My website has done other good things  besides inform alumni of my  high school of it's current events   and   reunion plans. I reunited sisters in September. In their case a family had a falling out with one member who turned in a crook member. No one heard from her for years. Eventually there was no way she could contact them, they all had different addresses, jobs, lives than when she'd last known them. The California  sister was --she'd never guess--in Florida. And so on. She put her neice's name in a search engine, hoping the teenager had one of those teen sites. Actually the girl had never had a computer. But my site came up with her on it  (Nicole Abernethy). She emailed me and Cathy just fell apart hearing she had gotten her sister back at last; had waited years to tell her she didn't care, never cared, what her sister had done, which their mother had told the sister the opposite, so that she never knew Cathy was speaking to her.
Hank Carr's sitser found my site and hated me and then said she wished a writer would do her story where Hank was a good person too but no one will write it.  She said in the end how I was ok. It's all in my Carr site guest book and I wish I was up for writing her book.
When the Oct 13 Sunday St. Pete Times did a 4-page color spread on a mural my kids' grandfather, Josph D. Myers, had worked on daily for a year with another man, and never mentioned  Joe, I emailed the art editor who wrote it the webpage where I uploaded a 1939 news article about the mural when it was new, with a photo of Joe and George painting it and paragraphs about the 2 men taking a year and so on. The lady called me 2 weeks later-last Thursday--saying my website didn't work and she was sorry but she'd poured over their archives and never found one mention of this myers guy in conjunction with the mural and didn't think anyone would ever be able to place him on it."If he was there, it's lost to history," she said briskly. I gave her my uRL again ( turned out she was leaving the " .html " off ) and bid her good day. Of course she didn't say anything in Sunday's paper and we'll probably have to wait until the anniversary of it  next October 13 to see Joe mentioned finally. But he won't be--better not be, or I'll persist--kept out of the history books again. This is the link to that page: LINK

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Marina and Mary, 8 and 14, October 2002
Mary and Marina
Mary gets ready
L.A. Looks Model Search -- Florida finalists

Mary
Lauren Howland
L.A. Looks Model Search finalists--eastern U.S. winners
WINNER        1st RUNNER-UP             2nd runner up

MARY
Mary
Marina.
TIKI
LIVONIA AGE 19
KILLER TOAD?
OCT 2002


I have to have an abcessed tooth pulled before I can begin Pegylated interferon but it is taking months to get it done with Medicaid only/and the infection went away on Augmentin 875 mg. just to return when the next dentist changed it to amoxicillin 500 mg.  Within 2 days I had  swollen lymph nodes in my neck again like 20 days before, and my jaw was beginning to be infected, not just teeth. Of course this is a weekend but Monday the new dentist--I want to like this chap--should agree to change it and I'll get on. He looked at my new x-ray and May 15 xray and  medical history and said it was still infected and he wanted me four days on an antibiotic more specific to the bacteria most likely to cause dental  abcesses before he worked on it. Specifically, I have prolapsed mitral valve and the feelings on that have just changed from years of making the patient take prophylatic penicillin 6 hours prior to and 4 hours following dental work--walloping doses, like 6 500-milligram tablets at once. I waited this long time--6 months--to get a root canal by the county at a dental college like Ann Landers always said anybody could get in any town in America so there was no excuse for bad teeth. Finally I get my turn, and i've been on antibiotics for weeks. Not good enough, their dentist says. She says I have to be on 3000 mg of penicillin for 4 hours before she's allowed to touch me, and I get sent home for another week til I get it all together and fill her scrip and they have a dentist again . Similarly, Medicaid now wil only  pay a dentist to do one x-ray and refer me to the one dental surgeon in reach--a St. Petersburg, Florida practitioner, who's allowed to pull it. St. pete isn't just the next city. It's across about 30 minutes of manmade bridge over a bay of an ocean. Tampa buses don't go there. Cabs would be shall we say for the special. I don't have a car. No one on SSI could possibly have one, either, it can't be just me--on $545 a month, which is what all the retirees in my age group, born in 1954, are going to have after they pay for their  prescription drugs: imagine auto insurance any cheaper than that, for starters. Rent  for a 2-bedroom pad so you can have your kid(s) sometimes couldn't ever go back to  reasonable  $350 a month, so think over $400, plus electric at $70 a month, cellphone, old-fashioned phone, at least $35, gas and t.p. and etc, $45--it's all you get. How do you get the  radiator or calipers fixed let alone the tires or starter replaced? You ay have had a car but it won't last as long as your need for disability checks.
The St. Pete fellow's office decided I needed to get antibiotics--penicillin--
from them on my first visit, then return to be treated. The E. R. refused to prescribe  me the antibiotics you treat prolapse mitral valve with first so I wouldn't have to go to St. Pete twice. Instead, the 23-year-old doctor called for a social worker to see me and asked me to wait in killer pain and not fill my antibiotics although she hadn't given me any in an IV or any thing to combat the raging infection. I waited and then the receptionist told me to go home, I was done, forget the social worker, here was a list of dentists in this county.
Anyway, while I waited for a Tampa dentist to take Medicaid some day, I had to get antibiotics through the E.R. twice. Dr. Childers, the dentist I finally found, said I really tried hard to keep my teeth, he could see my valiant fight. He said to his 2 females present in the room " I want her to start penicillin , doubling up on the dose the first 3 days and then pull the tooth in 4 days. Make her an appointent for 4 days from now."
These women nodded and murmered and distracted him telling him of a cat that had just lept off a fire escape out the window behind him. He went on to the next patient and the reseptionist lady of the pair gave me an appointment for November 21. Then I realized that they'd been talking about me when the other one said," Twenty  more days??!! But she's been on antibiotics for so long already! poor thing!"
("I can't help it, they're taking no one new  before the retreat.")
"But he said he'd pull it in 4 days!" I said.
"He's daydreaming! There's no room until the 21st. He's all booked up ," the receptionist said firmly. I could see the uselessness in trying to explain that my liver doctor was putting off my interferon until I had the tooth pulled because I would have trouble with the bleeding being controlled if I got the tooth pulled on interferon. And that the stuff cost $1600 or more a week and we were sweating putting it off 2 weeks as I had to pick it up or lose my access to it for  6 months again but it goes bad within a few weeks . And that someone else with a less  frantic agenda could and must change their appointment to Nov 21 for me. I've had doctors ask me to come in days even weeks later so someone in a dire way could get squeezed in. But this lady knew when Doc Childers stressed 4 days that it would not be 4 days and she didn't tell him. So she was not like a Deanne fan I could like you know count on sympathy from.
November  2002.
Faces by Deanne
Typical Marina: Purple nailpolish, Bandaid, and teary from  a fight with Mary.           
Mary was sure her fellow Orange Grove  Middle School of the Arts chorus classmate ,Lauren Howland, would win the model Search contest when she ran into her at it. Two guys won, the first year they let guys in it , too, we should havegone figured, but I did notice at the Orlando semi-finals that Lauren's dad is my old friend Chris Howland.(aND YOURS Twila, Johnny G, Blade,Perish, and  maybe Kevin D.)
I had enjoyed hearing from the women who found my site looking up our old boarding school, and emailed  those who signed my guestbook  about a reunion in the rennovated Motherhouse last month. Mentioned what the Dept, of Children and Families is doing to us. A lady wrote back that her whole 2nd grade class is praying for us, she is liturgical  leader of a parish; another has been legal secretary for 30 plus years and sent her boss's phone #, fax, --people could be really cool. Time magazine had done an issue on the new has-it-all American home and got and printed letters from all over the country in this week's ish  deploring the ostentatiousness depicted..reality check! We are not what they are telling us we are!
Sort of like what they did with the hippie culture.Suddenly everyone was a hippie in 1969. Not so. Two-thirds of the kids were junior businessmen. You see them all around you now.


Best Books
teens: A Well-Timed Enchantment by Vivian Vanda Velde
The Tale of One Bad Rat by Brian Talbot (comic-novel)
Ta da--best book I've ever read: Wicked by  Gregory Maguire
nonfiction for this age: Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich
Time Changes Everything
If you have gone around the monthly reports on this site over the last 3 years you know this is the hooker capital of the world here on the corner 1 house up. And that 90 immoral acts a day occur around my driveway behind my privacy fence  where you are hidden from general view. And  police say they can't stop it.  Sunday I walked up to the diner to get a newspaper and there was no riffraff on either side of Nebraska Ave as far as the eye could see. Just empty road. No people the color we don't have around here hiding behind dumpsters and hanging out at the top of the road working whores or being them. How is this? They boarded up the projects! Almost all the units--dozens and dozens--are all boarded up vacant. And the cheezo motel at the head of my strret is condemned , the fence torn down, the units boaded up too ready for demolition.
I know this doesn't mean diddly in places like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore ( I just read a book of photos of  decrepit old ruins in these places , showing old closed jails and theatres and hotels and factories the homeless haunt and reside for years in so aren't homeless really) but  it works in a juvenile city like all  Florida's,  where there never was a skyline because no one lived here when those scions of architecture were being opulent  in the 1930's and 40's in places teeming with life. With the projects and cheap rooms gone, the addicted-and--marginalized would have to buy one of the little homes  around here since they aren't rental units, absentee landlords are not in the market in this area, it's all home-owners. So the neighborhood has cleaned up in the snap of two fingers -- who'd have forseen? There's a grade school next to us . 95% non-white, but if it gets magnetized next year, the ratio has to be by law , the city ratio, about 23% black. That would blow that school, black as coal for years, away capital A. Marina's school, once all-black   until this year Lomax Magnet School, just got a new media center with all new books. They get stuff. So I see progress, I like it.
My website has done other good things  besides inform alumni of my  high school of it's current events   and   reunion plans. I reunited sisters in September. In their case a family had a falling out with one member who turned in a crook member. No one heard from her for years. Eventually there was no way she could contact them, they all had different addresses, jobs, lives than when she'd last known them. The California  sister was --she'd never guess--in Florida. And so on. She put her neice's name in a search engine, hoping the teenager had one of those teen sites. Actually the girl had never had a computer. But my site came up with her on it  (Nicole Abernethy). She emailed me and Cathy just fell apart hearing she had gotten her sister back at last; had waited years to tell her she didn't care, never cared, what her sister had done, which their mother had told the sister the opposite, so that she never knew Cathy was speaking to her.
Hank Carr's sitser found my site and hated me and then said she wished a writer would do her story where Hank was a good person too but no one will write it.  She said in the end how I was ok. It's all in my Carr site guest book and I wish I was up for writing her book.
When the Oct 13 Sunday St. Pete Times did a 4-page color spread on a mural my kids' grandfather, Josph D. Myers, had worked on daily for a year with another man, and never mentioned  Joe, I emailed the art editor who wrote it the webpage where I uploaded a 1939 news article about the mural when it was new, with a photo of Joe and George painting it and paragraphs about the 2 men taking a year and so on. The lady called me 2 weeks later-last Thursday--saying my website didn't work and she was sorry but she'd poured over their archives and never found one mention of this myers guy in conjunction with the mural and didn't think anyone would ever be able to place him on it."If he was there, it's lost to history," she said briskly. I gave her my uRL again ( turned out she was leaving the " .html " off ) and bid her good day. Of course she didn't say anything in Sunday's paper and we'll probably have to wait until the anniversary of it  next October 13 to see Joe mentioned finally. But he won't be--better not be, or I'll persist--kept out of the history books again. This is the link to that page: LINK

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JADE             TIKI-missing                  Tuala (R.I.P.)
                      BACK
Here is the lovely computer I got in 1997 and lost when the hard drive failed in Feb 2002. Scanner and printer too advanced for my kids' computers--they don't even have slots for them
$1600 scanner
     $1200 printer.
This guy or gal was on the porch a few days before the 2 kittens came back dying from their first day outdoors in their lives.  They made a hole in the screen.-I saw them romping in the grass and I thought how heartless we were to keep them indoors all their lives and let them stay out a little --little--while. They then vanished, to crawl home 24 hours apart near death.I've never seen such a toad or so huge. But where the heck is Tiki? I am so missing her and worried about her. She never went outside. Suddenly, the day after we buried the 2 poisoned little guys, who died awful, awful deaths, Tiki was gone.

I went to ask the weirdo across the street if he saw anything strange on Halloween Eve , and he didn't answer his door and I saw a plate of cat food on the front porch. He doesn't have a cat and as far as I know, hates cats. Then I recalled a dead mouse outside the gate 2 days before Halloween  and a big old rat Mika brought 2 days after Halloween. Was Harry poisoning rats and  the poor cats catching them as they died, only to end up as wretched as the rats they found , hours later? Oh mi god. it was so horrible. I loved these cats  and it was so bad. They were so sick--crying, in a panic, Oh God. Where is my Siamese I brought here from Land O' Lakes 2 years ago? Who the hell would let one of my cats out after seeing what Jolly and Honchuru went through? Of course not me or the kids, Marina was crying so hard,"Please don't leave us," over Jolly, unaware he was dead. No not dead. paralyzed. I gave him to dann to bury, sliding him in a plastic grocery bag, but he would not go stiff. He wasn't breathing, coulsdn't move, but you saw his eyes seeing  you. By the second one I knew they were dead-looking but somehow still alive. It was so awful. Then to secure the rest of them and go to a few medical appointments and get home and find your baby gone, your special kitty, and you're like, half-crazed: How did she get out?? f What was going on? Could it be legal?  Was a neighbor putting Poisoned food outdoors so squirrels, possums, coons,and cats get the poison? Still, after the 2 others died so badly, no poison would have got any other pet of mine, I was not about to let that happen, no one here was, and none of us had Tiki escape on us as we opened the door.  We'd have been right on her like white on rice.My little, hard-headed Tiki! Gone with 4 babies born September 30 she hadn't even introduced to us yet but kept quietly in the front room behind furniture. Babies she obsessed on. She's not just out for fresh air, She has got to be Gone.
I read how the same big corporation giving our kids food additives til they can't concentrate then gives them drugs for their ADDS or cancer.  The foodpeople (Agribiz) are also the drug people.
Click here to add your texUPDATE:
The teeth were pulled and a week later I was still infected and in great pain even taking the oxycontin I take for my back. The dentist said to double up on the 500 of Cipro, that I am resistant to antibiotics.  Meantime Sally the black lab-Great Dane mix my sister and ex dumped on me against my permission a year ago by calling it a birthday present for Marina and going 60 miles to get it and give it to her after I said no way could we handle another animal here,but my ex was still on the title here so there was nothing i could do about him having another dog here,jumped through my bedroom window, sending a sheet of single-strentgh glass into my arm sideways, cutting it open deeply, requiring 11 stitches which oddly the ER let a Special Forces soldier do. The hospital is crawling with Special Forces and they are learning to work in it I guess in case of attack He did such a poor job the doctor tore them all out and told him to try again. They said to keep taking my 1000 mg of Cipro.dEckerd drugs was distributing this 18-tablet prescription of Cipro in the form of 2 tablets a day, saying they had no more. On the third day of it I told the pharmacist I had no car or transpo to keep returning every day for my meds and he said "I know." (? ) I wanted to refill the rest elsewhere but he said I couldn't because the way he'd had to do it, he'd had to charge Medicad for the whole 18 the first day he gave me 2, so now no other place culd finish refilling it as it looked already filled. When that ran out I was still in trouble so had the dentist send the refill order to Kash and Karry instead. Kash and Karry's label says do not take with milk. I had taken all 60 of the ones I got from Eckerds with milk as they sid on the bottle "Take with food". And a hospital had once told me milk counted as food in such instances. We had no real food so I had to take the tablets with milk or not take them at all. Well now the different pharmacy says on their bottle, "Do not take with milk", meaning milk ruins the efficacy of the drug. So why didn't the Eckerd's pharmacy tell me that!! No wonder my mouth hurt like the dickens a whole week after the teeth were pulled--no wonder I was still infected when they were pulled--no woner my stitches are surrounded by bright red skin--I've essentially been off antibiotics all this time, rendering them useless with the act of taking the guys with milk! Eckerds used to have their HQ number in the phone book but don't this year but I think I better report this in case there are complications from this not yet known. Right?I mean, I can't take my interferon til I'm healing and i'm not healing because Eckerds did me wrong!If you wait til you have cirrhosis to take interferon it doesn't work, you will be sick 4 months for no reason. I was a hair from cirrhosis. I realize many many Americans have medical issues, and that many of us catch things in hospitals and that hospitals make lots of errors.It maks it pretty hard to get indignantabout just your own circumstances. yet if each of our individual circumstances were compiled into one log, maybe the nation's leaders and voters would see the huge problem and begin correcting it somehow. Thus each problem should be made known . I wil do my best to help but my arm is too sore from its infection to type any longer right now.However I have learned that people do somehow find this website so maybe someone someda will pay attention? Fat chance but almost all I can do about it is record my experiences with the medical crisis in this country.

My little helper: She has been so nurturing through this ordeal with my arm. She was in bed beside me, not having a blanket to take to her bed, when the window broke. She was actually sleeping closest to it but by some fortune the glass hit me instead of her. She has been helping me bandage it , wash my hair with it...she is the best little buddy I've ever had. The first thing I'm doing when I get some money the day after Thansksgiving is  buy her a comforter on sale at KMart so she can go back to her own room.
Jade, left. The late Tiki and the late Tuala, right.Well, now there's more counter space. I really didn't want more than 2 or 3 cats ever but had to deal. It is actually easier on us now but  was hard to handle the deaths but we're coping a lot better now plus life is easier now.
I want everyone to know that the main reason I keep this site up is because I lost all these photos --once on my hard drive and going to go on CD --when my hard drive crashed, Most of the original photos were destroyed while i was in Calif. and my ex stored them in a shed the roof caved in on. The only place they exist now is on this site. I continually hope to get a CD-Writer someday (there's one on my computer if I can ever get it to work!) and save all these pics back to my hard drive and then store them on CD for my grandchildren/descendants. So I can't let the website go because I'd loose 1000 family photos forever. To justify it all I have been updating the site periodically with whatever is on my mind. It is not here to slander anyone or attract undue attention to my circumstances as if I am the only person life is not fair to. I apologize to anyone who feels  slandered and encourage them to contact me so I can remedy it. We all make errors in judgement. Also I enjoy telling people interested in my grandfather more about him if they care, and also the artist Joe Myers, and my boarding school, and other topics of interest to me.