TiVo can call you? I'm not a big manual reader. This is a complete surprise to me. I must investigate. I may have to marry TiVo.

I got left behind when my mom and dad went do Disney World without me when I was about 2. This was the week that has spawned stories of me trying to play cards with my aunt's neighbor's dog, and deciding that a metal pot was a swimming pool.

I think this clearly shows I was scarred.

But the only "left behind" that I really still have issues with (and my family makes fun of me for having issues with) is when my youngest brother was born. I was just turning six (I mean, like, the next day), and my parents drop me and my brother off at the baby-sitter's house (we don't usually have a babysitter, so this is not even someone I really know). I spent 3 days there while my Mom had my brother and recovered and my dad was himself admitted to another part of the hospital for a major flu bug.

The worst part? I had to share a bed with the baby-sitter's daughter. And the first night? Leading into my big, important sixth birthday? She wet the bed.

What did I get for my sixth birthday? Peed on.

Scarred.

Oh...my...god. I just found out -- I not only get to meet George Clooney, I get to have my picture taken with him. His Dad is running for Congress and George will be attending a fundraiser in DC. Organizations that have double maxed will get to send 3 people to attend a private reception -- who will get their picture taken with George! I am so freakin excited!

I would have, except my husband got it out first. I was tempted the other day to run that as a headline for a travel story about Namibia. I didn't since I would probably have been fired for using jackass in 58-point type in a family newspaper. The story was about snowboarding on sand. Didn't TAR do that one year somewhere? Or does it just sound like a good TAR activity?



I helped my older brother pack his stuff to run away one time, and apparently, I was very worried that my mother didn't seem at all concerned that he was leaving.

Nope, definitely not the only one - here's what I said at the time on my blog:

Expo '67! I was 3-1/2 when my family went. All I recall is riding the tram around the sphery thing because my sister (13 at the time, and charged with my care) wanted to stay in the air conditioning. I also met some kids in the campground whose mother(s) apparently took thalidamide.

Were the Detroit riots that summer too? Because I recall having problems coming back through the Windsor tunnel due to the riots. Yup, (Googled) it was that year.

I was five and all I remember is going to Trois Rivieres after Expo to visit my Dad's French Canadian air force buddy. His daughter took me out to play with the neighbourhood kids and I can remember playing hide and seek with them and thinking that they counted kind of funny since I didn't speak a word of French and they didn't speak a word of English.

ETA: I of course tell my friend who didn't get to go absolutely incredible stories about how wonderful it all was.

My parents left me at my grandmothers house in Quebec - my father's side of the family does not speak any English and I didn't learn any French until high school. I do remember teaching some of my cousins English swear words and them returning the favour, but that was when I was older. tabarnak!

Count me among those left behind during Expo 67. Mom and Dad took the oldest four (9, 12, 13, 15), and left the youngest three (2, 5, 6) kids at home with a sitter.

It's funny that you all are talking about this now, as I have recently finished scanning my dad's slides from this trip. I'm working on a family history project, scanning in about 750 slides my dad took from 1946-1973, so I can burn them on a CD or DVD and send copies to all the siblings.



Me too! Even though, in cat years, my "girls" are now much older than me, I still baby-talk them.

BoDiva



It's not quite like that. He can't call me, but I have him call TiVoHQ at the same time every day (4:15). Because I have a Series 2 TiVo box, I can log onto my account on tivo.com and add a program to record. Then he calls in at 4:15 and picks up my request to record a show, and when I get home, there it is waiting.

TiVo and I have an open relationship, because I'm still holding out for Phil!

I love Tivo so much that I'm seriously considering bidding on EBay for one of the plush Tivos. I don't even like stuffed animals but I want a stuffed Tivo of my very one.
One time I thought my Tivo was dying on me and I was about to hyperventilate. Luckily it turned out that the remote just needed new batteries. Now I can't even enjoy watching TV at a friend's house unless they have Tivo. I hardly ever watch live TV at all anymore - TAR is one of the few exceptions. It is soooo wonderful to be able to pause TAR and rewind something immediately to make sure you heard or saw what you thought you did.

ilurk, I had absolutely no idea that was possible.

Wow. Tivo's better than ever!

How exciting, M. Darcy, to meet George Clooney! When is this reception, and will you post a link to a picture for us all to admire?

Its the Sunday before TARCON and heh, I am sure that I will email a copy to every person that I have ever met in my life. Wow, George Clooney and Phil (if he attends of course) in the same week. Best Days of Atonement ever!

Be sure and tell him how much you loved K Street. Also be sure to have a snappy comeback when he says "So you're the one". You could say that you have a friend who really enjoyed Solaris (that would be me).

I was thinking of telling him that I am such a fan that I actually watched K Street. That is a sign of devotion. Of course, I will probably just be a pile of mush and not think of anything to say at all :-) Heh, I should write out a script and memorize it before hand.

Okay, please don't beat me, 'cause I'm not asking for the specifics, but what is the general date for TARCon (sqeeeee ™)? I am definitely getting a kitchen pass for this one and would like to make travel arrangements now. Hubby will understand, but there's no way his family (now my extended family) will. Cover story, anyone?

It's been said that the finale is Sept. 21 I think, but no official word about TARcon yet.

Uh...These people you know, just got back from a long vacation...and they’re having people over to watch all of their home movies.

Try this

" I'm in this focus group on the internet (well we could be one). I've been taking part in this thirteen week study about geography and sociology (not too much of a stretch). The last week is coming up at the end of September and a bunch of the participants are getting together in NYC for the evening. I'm thinking about going just to meet some of the people I've been dealing with for the last three months."

See it sounds perfectly reasonable when you phrase it that way...

ilurk, I have a Series 2! Oh gosh. I've gotta do this.

And MDarcy, melt all you like. George is so exceedingly warm (and charming). Envy.

You know, I never got the Tivo love until I started dating my fiance. He has one and I lurve it! Seriously, he is alllowed to bring his Tivo, big screen tv and sleep number bed when we move in together; pretty much everything else in the bachelor pad is getting donated to Goodwill.

I don't have a traumatic left-behind story. Although my parents dropped me off at my grandparents just before my younger brothers were born (fraternal twins). I was only 2.5 so I must have put up a fuss until my Papa gave me M&Ms. Then it was mom and dad, who? Heh! From then on, my parents had to bring M&Ms to lure me home with them when I'd been staying at my grandparents.

How very cool M. Darcy although a friend of mine met him at a dinner party and she said he was nice but odd. Make of that what you will. Still sounds fun! The only celebrity that I have had my picture taken with is Peter Forsberg (only hockey fans will know who that is)

But did you get your picture taken with Forsberg's spleen? 'Cause that's the true test of a fan. ;)

So you like the sleep number? I see the ads, and if Jamie Sommers says something, I believe it, but it seemed like a cheesy airbed gimmicky thing, but then they opened a store here and I'm all curious.

I'm so glad that I live 3 blocks from last year's tarcon locale. Although I may need an excuse to get out of work on time.

beezer Eww, no! Actually it was last Oct so said spleen was already removed. Personally I'm much more of a Broncos/NFL fan but hey, how often does a girl get the opportunity. Here's the picture if you are interested.

The Sleep Number ROCKS! Seriously, I thought it was pretty cheesy too until I slept on it. Plus as a moderate control-freak I love that I can adjust my side to EXACTLY the level of firmness that I like. This comes in particularly useful since the fiance apparently likes to sleep on something resembling a rock.

My parents told us if we wanted to run away, they would give us $20, but only if we promised not to come back. None of us ever tried.

I am also curious about the sleep number bed. We are sleeping on a futon, and I have had it.

Early saturday morning my husband woke me up to tell me there was a bat in the room. I mumbled something about tennis rackets and rolled over. He thought I ment hit it with the racket, which he decided was cruel (I ment trap it between two rackets and carry it outside). So he was running around trying to open the screens so it could fly out, but it turns out some of them don't open (we have lived here less then a year, and haven't tried to open them). I couldn't sleep through that, so I had to help. We found one that opened, shut the doors to the rooms we knew it wasn't in, and went back to sleep, except I can't sleep after being woken up too close to my weekday rising time. He seems to be gone.

Then later in the day I mowed a snake, and mortally wounded it.

I was never left behind for family trips, but my uncle is still sulking over my birth. He was returning home from Europe, and I was born early. My grandparents came to see me at the hospital and forgot to pick up their son at the airport. He brings it up on occasion and I like to point out that if he could travel around Europe on this own, surely he could get from the airport to where he had lived all his life!

Hee! Mom and I have Tivo antenna balls. I've never tried that calling ahead thing, may have to sometime after the Olympics when I go back to my regularly scheduled Tivoing.

The OH's mom sold sleep number beds until recently and we adore ours. For those skeptics it is nothing like an air mattress, it's like a mattress that is designed just for you. Even two people who have the same sleep number are sleeping on completely different beds, a 40 for a 100 pound person and a 40 for a 300 pound person are completely different.

I think I tried to run away once, my plan was to sleep on the box that held the electrical equipment that was in the alley behind the house. I gave up after about 10 minutes I think, my brother never even noticed I was gone.

Funny that Tivo has come up... I just bought a new hard drive and network adapter for mine. It's full of TAR related stuff I can't bear to delete. But soon I should have 120 hrs. or so of free space to fill. That's my only gripe about Tivo - I've got 4 hours of the Early Show, but I really only care about 10 minutes of that. I wish there was a way to delete part of a program, but as far as I know, it's all or nothing. I also just ordered "Hacking Tivo" from Amazon, maybe that will tell me how to do that. One Hack that did sound interesting was getting your caller ID to display on the TV. So geeky, and so not needed, but I think it'd be cool.

Attention NYC vicinity residents:

• TAR will air at 7 PM on Tuesday, August 17, due to a Yankee game at 8PM on Channel 2.
• TAR will air at its regularly scheduled time everywhere else, so no posting of anything that happens in the episode in any TAR thread until 11 PM EDT.

Happy TARsday, everyone!

And a Happy TARsday right back atcha, MamaTiger. (Oh, and check your e-mail.) Less than 12 hours to go until TAR. Is it weird that, every Tuesday, I start checking my watch about 8 in the morning and counting how many hours I have to go until 10:00 that night?

Not weird at all. I wake up in the morning and smile immediately. It's definitely the highlight of my week. And it doesn't matter what day of the week TAR is on; any day that TAR is on is a good day!

What I love the most is that I'm still not used to TAR being aired on Tuesdays so I usually forget until about halfway through the day and then, once I remember, I'm in a good mood all afternoon.

More thanks to WCBS for the 7pm start time again this week. Now my Olympic viewing will be unaffected.

I ran away once...wait...twice. The first time I went down to the crick (2 blocks from our house...duh!) and was going to sleep in the crook of a tree (it sounded cool). But I had taken my brother's bike with me and he really wanted it back. The second time....wait, that wasn't running away...that was why I ran away to the crick. Forget it!

I've had a really awful week, with a few highlights...I hope this week is better. Last Wednesday my Uncle Charlie died. So Friday I had to drive up to Chicago (2 1/2 hours) for the funeral. The highlight was that I got to bring my two nephews (7 and 4 1/2) home with me that night. Then on Sunday morning, my boyfriend, a veterinarian, called to tell me that he had had to put the dog I was fostering to sleep. I think I've mentioned Roady here before. He had a serious, serious case of heartworm. He'd made it through 6 weeks of treatment and then Sunday morning he threw a blood clot to his lungs and went into resperatory failure. Poor boy was only about 5 years old and had been fighting so hard for his life. Everyone at the clinic is upset and the office manager wants to put a statue in the new landscaping that they are doing in Roady's honor. On top of everything, my boyfriend had a horrible week at work and I barely got to see him all the week. Its amazing how much you can miss someone.

Awww, labral. That is so sad. My condolences to you on your losses. It's good that you saw your nephews, but I'm sorry it was under such sad circumstances. I hope you and your family are as OK as you can be.

Thank you so much for doing the hard, heartbreaking work of dog fostering. As someone with a rescue cat and a rescue dog, I deeply appreciate the love you and all the wonderful foster pet parents give to these animals. If it wasn't for people like you, I would never have known the love of Sophie and Sheila. I'm sorry Roady didn't make it. Heartworms are scary.

I hope this week is much better for you.

Hi, I'm a new TAR watcher, and am totally loving it. I have this nagging question that I can't think where to ask - the episode threads are so busy and full and it seems lame to just throw it out there, so instead I came here where everyone is so nice and chatty. I hope someone knows the answer. Can you take pain-killing medication during the race? I ask because of Marshall, obviously, and I figured you could take prescribed stuff for blood pressure or whatever, but I just kept thinking if he'd just taken a lot of Advil maybe there would have been less complaining and more racing? It might not have helped his particular issue, but if it's forbidden, that's a whole other thing.

Edited because I meant to add my love for TiVo, it being a fairly current topic here, and to ask bungle3358 about your harddrive addition - is this something you're doing yourself and could a not electronically smart person do the same?

Hi, alitris, and welcome to the insanity.

You can carry your own meds (OTC and Prescription), or there are doctors available who are with the Race Production team. The ATCs (season 4) said that the problem with having one of the Race doctors take a look at a problem is that they have the authority to pull you off the Race if they think it's bad enough.

labral, I'm sorry to hear about Roady. He made it almost to the end of the danger period, didn't he?

Advil is what is called a "threshold analgesic", which means that there is a point after which taking more will not add more pain-killing benefit. (Aspirin and Aleve are also threshold analgesics).

Knees are tricky, because it is so very hard to give them total rest, so dealing with knee pain usually has several components (besides rest and topical application of heat). First, of course, you try the threshold analgesics. If they don't touch the pain, you go after the cause of the pain, with reducing the stress on the knees in all the ways you can think of. You can also often get some relief from a cox-2 inhibitor, although only if the inflammation is of the sort that responds to such medications. You can often also relieve pain in the knees by retraining the body to have other parts provide more support for the knees (for example, strengthening the quads often helps a great deal, although it's tricky to strengthen quads without straining sore knees -- a qualified physical therapist can be quite helpful with this approach). Some people find acupuncture helpful, too. Once all that stuff has been tried, if a person is still in serious pain, there's no real choice other than opiates. However, if you are putting someone on a long-term opiate regimen, you need to be more careful than if you are simply dealing with acute pain.

In my experience, once a set of knees becomes so painful that its owner is walking as gingerly as Marshall was, no threshold analgesic is going to touch the pain. And most of the other things that might have helped were almost certainly out of the question. Unless he happened to bring some of those paste-on-your-body heating thingies. I take some with me when I travel, but if he had no experience with knee problems, he probably didn't pack any.

alitris, you definitly can take pain-killing medication on the race. The producers supply some medicines, but as TAR4's ATC Steve (I think) said over here, the racers may not want to take something that dopes them up if it also slows them down.

(That thread is an excellent resource for your type of question there. Many cool and generous Ghosts of Races Past -- I mean, former racers -- check in and answer whatever they can. Welcome to the best show on air!)

labral sorry for your losses. Both human & puppy. My friends have fostered & rescued, and I think that is an awesome thing. Every time I see (which is daily) these over priced designer dogs in my 'hood, I just want to scream that there are so many pups (& kitties) who need a good home. Hope things pick up for you.

labral, sorry about Roady, and your uncle. Heartworms are awful buggers, aren't they? (Excuse me while I go give my pup a big wraparound hug...)



Expound, please. Does this mean no added benefit within a given timeframe? For instance, 800mg of Advil within 12 hours or something? So if you over-medicate yourself inside a given time you are doing more harm than good by risking damaging other stuff? I ask because as a migrainer I look for ways of heading the barstards off at the pass.

Re the tarcon date....a Tuesday, huh? Why was I thinking a weekend? Oh well, now I'll need a story for the boss, too. I'm thinking I can tell the family it's a writing seminar with an author I'd really like to meet. They've known me to travel to Key West to find a signed first edition, so they might just roll their eyes at that one and let it go.

Well. Those are the most exhaustive and helpful answers I could have asked for. Thank you all!

The only occaison that I know of where it was mentioned that a Racer was placed on preseciption medication during the Race was Danny during TAR 2. While during the season, leaving the South African winery pit stop, we were only shown that he was having problems walking because of leg pain, it came out after the Race that he had come down with gout and received prescription medication at each pit stop.

My condolences, labral.

I said:


Hexele responded:


Here's what my doctor told me when she was explaining why she was sending me off to consult with a pain management specialist: Different people have different thresholds, but with a threshold analgesic, everyone has one. Once the concentration of the drug is at that threshold, then more of that drug will have no additional analgesic effect; at that point, you will not get more benefit from taking more, and may risk whatever damage that drug also does. The key to using threshold analgesics effectively is to keep the concentration in the bloodstream as close to the maximum effective dose as possible.

She then went on to say that one effective way to treat acute pain is to hit with a serious dose of something like Advil, and then keep taking smaller doses to prevent the drug from wearing off. For example, instead of 400mg of Advil every 8 hours, she would start with 400mg of Advil, and then have the patient take 100mg every two hours while awake, since this would keep the concentration more even than taking larger doses less frequently.

For people who care, this is also how oxycondone is handled. An Oxy-Contin pill is a pill that contains oxycodone with a physical time-release system. As with threshold analgesics, opiates work best if you can maintain a steady level in the bloodstream. One way to do this is with a morphine patch or something. Another way is the way it's done with Oxy-Contin. Since this drug is designed for people who suffer from chronic pain, a regimen of taking pills every hour is unlikely to be convenient (or doable) over time. So the O-C pill is designed to do that for you. (This is also why people who buy black-market O-C crush it -- they want to destroy the physical time-releaseness so that they can get the entire dose all at once.)

labral, my condolences.

I'm so sorry for your losses, labral.

So Sorry, labral. Hope this week turns out better!

Thank you all for all the kind thoughts and comments. It is very sad.

rabrab Yes and no. He had made it through the 2nd and 3rd shot...after the 3rd shot, he started going downhill...he'd had 2 or 3 times where my boyfriend had thought he'd have to euthenize him after the 3rd shot. He says that the 1st shot kills about 20% of the worms. Then, a month later, they get the second shot, which kills about 40% of what's left. The third shot is given the very next day and it, hopefully, kills the rest. So, really, the 2nd and third shot begin the most dangerous portion (at least according to my logic). Roady had the first shot the wednesday after July 4th. He had the second shot on Aug 4 and the 3rd shot on the 5th. He just had such a serious case. If my boyfriend had charge the rescue what he would charge a regular client, the bill would've been upwards of 3000$. And yet there are people who claim they 'can't afford' prevention...about 60-90$/year. *climbs down from short soapbox*

Have any of you done a garage sale? We're having a huge neighborhood one this weekend and I am working like a dog. I've got so much STUFF that needs to get out of my house if I'm to get married and have someone else move in. I just wish he'd have time to help me out. But, when he's getting back to his house at 9pm and needs to work the next day, I hate to ask. oh well. what else are vacations for!