If you’re not familiar with chemical injury, here’s some key points about this devastating illness:

• Toxic injury is often characterized by a heightened sensitivity to very small amounts of air pollution, mold, petrochemicals and other toxins found in our everyday environment, this sensitivity being called Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), chemical injury or toxic injury.
• Toxic injury is a chronic, debilitating and sometimes life-threatening biologically-based (i.e., physical) condition for which there is no known cure, causing serious financial, employment, learning, housing, health, social and other consequences.
• Multiple Chemical Sensitivity is recognized by the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, and other state and federal governmental agencies, which have supported the health and welfare of people with this condition. The Veterans Administration, as documented in the VA’s report on GWS, released Monday, Nov. 17th, 2008, specifically states when discussing the cause of Gulf War Syndrome that “It is well established that some people are more vulnerable to adverse effects of certain chemicals than others, due to variability in biological processes that neutralize those chemicals, and clear them from the body.”

As part of our own personal contribution to Toxic Injury Awareness and Education Month, I’m going to direct you to a new article written by Michael and I that is now on our website: What’s So Tough About Home Repairs, Maintenance And Construction? It’s not easy when you’re living with a family member who has chemical injury.”

We hope you find it both educational and informative!

Accessible books.

I can’t read printed books. I can’t repetitively flip pages, or hold a book open. Even if I could, many books are moldy or have other problems such as disgusting modern inks that give me migraines and asthma. Prior to becoming disabled, I was a voracious reader, inhaling books to the tune of one or two daily.

Since the early 1990s, I’ve read by getting “Talking Books.” The National Library for the Blind and Disabled provides the “Talking Books” service (books on tape), and has hundreds of thousands of unabridged books available to its patrons – at no charge.

It’s a great service. Truly.

But.

Imagine a world in which millions of books have been published. You, the reader, can only get books that a panel has decided should be made available to you. Resources are limited. One must understand.

One does.

Truly.

It’s like any other public library – the collection is limited by the resources at hand, and someone has to decide which books enter the collection.

Normally, when a reader can’t find a book they want at a library, they can purchase any type of desired reading. However, while both new and used books are widely available, finding an accessible unabridged copy of a book is a tad more difficult. And expensive, even if one exists.

Enter Bookshare.

Bookshare is

an online community [that] enables book scans to be shared, thereby leveraging the collections of thousands of individuals who regularly scan books, eliminating significant duplication of effort. Bookshare.org takes advantage of a special exemption in the U.S. copyright law that permits the reproduction of publications into specialized formats for the disabled.

The majority of books on Bookshare.org – over 40,000 titles now – are there because an individual with a disability – most often a volunteer – decided to share that book with the rest of the community.

Wrap your head around this, Oh Best Beloved: my friend, M, scanned over 400 printed books this last year as a volunteer for Bookshare. I could hug her to bits because a chunk of that total included books that she scanned specifically for me – books that I never would have had the chance to read otherwise.

M, by the way, is also disabled. She’s blind, as are most of Bookshare’s volunteers. She scans books using a standard flatbed scanner and then uses an optical character recognition program (OCR) to translate the books into a rich text format file. Another volunteer proofreads (or validates, in Bookshare terminology) the contents of the file. Bookshare’s staff then translates the file into electronic braille files and into special DAISY html files that both blind readers and sighted disabled readers, like myself, can download and read on any personal computer.

How cool is that?

So, on the occasion of Thanksgiving I want to say: thank you, M, and thank you, all the other volunteers and staff at Bookshare. What you are doing is amazing.

If you’d like to learn more about Bookshare, you can visit their site for more information. If you’d like to volunteer to help out by scanning or proofreading books – anyone with a computer can volunteer, although completed books are only available to the disabled – go read their page about volunteering.

It’s a good organization. Worth your time. What they do helps make the world a better place.

Trust me on this one. I know.

Last Monday, even though it was raining, we decided to take a drive to find the new wind farm that was completed this summer in northeast Wisconsin. The wind farm was designed to generate 145 megawatts (MW) of electricity from 88 Vestas wind turbines, which means it’s capable of powering about 36,000 homes. In practical terms, that means that this wind field alone generates enough power to provide the electricity for two out of every hundred residences in Wisconsin.

Sounds like a winner to me.

Right as we approached, the sun came out from a break in the clouds behind us, creating a spectacular rainbow arching over the wind turbines.

Awesome.

I underestimated.

Michael asked our local experts – the Green Bay Packers – if they could give us the actual data we needed to turn my estimate into a more accurate comparison. Since they are nicest team in the USA, (as well as the best – Go Pack!) they dug out the exact data that we needed.

Have I mentioned how nice the Packers are?

So – how deadly is professional football compared to Thoroughbred horse racing?

If the National Football League had the same fatality rate for their players during the regular season as racehorses have during races, more than 50 NFL football players would die each year from injuries sustained during games.

More than fifty deaths?

Football would get banned.

The individual Michael spoke to at the Packers office, btw, said that the only game-related player fatality in the NFL that he could personally remember occurred back in 2001, and it didn’t actually occur during a game: a Vikings team member died of heat stroke during a practice.

It’s time for the Thoroughbred racing industry to clean up its act. Provide cash incentives for longevity and soundness. Require synthetic surfaced tracks – which have already cut the fatality rate in half where they’ve been installed. And stop rewarding the genetics of greed.

Imagine, just imagine, for one moment, Oh Best Beloved, what it would be like to lose the ordinary use of your hands.

Trust me on this one: it sucks. I, at least, still have some use of my hands, although this blog comes to you courtesy of what is known as ‘adaptive technology,’ which I use to get it written.

Many of our military personnel serving overseas have come home with injuries that make it impossible to use their hands for tasks the ordinary web surfer doesn’t give a second thought to doing. Web surfing? Try that when you can’t use a keyboard or a mouse. E-mail? Internet shopping? Blogging? How about watching a DVD – when you can’t hit the keyboard buttons that start it playing?

Enter Valour-IT. Valour-IT, a non-profit volunteer organization, has a solution. They provide laptops with adaptive software to American military personnel who were wounded while fighting overseas.

The cost to the injured soldier or Marine? Zero. Nadda. Nothing. The cost to the taxpayer? Zero. Nadda. Nothing.

Once a year, Valour-IT asks for donations to help cover the costs of providing these laptops. One hundred percent of donations – every single penny raised – goes directly to the purchase and shipment of laptops for severely wounded service members. No skimming. No fat salaries for administration. And it’s all made possible by the hard work of dedicated volunteers who saw a need, stepped up to the plate, and found a way to fill it.

Right now, Valour-IT provides 100 new laptops a month through this program, and the need continues.

Can you help?

Click here to donate on-line via PayPal (you can use a major credit card even if you don’t have a PayPal account). You’ll be taken to “Chaotic Synaptic Activity,” the site for the Valour-IT Navy fund-raising team that I’m supporting.

Every dollar counts. Skip a latte today, or delay downloading a handful of MP3s from iTunes, and you’ll have $5 right there that you can give.

And what will you have done?

You’ll have helped a wounded warrior regain the freedom to read a book, email friends, surf the web, or even take college courses.

It’s the least we can do.