Dravet's syndrome paper...

I will admit... I had a bit of an Ah Ha moment last week writing my rough draft... But it wasn't the kind you would think, or even the kind you would necessarily like... Mine was a realization that maybe I should have picked an easier topic. Easier in the sense that it didn't mean so much to me and now to my neighbor as she has been a huge help, but also now has high expectations. You see... Now that I picked this topic and have committed to it, I am realizing that I care WAY too much about how it turns out! I should have picked an easier topic where I would have only have had to worry about my grade and making sure I did everything I needed to get the grade I want. Now I have to also figure out how to make my paper "worthy" of the topic! I want to do this thing right... But the amount of pressure I'm putting on myself over it is instead only making it harder to do! AHHHRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving week to you all!
With this time of year upon us, I would just like to take a moment and bring everyone's thoughts and prayers to the military members and their families, especially those who are deployed or overseas. This is a great time of year for most people, but when you are missing part of your family it can be especially challenging. My sister in law right now is at home with a 6 year old and a 3 year old who are both missing their daddy, and she is missing her husband while playing the role of a single mother. He has been deployed to Africa since early spring and won't be back until almost next spring. I know how hard it can be to be the one that's away for the holdiays, but only now am I realizing what the families back home are going through.
This is also a tough time of year for those who have lost loved ones in the past year, so my thoughts and prayers are with you also. My Grandfather passed away 8 months ago now, and he was the rock of the family. We never realized how much until he was gone, but I know this is going to be a tough one for my Grandmother and all the kids, grandkids and great grandkids.
So to everyone that is having a challenging holiday... I wish you the best.

My little rant...

So... I am taking Food Safety and Microbiology as my other course right now and we were talking about some things that made me want to rant a little (and I did on the discussion board a little but need to get more out of my system I think.) We were talking about food safety of course, and it came up that people never used to do things like cook stuffing separately from the turkey to make sure it was cooked, they just stuffed the bird the night before, stuck it in the fridge, then cooked it in the morning. But it brought me back to an earlier discussion about why we can't do things the way they did "in the good old days" anymore... Historically that might have actually been safer than it is now (even despite better stoves and whatnot) because ingredients in that stuffing were probably safer. Historically ingredients were grown and sold locally, at least compared to the global mass markets today. Things were somewhat kept in the area, so cost and production were not as high because demand wasn't as high. But now that your product can be shipped anywhere, it is causing a greater demand for it, so it puts more pressure on the producer to --produce! Money becomes the bottom line and with it that productivity. So things like cheap chemical fertilizers and pesticides are used that would never have gotten near food going to your neighbors, and contamination and foodborne illnesses are much more common. Not only are they more likely because of this, but the outbreak of illness from contamination is much more widespread because that celery that you made got put in people's salads in one part of the world, sent to a company that made the stuffing in another and into soup cans somewhere else. Now not only is your ingredient itself causing illness, but everything it got put into and distributed as! That stuffing you put in the bird the night before just like your mother and grandmother is suddenly not as safe as when they did it... So what I said in my discussion board brought it back full circle... If you want to be able to do things the way it used to be done "in the good old days" then you need to start that good old process much earlier in the chain...

OK off my soapbox again and for the final time tonight. I just needed to say it somewhere, and also needed a blog post for this week, so what better way to kill two birds with one stone as it were? Good luck if you actually read it and I hope some of it made sense to someone! ;-)

Unit 4 Plagiarism Topic

So... Don't get me wrong, I am all about giving people credit where credit is due. If you came up with the idea, I definitely want to make sure other people know it was yours and know where to find what all you said about it. But... I have always had a hard time with the definition, or lack of definition for what is considered "common knowledge". That has always been the tricky area for me. Especially in the age of the internet where you can research one topic on a hundred sites in minutes, it can become sticky trying to keep straight what came from where and what just came from your own brain. When you think about it, absolutely everything you know you learned from somewhere... So at what point does it become your own knowledge? After you have known it for a day? A week? Month? Or maybe just once you don't know where you learned it? But even then it should be cited if it came from somewhere right? Even if you don't remember where? And what if a dozen different sources are giving you the same information? Does that make it common knowledge? Or do you just have to pick one to cite? What if you are putting pieces from all those sites together to form your thoughts? Then are they really your thoughts or do you have to cite all the sources that provided the pieces to your mental puzzle? I understand that there are some things that are obvious one way or the other. The sun is hot, that is common knowledge, specific quotes or statistics must be cited. But what about everything in between?