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Sleep and Trauma

They say that adults who experience sleep disturbances where they can't sleep at night is because of childhood trauma, and because the night is the time when everyone who hurt them were sleeping that it remains embedded deep into the subconscious which prevents that person from being able to sleep at night so they can satisfy the need for calmness and safety that the night brought to them as a child.  I guess this explains why I've had trouble sleeping at night from as young as I can remember.   Everything from being bullied at school and on the streets to both parents being abusive left imprints on me that no amount of psychological intervention will ever be able to erase.  I may be luckier than others that my slower development of emotions and understanding shielded me from becoming a wounded animal cowering in the corner needing medication to control my anxieties, although there are times I feel like curling up into a corner and wishing for tears to carry away all the ...
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The Ready Meal Diet - A Journey into Obesity

25 years ago I was smiling as I looked into a mirror of me fitting into a long purple dress that was a size 14.  Weight loss had been a battle for me as since 11 years old I had ballooned in weight.  I wasn't the only one, my father had developed a pot belly too.  One would've assumed that whatever we were both eating was responsible, however my mother was doing all the late night and weekend cooking which often involved healthy stews and salads and she too was on the large size so it baffled her that we were all putting on so much weight.  She attributed his weight gain to him drinking beers and as for me she couldn't figure it out at all. So what had changed in the course of a year that I suddenly shot from a healthy 5.6 stone girl to an 8 stone marshmallow?  From the early years my mother provided me with my own school lunches which were often sandwiches, a small yogurt and a bag of crisps or a piece of fruit with a bottle of vimto or orange juice.  Afte...
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Pets Are Not Vegan by Choice

This is another topic that has really hit a bad nerve with me. Vegan pets. Unless your pet is a rabbit, a guinea pig, a chinchilla, a chicken, or a species of bird that is a herbivore  (some birds eat worms and other small insects) then your pet should be eating meat as part of its daily requirement. Unlike humans animals do not have a choice, they either are herbivore, omnivore, or carnivore.  You can imagine how much this irks me when I hear of hardcore vegans who are feeding dogs and cats a vegan diet and saying how healthy they are.  For the untrained eye they may look like they're coping when in fact some serious organ damage is happening in their bodies from the lack of meat and fish, especially with cats. Cats are carnivores - no veg period!  Just because they eat grass doesn't mean they're getting anything nutritional from it nor that they enjoy eating it.  They eat the grass out of necessity to help them vomit up clumps of hair and dust they've swallowe...
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A Dog Is For Life, Not Just For Lockdown

First we hear of dog kennels getting full after Christmas.  Now we've got dogs being adopted and promptly returned for silly reasons during lockdown.  It was kinda inevitable that when we were told about needing a second lockdown that people living by themselves would seek out a fur baby for company, but once again there's been lots of puppies being adopted and returned for all kinds of reasons - the new owners couldn't afford it, it was too difficult to train it, or in one ridiculous case it didn't match the colour of the furniture . Honestly have we forgotten that dogs have needs of their own and what happens when kennels become too full?  Have the stories of dogs needing to be put down because there's nowhere else for them to go not reached the ears of the masses?  Oh I'm sure you think your pure-bred dog is something special, but if it were that special you wouldn't be giving it away!  And no, being a pure-bred does not make it exempt from being put down...
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In-app Purchases are a Cancer

I remember buying the original The Sims back in the day and getting excited over the Pets expansion.  What I didn't expect was a trend soon to follow where many games would be segmented into various DLC packs to make up a game that in the end once you added the cost altogether would be as expensive as buying a brand new PC. This trend of buying extra content doesn't just stop with games that I will now refer to as "incomplete games" like The Sims franchise, but is used in many games such as MMOs and phone app games for buying optional items. Now personally I don't mind games like MMOs where buying extra content is optional and not game breaking if you don't buy it.  What does bug me is games that gate you and massively slow down your progress or require you to use items that can only be purchased from an online shop using real cash. For example I used to play Grand Fantasia, a cute anime style MMO that was free to play, but every time your gear broke you neede...
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Lockdown Should Mean "Lock Down"

So this Covid-19 virus has now been around for 2 years and our awesome British government (sarcasm) still hasn't come to terms that in order to protect the people around us and to reduce the number of infected we need to keep our bloody doors shut and stay behind them.  Our government isn't setting a good example when they're bribing people to go to public restaurants, opening public schools, and are filmed shaking hands with random people in hospitals.  What in the hell was all that about? Now that there's a vaccine being passed around the most vulnerable members of the public the government has decided to relax the lockdown regulations once more, even if most the public had already given up on trying to guess what the hell they were or weren't supposed to do before due to constantly changing and conflicting press announcements or just didn't give a crap. Aside from our government being run by an amoeba who hasn't brushed his hair since the day he fell out ...
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