Help sezzme fix her car (UPDATED)

 As of April 20, a cancer charity has decided to write a check to cover the cost of the car repair.  :)

That's awesome.  :) :) :)
 ---------------

Goal: Raise a minimum of $750 to get the car running again.

I need the car I use fixed in order to be OK. Since I am in a crisis where I may lose my home, the least I can hope for is having the car fixed so I can find shelter soon. The transmission is broken and needs to be replaced. Fortunately we have a 100% honest auto mechanic named Kevin at a local auto shop named “Car Doctor” who has promised to fix the car for $750. Kevin is willing to take donations on our behalf.

In order to participate, contact Kevin by phone at (702) 732-0112, Monday to Friday: 8:00 am to 5:00 pm or Saturday from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm Pacific Standard Time. Tell him you want to donate to the “Sezzme Ford Transmission Fix Fund”. (He DEFINITELY knows who “Sezzme” is!) Ask Kevin for his opinion on the best method of payment.

Kevin can also be contacted via his website at cardoctorofvegas.com

Sezzme's Wishlist Part 3: Artistic Materials

Stuff that would help me to be able to afford my own darn food and expenses after awhile... I am still in the process of learning my new craft.

I make pins and pendants with astronomy themes out of artistic material called "polymer clay" that cures at 300 degrees.  This silicone stuff listed below would help me upgrade my artwork efforts to a MUCH higher level.  Silicone molding material also makes great candy molds too, even though I'm not into making candy.

Silicone mold materials:

1. http://www.makeyourownmolds.com/silicone-spread

2. http://www.makeyourownmolds.com/silicone-plastique

3. http://www.makeyourownmolds.com/ez-shellmaker  

(NOTE:  There are several brands of polymer clay out there.   I've already listed what I need in my Amazon wish list, but if you have any knowledge of the stuff, please avoid "Sculpey III".  That stuff is substandard compared to other polymer clays such as Premo, Fimo, and Kato.

Sezzme's wishlist: Part 2: Foods and supplements

**Foods and supplements**

Bulk foods bought wholesale online are an AWESOME value!  Beats the hell out of grocery store prices.  I bought a 50 pound bag of oat grains once and only had to pay $1.10 a pound for it.   Put it in the rice cooker and end up with something MUCH healthier and tastier than oatmeal.  That lasted for 7 months.  

I have learned a valuable lesson: if you get bulk foods wholesale, you get a MUCH bigger bang for the buck.  They will store forever and food scarcity will no longer be an issue in your life for quite a loooooong while. 

So here's my food list (look for frequent re-edits):

50 pound bag of brown rice so I can always have something healthy to eat. (link will go here, stay tuned)

[Freeze dried veggies so that I can have awesome instant veggie stew whenever I need it](http://store.honeyvillegrain.com/freezedriedvegetablecombo.aspx)

[Dehydrated refried beans seem to be pretty useful](http://store.honeyvillegrain.com/refriedbeanflakeslargecan.aspx)

[Freeze-dried MUSHROOMS!  I love mushrooms!](http://store.honeyvillegrain.com/freezedriedmushroomscan.aspx)

[Whole eggs in powdered form](http://store.honeyvillegrain.com/powderedwholeeggscan.aspx). It beats the livin' heck out of the price of fresh eggs while being a more efficient way of delivering the needed protein.

- [Omega 3 pills, exact brand as recommended by doctor](http://www.nordicnaturals.com/en/Products/Product_Details/514/?ProdID=1428)

Sezzne's wishlist, Part 1: electronic stuff (VERY short list!)

RECEIVED:  THANK YOU!  :)

Replacement laptop battery for my creaky old laptop. (EDIT: YAY!  Someone helped me with this!!!)

[Replacement fan for same laptop)  The bearing is wearing out, making a rattling noise and also scares me in the process.  (EDIT:  YAY!!!  We GOT that one!  That is a relief!)  :)  :)  )

Replacement yellow cartridge for my Epson R200 printer: (EDIT:  GOT IT.  :)


NOT RECEIVED (fortunately not hugely critical)

- Some kind of DVD/blue-ray burner which attaches via USB.

- Alternatively, just a DVD/Blue-ray player.  I don't own any disks, but I can borrow ones from the local library.

Fave movies and TV shows?

I loved "Nova" and Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" on PBS when I was a kid. 

"American Pickers" is always teaching me something new about the history of some interesting object I might have never known even existed.

"From the Edge With Peter Lik" is also excellent, since I've done some amateur photography. 

 "Mythbusters is good too. 

Other works and TV/movie folks I've loved include Ernie Kovacs, Metropolis, “The Wizard of Speed andTime,” [“Dark Star”](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069945/) (hilarious!) and Allegro NonTroppo.

Those dreams I was talking about

Stay tuned to this post for the story on what I now know I could have been... and why there still might be hope.  This will be documented sometime during Thursday, December 15.

EDIT (some hours later)...  GAAAAHH.. I have officially crashed.   I have been saving up my energy for many days now just so that I could burn bright on ROTD day.   

That I did accomplish... but those who burn brightest are also those who burn out the quickest  :-/  

I keep forgetting that I am much more limited than I used to be. 

Stay tuned for the story of my lost dreams regarding becoming an innovative engineer... and why, even though I've lost those dreams, I am grateful that the cancer experience has taught me what my dreams were in the first place.

If you could have the most awesome shout-out ever on your behalf, what would it be?

Wishful thinking, but what the heck. 

I'd like to see Steven Colbert sneak in some reference to some bird species into one of his scripts, ending that spoken comment with “sez me!” Perhaps he could add some sort of quick flying/flapping gesture with both hands along the way to completely confirm the shout-out. 


Only the people participating in this thread would know what THAT means, but the news would probably spread across Reddit like wildfire. THAT would be fun. :-D

Relationship status?

There's a whole, huge, inspiring story about that. You tend to show your real character under pressure. Throughout the incredibly tough time we have had these last few years, my guy (I'll be calling him "Rezz" in the ROTD thread) has persisted with guts, determination and integrity despite the hell we have both survived through. He has inspired me to become a much better, braver person in the process, despite his own very serious health issues.

Stay tuned for the rest of the story... I need it add it here.

EDIT from several weeks later:  Unfortunately things are not going so well nowadays... it's too depressing on top of everything else that's going on in my life so I don't want to talk about it.  :(

What do you do when you’re not on reddit?

I am now focusing on creating brooches and pendants at home with an astronomy theme. The same technique I use to create those things allow me to make brooches and pendants out of ANY image you can send to me. I'm focusing on astronomy because Hubble images are free to use and I LOVE science. (See more pics are in the "plug/promote/advocate" section below.)

Otherwise it's sleep, eat, deal with life, deal with doctors, rinse, repeat. I don't socialize much. Sometimes if I have enough energy, I visit local parks and beautiful neighborhood places that tourists on the Strip have no clue about. I used to geocache years ago but not so much nowadays.

I make customized Pins and Pendants! :)

Info on my astronomy-themed pins and pendants is going here.


Here is a brand-new Flickr photostream to start things off.

I'll be uploading more pics and hopefully videos too throughout the day of Thursday, December 15, 2011.  I'll be explaining the process.  No paint was used in the making of these brooches.



EDIT:  Answering all the questions is taking a whole lot more time than I thought.  Also my friend with the good still/video camera is not back here yet.  Keep watching this blog for details.

What are your favorite books?

"Shadow Divers" by Robert Kurson was so awesome I almost missed a plane once while reading it. That book REALLY needs to be a movie.

"Doctor Folkman's War" by Robert Cooke is about the doctor who did the research for the drug which is currently saving my life. I read the book 10 years ago. The day when I found out that I was going to benefit directly from Judah Folkman's work, I felt very happy about the connection between that awesome book I'd already read and the drug that was going to extend my life.

"The Talk Book" by Gerald Goodman is thick, very academic and hard to read. IF you can still get through it, it's AWESOME for knowing how to communicate well verbally. I've read it hundreds of times over the years.

Any book written by the author Barbara Sher. Period. Looking for a better direction in life? Go to her.

I'll post more here as I think of them.  I used to darn-near live in book stores.

I love books. :)

What is your favorite music?

I'll just start here by linking to the Ectophiles music-subculture website. That's a pretty good guide to where I come from musically without breaking the 9000 character limit for this questionaire. I haven't been active in Ecto for quite awhile, but my musical tastes still have roots there. 

Also for music, I'd like to do a positive shout-out to Youtube user "melodysheep"  who actually threatens to give Autotune a good name. ;)

I'll most likely be linking to other awesome music pieces here.  Check this particular post throughout the day for links to other music that intrigues me as we go on.

What creative ideas might you have for making our ROTD subreddit more interesting?

Oh I have a LOT of thoughts on that one. My apologies to the mods, because your subreddit is wonderful. Still, I hope I am not being too forward with some of my ideas I'll offer here.   I will not be offended if none of these can work or even apply to the situation.

First of all, I'd have a sister subreddit for discussion of this subreddit, call it "Meta-ROTD" or something like that. Use the sister-subreddit to let people contribute ideas and discuss how to attract more folks to ROTD.

Second of all, I would have each ROTD start with a full paragraph from the mods that describes WHY the person was chosen for the ROTD. What made them notable enough to be Redditor of the Day in the first place? What made them stand out enough to be featured? That would give each ROTD thread a much better context.

Thirdly, instead of the traditional questionaire, I would have a "question bank" that the nominee could draw from. Pick x number of questions from the question bank that suit your particular personality, quirks and life purposes for your ROTD interview. The entire question bank would have over 200 questions, each one as interesting, intelligent and thought-prevoking as possible. It would say a lot about the person to see what questions they actually choose for their ROTD summary!

If you could create your own national holiday, what would be it's name and what would it celebrate?

(NINJA EDIT:  We now have a subreddit just for this subject!  Come join us over at /r/mishmashday!)

Back to the original post...

An interesting thing about the month of August (in the USA at least) is that particular month has no national holiday as part of it's existence.. So I would love to create a new national holiday called "MishMash Day." I'd simply call it "Mishmash." It would occur on the second Saturday in August.


On that day, people would throw parties that deliberately mix up the usual traditions from every other holiday of the year as incongruously as humanly possible. The sillier and more nonsensical, the better. Put up a little Christmas tree, decorate it with halloween items and put Easter eggs underneath it, for instance. Serve eggnog with your barbeque. Grill a turkey, stick a patriotic flag on it and serve it under the mistletoe. Maybe wear a stovetop hat - like Abe Lincoln - to add some Presidents Day flair to the goings-on. The more national holidays you mix into the party, the better. Then you end the day's festivities by counting down to midnight, shoot some fireworks into the year and yell "Happy same old year!"


Everyone could adapt Mishmash to the traditions of their own country. Heck, a creative crowd who is planning a good Mishmash celebration could deliberately learn some of the national holiday traditions of other countries to include it in their own party plans, if they really wanted to make it even more fun and creative. :)


I think that another aspect of MishMash should be to have a birthday cake in the name of some random person in the group, maybe someone who needs some cheering up at the time, no matter when their actual birthday happens during the year.


A variation on this idea would be to celebrate off the birthday of someone your crowd mostly tends to admire. Some examples would be an Ansel Adams birthday cake for a group of photographers, or a birthday cake in Neil DeGrasse Tyson's name for astronomy-oriented folks, or perhaps John Lasseter for people who love 3-D animation. (That last one would be MY choice. :)


Maybe for their Mishmash day, a few fun-seeking Redditors would decide on featuring a Reddit alien birthday cake bearing the specific date of whatever day Reddit officially got started.


I think a birthday cake served on this deliberately incorrect day for a birthday - for someone who might not even BE there, no less - would be a perfect centerpiece tradition for MishMash. :)

Do you love where you live?

"I live in a city with two personalities. It's like getting to know two twin brothers, one who is an extreme extrovert, one who is a real introvert. Everyone gets to know the extrovert at the party, while the introvert gets eclipsed and is mostly ignored by the rest of the world. 

Most people don't realize that the Strip is just one crazy street and that there's a whole other, nuanced, quieter dimension to discover in the city where I live. 

I love the hidden, introverted side of Las Vegas. From the sound of laughter from children at the local neighborhood schoolgrounds, to the quiet, winged beauty of a egrets and herons taking off into the sky at Clark County Wetlands Park, to the multidimensional present and past history of the local valley as showcased at Springs Preserve to the ancient desert secrets to be learned at Red Rock Canyon to the last surviving farm/orchard in the area... and so much more.

I appreciate my city's quieter, more introspective side that the tourists on the Strip would never understand, satisfied that I still have much to discover and learn from the many hidden, more thoughtful aspects of this multidimensional desert valley.

I also want to let everyone know that this city also features a future real-life spaceport. (I wish I had an "in" with that company so I could hang out for a day with their engineers.)

Why do you think that you got nominated for Redditor of The Day?

I'm a breast cancer patient. For those who speak oncology, what I got is "triple negative, poorly differentiated, stage 4, grade 3, and metastatic to the liver." Sometime around 5-6 months ago, fellow redditor "twomoreandatinkle" was inspired by something I wrote, and quoted me to the ROTD mods: "Also realizing all the dreams I've lost along the years - before I even knew I had them - has really started to sink in."

Originally nominated for lost dreams? That one made me stop and think. Do I REALLY want to be known on Reddit only for my lost dreams? Is that really the legacy I want to leave from participating in my "Redditor Of The Day" thread?

Well that really made me re-consider a few things. Yeah, cancer is a huge part of my life and it does drag me down, but it's not all of who I am. So I changed direction and told the ROTD mods to hold off for awhile so I could re-think all this I'm still a breast cancer patient, yes. I have missed out on many career dreams, yes. However for this ROTD nomination, I decided to meditate and re-consider more on who I really am beyond the disease, beyond the lost dreams. I found some really cool, creative multi-dimentional aspects. In this ROTD, I will share them with you. :)