Hi, James!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

JB>  I just visited with the God-Mother. She seems to be MUCH
JB>  better than the last time I saw her. $600 of annuals alone
JB>  in this year, and she scaled back. Quite a girl! What a
JB>  bunch of laughs too.

AH>  Sounds like a kindred spirit, all right....  :-)

JB>  But the God-Father isn't doing so well. Like sands through
JB>  the hourglass, and all that... /-:


          Well, I guess it happens to most of us eventually.  I hope it
doesn't happen too soon with you & me because we still have work to
do....  :-/



AH>  may be upset that you're not using it quite the way it was
AH>  designed to be used and/or you may have heard more than you
AH>  ever really wanted to know about Pilates, but you're able
AH>  to problem-solve with the resources available...

JB>  It's not like I don't use it as designed,


          Ah... so I gather you're doing that as well!  I was thinking it
might be like the electric carving knife my father gave us for Xmas one
year.  He had one himself & he loved it.  On the rare occasions when we
actually used it, the bulldog kept trying to attack it.  A friend told us
it was a wonderful tool for cutting carpeting, however, and our own
experiments proved him right... [grin].



JB>  but as an air-bag suspension - I'm sure the designers
JB>  only had that idea as a passing thought.


          Sometimes "passing thoughts" may be associated with the
still, small voice... and well worth paying attention to!  Sometimes there
is also a matter of targeting a particular audience.  A few weeks ago I
noticed a Pilates video at $44.95 with a "Power Sculpting Band"
included, for example.  It reminded me to get some Thera-Band from the
local pharmacy.  The only difference I can see between these items lies in
the marketing & the price tag....  ;-)



AH>  I'll take a good idea from anywhere & adapt it to suit
AH>  our needs as well.  Nobody has asked us why we've hung
AH>  a fuzzy key fob on the light switch in our bathroom, but
AH>  there's another example... [chuckle].

JB>  "Fuzzy key fob?"
JB>  A) What is it.


          A key chain with (in this case) a stuffed animal attached.  We found
it at a local dollar store.  I've seen similar things with other shapes too...
a woman I knew years ago had a key chain with a 2" electric blue plush-covered
ball on it.  She bought it because it was easy to locate in her purse....  :-)



JB>  B) What's it doing in your bathroom, let alone on
JB>  your light switch?


          Ah, thereby hangs a tale... a tale about how we adapted an idea
we'd picked up from a friend.  When Nora was about four years old we
visited one of our correspondents in SURVIVOR who was married to a
quadriplegic.  This couple had a light switch in their bathroom with a
plexiglass extension which enabled an adult in a standard wheelchair... or,
incidentally, a child who wasn't tall enough to reach the switch... to turn
the light on & off by pushing or pulling on the extension.  It was a
commercial product, very elegant & very expensive. We were able to make
use of the idea, however, by drilling a small hole in our own bathroom
light switch & attaching a bit of dowelling with copper wire.

          Some time went by.  Nora grew taller & didn't need the
extension any more... so we removed it.  We continued to use the
old-fashioned toggle switch with the hole in it.  Several months after her
stroke, when she had managed to regain the ability to make consciously
controlled movements with her left arm, Nora expressed a desire to operate
the switch with her left hand.  Because she was hypersensitive on the left
side, we needed something soft & we also needed something she could
grab easily.  The stuffed animal works very well....  :-))




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+