"I Have No Doubt God Sent You Here"

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards recently attended a special sacrament meeting (Church service) to thank the Mormons for their service in helping with the flood-ravaged areas in the southern parts of the state.

The church members sang, "I Am a Child of God", with the next phrase being, "And He has sent me here." Governor Edwards told those in attendance, "I Have No Doubt God Sent You Here."

I always thought of that phrase referring to earth itself, but it was a thoughtful and clever turn of the phrase. Maybe God sent him there too.

That aside, I know a few people who will wonder to themselves: "Uh, that's nice that you think God sent you guys there, but couldn't he have just *not* sent the rains/floods? So much loss and suffering! And what a colossal waste!"

I think everyone should have an answer to this question in case it gets asked.

For those who don't have one yet, you're welcome to borrow mine till you do. =)

1. A wise man* once told me, "If you wonder whether God sends the storms, or simply allows them to pass -- read the book of Job." Spoiler: God doesn't send the storms, they are part of living in a fallen world. God can, and sometimes does intervene, if the faith and prayers of the people qualify them for miracles, and they align with his purposes. But sometimes he has even greater things in store for us...
2. We exist so we can have joy. (2 Ne 2:25) We think joy comes from ease, comfort, and pleasure -- but God knows joy comes from strength, and from being loved, trusted, understood and feeling that their work is appreciated. And how do we get that? From work, which often looks like service. Why catastrophes? So people can become strong, and have opportunities to serve others, "that the works of God should be made manifest" (John 9:3).

People who served in the Hurricane Katrina cleanup still talk about it as one of the greatest things they ever did.

Maybe this will be one of those experiences for the next generation of people.

---

* Thx Bro. Beard!

Planed wood

The closest local sawmill is going out of business, so I picked up a few of the nicer looking boards I could find.

Nice, of course is relative, almost all the wood had been sitting outside, so it looked pretty rough... When I got it home, I ran it through the planer. On the left is what a couple of the boards looked like when I bought them, on the right is after the planing:



Quite stunning. They'll look even better with a few coats of finish.

There is beauty in even the roughest stock. I learn a lot about how the Lord sees us when I work with wood like this.

State of the nation

Reasonably good description of the state of the nation from Harper's Weekly:

It is a gloomy moment in the history of our country. Not in the lifetime of most men has there been so much grave and deep apprehension. Never has the future seemed so uncalculable as at this time. The domestic situation is in chaos. Our dollar is weak throughout the world. Prices are so high as to be utterly impossible. The political caldron seethes and bubbles with uncertainty. Russia hangs as usual like a cloud, dark and silent, upon the horizon. It is a solemn moment. Of our troubles, no man can see the end.

Harper's Weekly, October 1857

via Hugh Pinnock at BYU Speeches

Ashton Kutcher's advice for young people

... is surprisingly wise:



His "smart is sexy" comment probably rang an odd chord with some of the youth, probably because that's not the experience most of us have -- at least the way we usually define "smart".

I'm guessing he meant something more like "confident", but thankfully the best kind of confidence comes from wisdom, which comes from knowledge paired with experience, so "smart" is a good word for this audience.

Nice job, Chris.

The linchpin

I'm very saddened by the events in Connecticut.

----

The Israelis have an interesting situation -- war is at their doorstep, they can't afford as much time/energy put into mourning and compassion. Similarly, as a father of little ones (including a 6-year old), my mind quickly turns to what could and should be done about it.

As a very wise friend* once taught me, bad situations are almost never a consequence of a single decision. They're usually a result of a sequence of poor decisions.

Knowing very little as we do at this point, I'm guessing in this case that list might look something like this:

1. Broken home
2. Strained relationships
3. Mental condition
4. Accessible weapons
5. Violent media (movies, video games)
6. Vulnerability of schools

Probably a significant improvement in any of the above would've changed the outcome here. But now, much of the talk is about the individual items in this list (esp. #1 thru #5), that each thing is very common in society and isn't correlated with violence. But has anyone looked at correlations against multiple conditions?

My guess is that in this case the problem is #3 and #5 together. I have seen each of my kids mimic things they see on tv. Boys especially are very good at inserting their minds into the storyline. A few times I've played FPS games, and each time I've left feeling like it was an mentally/emotionally dangerous thing to do, that I had to switch off an important part of my brain just to play it.

Media is automated storytelling. The reason we tell stories as humans is to teach us accurate consequences of actions so we can learn from others' experience (see this terrific article on the "Rules of Story", what makes a good story and why). Better stories are more accurate and applicable to life. Bad stories encourage immoral or unethical behavior by showing few (or positive) consequences of that behavior. I bet Adam got very little "accuracy" (by volume) from his media, and his mind was less able to discern the fallacy of it.

The more I think about it, the more I think the linchpin here was the parents allowing a crippled mind to poison itself.

---

* Shoutout to JCSH =)

Random thoughts

My life is officially full — my inbox-of-life has not stopped growing since my son was born. The stack of unanswered emails, unfinished projects, and unread magazines are all simultaneously growing despite my best efforts.

What does one do in this situation? Prioritize! Be sure to do the most important stuff first. As one would expect, blogging is a ways down on that list...

But I've had a bunch of things on my mind lately and I'd like to get them out:

• The iPhone 5 - Taller, lighter, faster — a miracle of modern engineering. Everything I loved about my old phone, and a bit better.
• Apple - One of Steve Jobs' earliest mantras was that a brand is about trust. Apple under him never traded that trust for money, and the current management looks to carry on that legacy. There's an example for other companies (and individuals whose name is their brand) to follow.
• Age - Anybody else notice that they're getting older?
• Brain - Turns out I got one of the heaviest doses of anyone affected by the CT overdose problem. What are the odds that I get a migraine that looks like a stroke, and my first and only CT scan is an overdose? I've learned that getting an X-ray is like trying to see what's inside your car by putting it in front of a large white sheet, and shooting it full of holes with a machine gun, then looking at where the bullets made it through to hit the sheet. X-rays can burn or kill cells — I had really weird effects for weeks afterward, the effect of burning all that tissue. Cancer can happen when an X-ray happens to hit a piece of DNA just right to mess it up without killing it. Fortunately, I just had an MRI and it came back clean — no signs of brain cancer yet. Good news, though most cells in your brain grow very slowly, so I may have cancer, but might not know it for 10 or more years. By that time, we may have cancer figured out.
• Obama - Well, I think I was right. Really complicated healthcare reform was passed, but my healthcare costs continue to climb rapidly. Jobs, overall economy, deficits, foreign relations — I mostly hear blame of Bush and other excuses for the current state of affairs. He got Osama, but lost a few planes we didn't know existed. Other than that, most of the news I see about him relate to him hanging out with celebrities.
• Romney seems troubled. If I were him, I'd feel the same way. As Scott Adams says, "the electorate is full of idiots", and in order to win he has to tailor his remarks to whatever group he's talking to, which when taken as a whole looks almost like a different person talking. That's got to be stressful for a very principled person. But I get the feeling that most people don't want a principled person in office because they've come to distrust all principle. I hope he wins, he's obviously a man who knows how to accomplish his goals, and has the determination to do so, and has an amazing track record. But I also don't expect the election to even be close.

How to become exceptional

From SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner:

"A lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with," he says. "But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it." Or, put another way, expert performers -- whether in soccer or piano playing, surgery or computer programming -- are nearly always made, not born.

And yes, just as your grandmother always told you, practice does make perfect. But not just willy-nilly practice. Mastery arrives through what Ericsson calls "deliberate practice." This entails more than simply playing a C-minor scale a hundred times or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

The people who become excellent at a given thing aren't necessarily the same ones who seemed to be "gifted" at a young age. This suggests that when it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love -- yes, your nana told you this too -- because if you don't love what you're doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.

I'm not sure how this applies to little kids, they have no idea what they love. A wise person recently told me, "Kids tend to like things they're good at."

Those last two paragraphs sound contradictory, but I have a feeling they're just true at different times in people's lives.

Moments That Matter Most

Spreading "culture"?

Remember my post on culture?

Looks like the "stool donor" approach is getting some traction -- Dr. Gordon is Director of the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, talking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air a couple weeks back about doing exactly that:

Dr. GORDON: Well, in this particular case, a fecal community was transplanted into a diseased individual's gut and there was a beneficial effect observed over time, reflected in improvement of their symptoms. ...

GROSS: I guess one of the things I find so interesting about this fecal transplant is one, its a fecal transplant. It's so odd to think of using in this case, a spouse's feces or the community of microorganisms in those feces to transplant into the ill person's gut. Its a way of transplanting good guy bacteria instead of using antibiotics to just kill the bad guy bacteria and in the process, kill the good guy bacteria too.

I still think someday it will be more common for doctors to administer bacteria cultures than anti-biotics.

Also interesting from this interview is that 90 percent of the cells we carry around aren't actually human -- but bacterial and other non-human microbes. By count, we're ~10x more bacterial than human. Surprising, hard to believe, but also very interesting.

Having politicians kiss your babies? Maybe a good way to get healthy/successful peoples' bacteria on your kids.

The value of a happy friend

Mental Floss this month cites a study* that found that if you add one "happy friend" to your life, that your probability of being happy yourself goes up by 9%, and that's worth about $45,000.

I still generally assert that happiness comes from keeping the commandments, but still, if those findings have any truth to them, I need to reassess my net worth.

I wonder if we should be actively trying to befriend happy people. If one happy person can make several new friends happy simultaneously, and they in turn, the world would obviously be a happier place.

---

* How Do I Put a Price on Friendship, Jul-Aug 2010, p21, citing a study in the British Medical Journal.

Discovery Middle School shooting

The real story is starting to come out, and it lines up well with what the kids at the school have been saying (I know two of them).

What a sad story -- group of middle class, middle school kids join one of the LA gangs over the internet, one wants out, which necessitates a just-short-of-fatal pummeling, so when he's threatened with it he opts to take out the one making the threats.

I think just being part of one of those gangs should be a crime, and the whole group should be punished for that (maybe it already is, I don't know). But once you're in that situation -- where you're told you're going to be almost fatally pounded for getting out of the gang -- what should he have done?

With the mind of a 35-year old guy, I'd probably tell my parents and go to the police, change my name, and hope that we'd move out of state, then carry pepper spray (or an air horn or something) around in case they ever cornered me. I doubt they could, though, since I'd probably never leave the house.

But can we really expect a 14-year old to think like a 35-year old adult? Maybe that was really the result of his best thinking.

I have to go back to what John Holman told me years ago when we found out just how bad someone else's life had become, roughly quoted: "But it's never just one bad decision that ruins someone's life -- it's a series of bad decisions, every day going down those same lame paths instead of waking up and deciding, every day, to make today different and better."

This kid didn't wake up one morning and find himself a member of a gang -- I'm sure he lied awake in bed more than one night thinking about whether he should do it. And it's those times when we're all alone and deciding what to do that make all the difference.

Camping joy

That title is admittedly part sarcasm.

For those who expected me to do other things Friday and Saturday, here's a quick rundown of what was supposed to be a simple overnight campout. The rest of you can skip to the end -- the middle is mostly complaining. =)

• Review girls' packing job; Kennedy has packed 6 pairs of socks, and no pants.


• Vacuum out the van, looks like a vending machine exploded in there.


• Get the van loaded.


• Discover the battery is dead (girls left the van dome light on)


• Van won't shift out of park without battery power, so I have to pull the battery completely out of the truck to take it in and jumpstart the van.


• Van radio requires you to enter a code after a power outage or it won't work; the code is filed away the basement.


• Usual stops at Walmart, gas station, McDonalds...


• GPS unit says my 2.5 hour trip will take 4 hours (?!); how does it know I have kids? Finally get on the road 3 hours late.


• 15 minutes later, all 3 kids need to go to the bathroom "NOW!" (45 minutes later, they need to go again, unsurprisingly.)


• Why does TomTom send me the wrong way in EVERY state park? Seriously, it's 0 for 3 so far.


• Campground is nice, play for awhile, roast hot dogs and marshmallows, had a nice evening.


• Getting cold, time for bed! Uh, oh, really cold...


• Uh, oh again. Did we pack a binkie for Kennedy? Of course not.


• Spend about 2 hours trying to keep Kennedy from waking the whole campground with her crying about being too cold (despite kicking off the covers) -- I'm pretty sure she mostly just wants her binkie.


• It's getting colder, I can't move because I'll wake up Kennedy, and I can feel the cold pushing up through my hips. Not good.


• About 1:30 am I give up -- cover the girls with the 2 adult sleeping bags to keep them warm, and get up.


• What do I do? Go turn on the van and sit in there with the heater on for 6 hours? So I go and rouse the fire with little sticks (and a firestarter =).


• 20 minutes later Eric comes out of his tent in the same boat, so we get the fire going. Eric: "Old indian saying, 'Indian stay warm tending little fire, white man stay warm finding wood for big fire.'"


• An hour later, we hear rustling behind us -- "Something's over there," I whisper, but we don't have flashlights. I finally go get one, and shine it off toward the table. What do I see? A giant raccoon finishing off my lunch! "Hey, get outta here..." Ah, I forgot to put all the food away trying to keep Kennedy quieted down. He comes back a few times, but since we put the food away he didn't find much.


• About 4 am Regan comes out and wants to sit by the fire too.


• About an hour later, Kennedy's up and crying. Woken up, Scott and Jill offer to let her sleep in their tent by their space heater (!!), but after setting up a bag, her crying has woken up Scott and Jill's kids, yet she refuses to sleep there -- grr. She wants to come sit by the fire. Glad she woke everyone up.


• Fortunately both Regan and Kennedy get to see Swiper the Raccoon poking around behind us a couple times.


• About 7 am I finally fall asleep slouched back in the camp chair, sleep for maybe 45 minutes. McKinley appears around this time, she seems to have slept fine.


• After a slow start, we finally head to Fall Creek Falls (pretty), then on to Piney Creek Falls, which were much more impressive.

Actually, the area under the suspension bridge at Piney Falls is one of the prettiest places I've seen out here. Fast and beautifully clear water near a pretty little rhododendron forest. (I'll post a picture here soon.)

The drive back? TomTom messes up getting us out of the park ("so we're supposed to ram the gate into the youth camp?"), and if Regan hadn't specifically prayed for me to not crash, I'm pretty sure I would've. At one point I'm sure I would've failed a sobriety test, so I pulled over and took a nap. Why don't they make the seats in cars more sleep-friendly?

So, apologies for being MIA over the weekend. Hope your weekend yielded more sleep than mine. =)

Fixed-schedule productivity

I practiced this in college, I just didn't have a name for it.

Every college student should read it.

(Thanks, Eddie.)

Chainsaws

Think chainsaws are scary when they're running? How about when they're *not* running?

[ UPDATE: Just heard back from him and got a different story than the one he told that day -- not quite as surprising if it was running. ]

At a community service project, our HOA president (an older fellow) was cutting down brush with a chainsaw. At one point he shut the saw off let go of the trigger which stopped the blade, then in swinging it down happened to bounce the bar/chain across the front of his thigh and the blade jerked forward:

For those who are wondering how it turned out for my leg, after the job I cleaned up and went to the ER where they had to put in 7 stitches to close up the wound. I’m Ok but little sore now, that will learn me to leave off my chain saw leggings.

He was bleeding pretty bad, looked about as bad as most sword-slash wounds in the movies. And he was wearing jeans!

Watch out for chainsaws.

Slow Dance

David L. Weatherford:

SLOW DANCE

Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?

Or listened to the rain
Slapping on the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?

You better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won't last.

Do you run through each day
On the fly?

When you ask: How are you?
Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done,
do you lie in your bed

With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?

You'd better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won't last.

Ever told your child,
We'll do it tomorrow?

And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die

Cause you never had time
To call and say, "Hi "?

You'd better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won't last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift thrown away.

Life is not a race.
Do take it slower.

Hear the music
Before the song is over.

Maybe we're not supposed to "love" our jobs

Scott Adams:

There's a natural limit to how happy a person can be at work. If work becomes fun, your boss will stop paying you to do it and start charging other people to have that fun in your place. So let's agree that work has to be a little bit unpleasant, at least for most people. Still, despite this unpleasantness, many people have a feeling called job satisfaction.

Changing hairstyles, part 3

Oh. Snap.

Looks like battery acid may not be the end of this story.

Any chance this lady had a headlamp with leaky batteries like mine?

Bodybuilding

No, this isn't me.

Okay, so I'm not much of a bodybuilder, most folks who've seen me in person could probably guess that. It's too boring. I always preferred to be doing something, like playing tennis or racquetball or sand volleyball or rock climbing.

Well, if you're at all like me, you might enjoy this article, Bodywork, from Outdoor magazine. Notable quote:

What I didn't know [in high school] was that my favorite machines and free-weight lifts were destroying me. Those contraptions and benches are designed to isolate and supersize muscles. But isolation is the enemy. Every sport we do as outdoor athletes demands that the full body participate. You don't biceps-curl your way up an ice climb or bench-press your way down a river. ...

During a frigid mogul-skiing contest in New Hampshire, my left humerus squirmed from its cozy socket on a misplaced pole plant. I credit the shoulder injury to the military presses, which, with their extreme range of motion, stretch and degrade the ligaments that are intended to hold your shoulder in place. Shortly thereafter, I herniated a disk in my lower back, a condition that had me nearly crippled for most of my twenties. Thank you, bench press, which makes your lower back weak relative to your chest, arms, and shoulders. Much later I would blow an ACL skiing powder in Canada. Didn't even fall. My quads simply overpowered my hamstrings in a turn and pop! Blame the seated leg press.

Another interesting point, the bodybuilders aren't the strong ones:

Michol Dalcourt, a longtime professional hockey trainer in Canada, witnessed this dynamic firsthand when he compared the performance of seasoned pros, placed on machine-dependent workouts, with rookie skaters just off the farm. "Ask a farm kid what they do and it's 'Chores,' " says Dalcourt. "Moving stuff. Shoveling. .... They never set foot in the gym, but they were stronger."

I always associated strength with exercise, but now I'm starting to think the connection should be strength with work.

Work generally adds value to things too, often making money, or at least improving the value of your property. Better than the "stir water" approach of gym exercise, which costs you both time and the price of a gym membership.

I'm sure my wife will be happy to take me up on this one. =)

Changing hairstyles, solved

Those who've had any interaction with me in the last 6 months know that I've had an interesting time of things.

Laptop and fire issues aside, perhaps most notable was my unusual haircut:

Except that's not a haircut. Back at the end of March my hair started falling out in a stripe around my head.

But let me back up, I have to tell you this other story first.

Tuesday, March 10th. No lunch, and a rather stressful day at work. After work I head over for my racquetball league match, which proves to be one of the most intense games I've ever played. I lost too. =(

Getting home, stepping through the back door, I knew something wasn't quite right. I couldn't see quite straight. Looking at Kyla, it almost looked like I was looking through a gemstone or something, with pieces of my vision fractured and shifted around. Scary.

I went in to the living room and lay down on the floor and soon was asleep. I remember Kennedy (2 yrs old at the time) kept trying to climb on me, and I kept pushing her off since I was feeling dizzy and hurting oddly -- I'm sure I scared her and hurt her feelings.

When I woke up I knew things were worse. I was more dizzy, and it sort-of hurt, almost like the pain you get from really loud noises except it was quiet. I laid my head back down and stared at the TV. I watched as the closed captions go by, but quickly realized I couldn't read the words. I could see the shapes clearly, it's not that they were blurry or anything -- I just couldn't process those shapes into letters or words. Now I'm really scared. I can't read!

(Note, curiously I tried to say the alphabet and I could...)

I tell Kyla something's really wrong, that it might be a stroke or something, so she goes in and starts checking the internet for symptoms. I go in and grab my cellphone and call my dad. I describe my symptoms (poorly), and he says, "Sounds like you're having a migraine, go take a couple of aspirin." I go in and grab the medicine, the whole time feeling dizzy and almost like I'm going to pass out. I pick up the bottle that looks like the aspirin, but I can't read the label. "Regan, does this say aspirin?!" Maybe I'm having an aneurism??* I take two aspirin and go lie down on the floor. Dad, still on the phone, says, "Yeah, something's wrong with you, you're not making a lot of sense." Great.

I hang up and Kyla calls our paramedic friend, Greg, who suggests that it might be a TIA, and says we need to get to the hospital asap.

Long story short, we call 911, freak out our neighbors, and they put me in an ambulance. About the time we leave for the hospital, I can start reading things again. Ah, finally things are starting to improve.

Sort-of. Except the medicine is worse than the disease. Hospitals are miserable places, not due so much to people as to process. I was moved 4 times over the course of 1 night, and was woken every 30 minutes or so by someone wanting to check my blood pressure, get another blood sample, or introduce themself as the new nurse on duty. I don't care, I'm tired!

The EKG, CAT scan, and MRI went off fairly quickly, before midnight. I had to stay, however, because they wanted to do an ultrasound on my carotid (?) arteries, and nobody could do those till 8 am. (So why wake me up every 30 minutes again?) Thankfully Kyla was able to come soon after I got there and stayed with me through the worst of it -- it would've been much worse without her.

Bottom line? They don't find anything. No stroke, no evidence of TIA, nothing. (Except a little plaque in my carotid artery, which is apparently normal.) "Atypical migraine" was the diagnosis. They said they'd tell me what to do different in life, but they couldn't think of anything to tell me. I don't drink, smoke, do drugs, not overweight, etc.

Then they tried to put me on cholesterol medication. What? Was my cholesterol high? No. So why put me on that? Oh, because it might have contributed to your arteries getting plaque in them. But that amount is normal, right? Uh, well it's just a "preventative measure"... Uh uh, no way, I'm not doing it. I'm really bitter about the shotgun trial-and-error approach the medical community uses for making medications. As David Hamlin says, roughly, "you don't get to shoot the side of a barn with a shotgun, draw a circle around the hole, then take credit for a bullseye." Especially when you have no clue what you just destroyed inside the barn.

They send me home.

Another sidenote, in case you're curious, this is how the hospital and insurance company reconciled:

Click to see the whole thing. So the hospital collected less than 3% of that bill. Make sure you have your "97% off" coupon the next time you go to the hospital, nice to save a little money here and there.

Okay, anyway, back to my hair story.

Three weeks later my hair starts falling out like the picture above. Now I'm really scared. I immediately make an appointment with the doctor. They think it's a bad haircut. "You should go see a neurologist about your migraine, maybe it was a TIA. No idea on the hair."

At the neurologist: "No way you had a TIA or a stroke, you have none of the risk factors or signs, and looking at the test results, the likelihood is pretty much zero. Let's talk about migraines. Family history of them?" Yes. "Unusual stress?" Yes, some. "Missed meals?" Yes. Consistent symptoms, bingo. "Migraine symptoms depend on where in the head they occur. Yours was a little lower in your brain than where most people experience them, but about the same."

But what about the hair?

"I don't know, I thought it was a bad haircut. It's not neurological, that's for sure."

Great, back to square one. At least it's not some form of cancer, insanity, or known alien abduction torture technique. We talk to about a dozen other doctors -- and the best we get is maybe an allergic reaction to latex on a headband on the MRI (wait, what headband?)...

I spend a few months like this. I practically shave my head so it doesn't look so creepy, and people who don't know the story think I was just being weird. Still no clues on the cause.

Then, a break.

In ~July I go to climb in the attic and put on my Energizer 1W headlamp**, and instantly realize that the headband on the headlamp follows the bald line around my head perfectly. Perfectly.

Ah, now we have something! There's no way that's a coincidence! I mention it to Maureen at work, who says she might be able to help. "Somebody put Nair on your headband, I know it! Bring it in, I'll get it tested." You know someone who can test it?? Like CSI? I don't know anybody who would put Nair on my headband.

Another couple weeks go by, and then the verdict comes back from the chem lab. Ready for this? Battery acid. All over the headband.

Oh sure, that makes sense, I remember one of the batteries in there blew up a few months back and I dumped them in the trash and put new ones in. And yes, as a matter of fact, I do wrap the headband around the whole lamp and battery compartment.

The tech was apparently quite surprised that I didn't have burns on my skull. Maybe my hair protected my skull.

Here's how I look now.

So, mystery solved. Hair's back, and no new migraines. Lessons? Learn to relax better, and watch out for Kirkland (Costco) batteries leaking in your headlamps, I guess.

Glad we finally got answers to that crazy sequence of events. And I hope it never happens again.

---

* BTW, I learned that aspirin is the *wrong* thing to take for strokes and aneurisms, as it makes the blood flow easier and therefore bleeds more freely into the brain. It's a good thing, however, when minor inflammation in the brain (?) constricts blood flow to take an anti-inflammatory like aspirin or ibuprofin.

** Energizer actually calls these "headlights". I think it's ironic that the guy whose blog is called "head-lights" has an experience like this actually being caused by one.

On Michael Jackson

Well said.