Margret Sloan

My favorite way to spend a few minutes on a mental health break is to play online backgammon or some of the free card games on Yahoo or other online game sites. I first discovered online games way back in the early 90’s, when Microsoft launched their “Village of Games.” Now there are dozens of different sites, some with excellent graphics and large numbers of regular players from all over the world.

If I have a full hour to spend on R&R I’ll try to find a good partner and play one or two Spades games. If I only have a few minutes I’ll play something fast, like backgammon or cribbage. Sometimes I like the cutthroat strategies of Hearts to sharpen my mind. These are not time wasters as much as they are mental exercises to keep me alert and sharpen my critical thinking skills.

I’m a little nervous about my nephew’s plans to go to South Africa this summer as part of his college studies. The news there has not been good this week, with a lot of violence and even riots over a wave of African immigrants.

My nephew is a real sweetheart – a humanitarian and he has always had a strong interest in helping people. The college program takes a lot of precautions to protect the students, but such an unstable culture as the African countries exhibit makes me very concerned. He’s leaving the U. S. at the end of the month, so it occurred to me that something he might appreciate taking with him would be a calling card. You know, the prepaid phone cards that let you make international calls at very cheap rates?

I found an internet site that sells the phone cards in different denominations and has different types of cards, from single use to ones you can reload. From reading about the rates between the United States and Johannesburg, it is much much cheaper to call FROM the U. S. to South Africa than to call the U.S. FROM South Africa. So I will get him a card with at least 20 minutes of calling time that he can keep in his wallet and in case of emergency he can at least call home and let us know he needs help. Otherwise, because of the expense, his mother should call him at a pre-arranged time to save money, so I’ve buying a calling card for her, too.

Our grandson was here over the weekend. His mom dropped him off Saturday morning and we got to spend the whole day together. He usually goes to bed pretty early at home and I like to keep him on the same sleep schedule although not on the same routine.

At home he usually falls asleep watching TV and his mom moves him to his bed and leaves his clothes on him, then in the morning he gets a bath in a big hurry because he has to leave for school.

At my house (my rules!) he takes a bath after dinner and puts on pajamas, then he is allowed to watch TV or a movie and then he puts himself to bed. I tuck in the covers and say, “Sleep tight – don’t let the bedbugs bite!”

Well, I’ve always said that because my parents always said that and their parents always said that. We’ve never had to worry about bedbugs – it was just a cute rhyme that we said out of love. But what do you do if you really do have to worry about letting the bedbugs bite? Well, there is a web site that can help people with that: bedbugsguide.com and I found it while surfing the internet with my grandson, because he asked what bedbugs look like.

So if you have a problem with bedbugs where you live, check out this site for how to kill bedbugs and soon you will be able to “sleep tight” again.

I have no idea why I am so fascinated with earthquakes, but I have a morbid curiousity with them. I look at the USGS earthquake maps almost every day. I see patterns and clusters of quakes and it is amazing how Mother Nature can impact our daily lives with such unpredictable occurrences as earthquakes and tsunamis.

The earthquake in China was devastating. The reported number of people killed keeps growing, by practically hundreds by the hours. The last time I looked it was over 12,000 dead and 18,000 missing or trapped in the wreckage of schools, office buildings and apartment homes. My heart goes out to these people and I hope that the rest of the world steps up to help provide aid to these victims.

Was in the mood for a chick flick so I picked up Georgia Rule with Jane Fonda, Lindsay Lohan and Felicity Huffman. It’s better than I expected – a combination of good writing and excellent acting. The Director, Garry Marshall, also directed “Pretty Woman” and “The Princess Diaries.”

Something I do for fun when I am watching a DVD on the set with a remote control is to use the Spanish subtitles and then watch it again in Spanish if the DVD has that option. I took Spanish in school and I can understand a lot of it when I hear it, but I never have the opportunity to speak it to anyone. I feel terribly handicapped when I am around a lot of Spanish speaking people and cannot participate in the conversation.

I would love to go to the Spanish immersion camp they host every month out west. You go for 2 weeks and everything around you is in Spanish. Being able to speak it and have feedback from someone interested in helping you improve your speaking ability would be the best part for me.