WASH--AND DRY--YOUR HANDS:
With cold and flu season approaching, we're told about the importance, in order to stay healthy, of washing our hands.  But a new study suggests the second part of that is also important--how you dry your hands:
"To stay healthy, be sure to wash your hands a lot.  But what we don't hear so often is the rest of that story: To best prevent the spread of germs, you also need to DRY your hands.  That point's driven home by an interesting pair of studies published Tuesday in the Journal of Applied Microbiology. The studies, quite transparently funded by Dyson Limited of the United Kingdom (maker of such technologically advanced gadgets as this summer's coolest fan and my favorite vacuum cleaner) set out to determine how the company's new Airblade hand-dryer stacked up against conventional hot-air dryers such as are found in public bathrooms.  Under some circumstances, the Dyson dryer (which uses ambient-temperature air to kind of shear water off hands held stationary in the device) did a better job than the hot-air dryers of keeping just-washed hands' bacterial loads low.  But when all the air dryers were pitted against plain paper towels, the conclusion was clear: Drying hands with paper towels did a better job than the machines of getting rid of lingering bacteria....Of course, the study notes that paper towels can make a big mess themselves because they're hard to dispose of in a sanitary, non-germ-spreading way. But still, the study couldn't escape the finding that even the latest high-tech hand-drying gizmo doesn't quite stand up to good ol' low-tech paper towels."

We all need to stay healthy this winter.  Wash...and dry!...those hands.

MOEBIUS MEMORIES:
I think I have mentioned here one of my earliest memories:  deciding, at the age of four, a number of days before Christmas, to go ahead and open up one of my Xmas presents way early.  (It turned out to be a stuffed animal, a zebra).  And what I remember is, trying to tell my parents about it...though they had a tough time understanding me.

But there's another piece to the story.  Another memory I have is when it was time for my sixth birthday.  That would have been February 1968.  And so a birthday party was held for me, on a Sunday afternoon.  A number of our relatives were over...my cousins Tim and Lynne, my Aunt Lois, my Uncle Jerry.  Soon the time came for my birthday cake, and what I remember is all of us sitting around the table in our dining room, and everyone singing first "Happy Birthday" to me and then, to the same tune, crooning "how old are you?" to me.  And by then, I could speak much better, and naturally I was enjoying all the excitement, so at the first chorus of "how old are you?", I piped up and said, "I'm six!"

And to me, what that makes me think of today is that I did that because, yes, I could talk better by then; I'm sure I'd progressed a lot.  And that's the thing to remember for those with Moebius Syndrome, and for those parents whose children have it:  it does seem to me that over and over, this is what happens:  once those who have Moebius begin to figure things out, watch out!  Their progress will be rapid, it will be swift, and it can be something to behold.  Take speaking.  It can take longer for those with Moebius Syndrome to speak well.  Our mouths, tongues, and lips are shaped differently and work differently from others.  It can take a little bit longer to figure out how to talk.  After all, we have to do it differently than do others.  But once we've figured it out, off we go. 

There can be challenges every day, but there will also be victories every day, some of them small, but some of them big indeed.  And that's what those quotes I've been featuring from David Roche have been driving at; if we come back every day and try, try again, there will be victories (there will be setbacks, too), and there will be those moments of grace.  Seize them when they come.