If you want to get ahead then you have to get up

Thanks to all the lovely lassies who left comments on my blog yesterday I have a spring in my step today. This is good because I hauled myself out of bed this morning with some things on my ‘To Do’ list that I knew would pose a bit of a challenge.

My husband brought my mother in law home from hospital yesterday, which is great, however although she is doing well both of us question whether or not she may have been discharged a wee bit too early. However she is delighted to be home and I guess that’s what matters.

I did have a wee laugh to myself yesterday though when we were waiting to find out if she would be getting home or not. I got a text from my husband saying that ‘the doctors would be doing their rounds in the afternoon and the hospital would let us know if they going to release her”. Release her!  That makes her sound like some 94 year old villain.

Nurse, call my son, I'm making a bid for freedom

I should explain of course that my husband is an retired policeman. I guess you can take the man out of the service but can’t take the service out of the man eh! It’s the same when I hear him on the phone and he is spelling something out to the caller using the phonetic alphabet. He’s obviously got a handle on the old ‘b’ for bravo, ‘e’ for echo, ‘p’ for papa thing, whereas me I say things like ‘b’ for balloon, ‘e’ for eczema and p for ‘pringles’ (yeh the ‘e’ for eczema is a cracker, it causes all sorts of confusion )

Anyhow I digress. So, today one of my tasks is to telephone Social Services to find out about the progress not of the care needs assessment we requested be carried out for my mother in law. This was requested back in August 2011 and we’re still waiting. Now I know that there have been cuts to funding and care teams have been restructured but I’m afraid I’m just going to have to step over all of that and push for this to be done. This is especially important as, in addition to my mother in law’s recent collapse, she also suffered a mini stroke before Christmas. So I donned my riot gear, squared my shoulders and got down to making ‘the’ call.

"Yes Good Morning, I'd like to speak to a social worker please".

Of course I know that this will be sorted out, and to achieve this we’re quite prepared to politely push as hard as we need to, but what about the people who don’t have someone to do this for them?

Now it would be fair to say that I know my way around the system. This is not just because Health and Social Care is the Honours degree I’m studying but because as a carer you bloomin well need to get up to speed pretty fast. In this respect the internet is your saviour. At the touch of a button you can have access to oodles and oodles of valuable and empowering information. It is this reliance on the internet which brings to the forefront of my mind the recent protest in the US. It seems that media industries plan to introduce these new laws (that to little old me don’t appear to have been well thought out) which could result in innocent victims falling foul. From what I’ve read am I wrong in saying that these laws appear to be focussed on ushering in a new era of censorship?

Many of the blogs I usually read were blacked out as a protest against the proposed laws.  I didn’t take part in the black out although I do acknowledge that this is not just an issue for the US. Yesterday I admit was a bit of a down day for me and instead of protesting I choose to cheer myself up writing poetry.  However this protest has stayed in my mind so this is my wee attempt at flagging this up and showing support.

OK if I’ve got this right this is about laws in the US but is something that impacts on us all – especially us bloggers.  In the UK we rushed in the Digital Economy Act, which hasn’t yet been implemented due to legal challenges.  The big question around all of this surely, whatever you are in the world, is that the powers that be don’t seem to be able to highlight data that shows the extent of the impact of illegal file sharing in the internet.

God damn these illegal knitting games are good!

Now I might be seeing this all the wrong way but isn’t this the kind of data that needs to be part of any discussion to ‘manage’ the internet?

I guess it’s not just the here and now we need to think about with this one, but what the internet will be in the future.

“The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow” (Bill Gates).  It’s nice to know that people are getting together in our town square and talking about this stuff