to sell it in order to qualify to get a student loan. Yes that is definitely ironic. i don’t even want to get started on how the Government expects you to cash in all of your RSPs before you can qualify for a student loan.

Thursday, November 20th, 2008.

So three of my nursing exams down, and only four more to go. Yeah. like that is not a lot to prepare for. Really, it feels like I never stop preparing in this program but I am not complaining because I had an idea of what to expect going in. I can’t wait for the practicum, i will finally be able to use these new skills that I pride myself on. i can’t believe that some of these students will be working with real people: they are barely passing their skills testing… Really, some of them are so sloppy with their skills. I sometimes wonder if we all are not really ready for this step yet. I am thinking this because of the short amount of time we have been given to learn so much. For example, we had a two hour session on wound care. Really, we need more time than that, we’re going to be bandaging a lot of people from what I am hearing and more time practising would have been desirable, but oh well.

Anyway it’s still exciting just to think about going out and getting even this experience.

I hope to spend some time with my five year old tonight. I give him 15 minutes to hug and talk about his day and then I launch right back into my four hours of evening study for A & P. My eight year old asked me to take a day off of work to play with him. I declined telling him that Mommy just didn’t have the time right now. Later i cried just thinking about what I had had to say to my son.

I told myself that there would have to be some sacrifices to the time I spend with my family when I started this nursing program, but when it actually came to following through with those decisions it has been so hard to do.

I ran into the two girls that had been fighting over their group project marks last week; I told them it wasn’t worth arguing over their assignment like they did. I told them about my situation with my two partners and how they pressured me into giving them a decent mark or evaluation on the project for the team aspect of it. They insisted that they were not really fighting and that it was really just a friendly discussion. Well, it was the loudest “friendly discussion” that I ever remember seeing. I wonder if they would have been saying the same thing to me last week? If we don’t have another partner assignment this semester I won’t be too upset, lol.

The room that we sit in fluctuates from 30 degrees celsius to below 15 degrees celsius every 20 minutes or so; we have to put our sweaters on and off as if we were all older adults suffering from the pangs of menopause. (ugh) We finished class around 2:00pm today. At the end of class some more exam marks were handed to us: again I pulled off adecent mark - God only knows how. Lucky for me my Mother is a nurse and was able to tutor me alittle for this program. We also got our Ethics assignment papers handed back to us today. I despised that assignment because I had been stuck with two dud partners who didn’t seem to understand the assignment and didn’t seem all that willing to try and understand. I ended up writing 95% of the thing myself. One of the girls gave me her ten sentence contribution - thanks. The other girl? She conveniently made herself ‘unavailable’ most of the time and didn’t end up contributing. I only did the assignment for them to make sure I at least got a mark. I can’t help but think the whole lack of contribution from my partners (who will still get a mark) is a blatant example of unethical practice in the class. Oh well.

When we got out assignment back, the two slackers swooped down like seagulls to se what kind of grade they got. Wish they had shown that much motivation earlier! When most everyone had left, I overheard two partners from another group who were arguing loudly; One said, “how dare you evaluate me so low!” The other replaied back,” if it was up to me, I would have given you a 1 but I was generous! Now you complain and throw this in my face but you didn’t help the group at all!”

Hmm, I think I handled things in my group pretty well in comparison…