Kids Nowadays Want to Become Famous YouTubers

Posting videos on YouTube has become a profitable trend for many people.  My kids tell me that most of the kids in their class want to become YouTubers.  Okay, well.  I asked if they wanted to become one and they said 'yes'.  So I took it upon myself to create a YouTube channel for them.  With the existing cellphones and tablets they have, they have the tools to create their own stop motion videos, especially the Minecraft videos.  And so far their videos started out kind of awful, but as they got more experience, their videos continued to get better and better.



Minecraft Stop Motion Studio

Now, they are making videos with their toys and my youngest daughter started a series "Cooking with Pinkie Pie".  The kids are so creative!



All of this can be created inexpensively too.  All the kids need are toys, a tablet or phone that can download apps and a little bit of creativity.

Why it is Important to Read Everything No Matter the Topic

Sometimes, I come across articles on Yahoo that I truly don't care about.  I ran into one article that was about a journalist that was bashing another journalist, which quite frankly seemed like a huge waste of time.

But I got something out of it.

The article was full of words that I was unfamiliar with.  All of the sudden, the article became interesting to me and I took fascination with the difficult words that the journalist was using.  Now that I know how the words were used within a sentence, I wrote down the list of words I didn't know in a notebook.  The next thing I know, I was looking up words up on Google like "excoriation" and "decommodified".  I unknowingly increased my vocabulary by reading stupid articles that I normally wouldn't read.  There was this feeling of satisfaction that I have learned something on Christmas Day!

Merry Christmas!

I Want to Burp but I Can't

Recently, I had an episode where I felt like I needed to burp, but no matter what, I couldn't.  I could swallow air, but it felt like air was being trapped in my esophagus.   I tried to drink water, but it only made it worse.  It felt like water would only go down a certain point and stop as if it stopped at the sphincter that enters the stomach.  The pain was excruciating.  I didn't know what it was.  I had a co-worker drive me over to the emergency room.  I told them that I had chest pain and immediately, they took an EKG on me.  I told the technician that it wasn't my heart!  I had pain in my esophagus area!  My EKG turned out to be fine.  My blood pressure was through the roof though.  It was 200/100.  A normal BP is 118/50 for me.  People could tell that I was in extreme pain, my face was red and I never felt so horrible.  I sat in the waiting room for an hour and a half and they finally called me in.  The staff did a turnover with the night crew and I saw a triage nurse.  About 30 minutes later, I spoke to the Doc and I told him my symptoms.  He said, "what helps with the inability to burp is a carbonated beverage like 7-up."  He left and I didn't see him again for another 3 hours.  Between that, I got a couple of chest x-rays and they turned out normal.  A nurse gave me a "G.I. cocktail" which numbed my mouth and throat and I would assume that it did the same for my esophagus.  I didn't fell better though.  I just waited and waited.  Eventually, someone came in and verified that my blood pressure went down and then I was shortly released.  They couldn't figure out what was wrong with me.  My diagnosis was "gastric pain".  I almost yelled at the doctor.  I asked why they didn't scope me to see if I had some kind of tumor or something.  He laughed and said, "scope in the ER?!?  I need you to go see your primary care provider and he can give you a referral to the GI clinic."   My visit was so disappointing that I left pretty pissed.  I wasted five hours of my life just to find out it was confirmed that I had gastric pain.

I figured that I had something called heartburn.  When I was sitting in the ER,  I had plenty of time to google all my symptoms on my phone and all signs were pointing to heartburn.  Next time I have heartburn, I'm going to take Alka-Seltzer or drink some carbonated beverage or something.