Not A Company Website
No, this is not the H Mueller Design website. That company no longer exists since I retired more than a decade ago. I was looking to create a blog where I could capture my thoughts and experiences with Parkinson’s – I knew that it was going to bad, but just how bad, I will still have to experience and then capture it in the blog. Except it is not a blog in the the traditional sense but rather a personal, non-public, journal.
So it is a blog?
Yes, but not really.
A digital space where I can capture my thoughts and impressions while on this Parkinson’s journey.
So there is no About Us or Contact Us pages, and no comments.
Because I am using WordPress and, for weird reasons I will explain later, it contains an online courses section, I may still refer to it as a Blog, even though it is a journal created for therapeutic purposes.
I can report growth
It has grown in scope in the mean time as learn more. So I should break it into separate functional units. Otherwise the sever will not be able to cope. Just the last few days it has become clear that the online courses section will be expanded.
The Diagnosis
I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disease. Over time your nerves or neurons if you want to be more precise and consequently your physical and mental abilities decline. However, it turns out that if you exercise the very abilities that you are losing, neuroplasticity kicks in and you slow down the progression.
I took that seriously and do daily walker runs as I call them, I resemble a crazy apparition when I come storming down the hallways. I have severe neuropathy in my lower limbs but they say ignore the pain and that’s what I do, I push through it and get going, I talk my problems through. It does seem to help with my stamina and balance, and it clears my mind and I can think clearly. But plasticity only appears to slow down the progression: I needed to find a way to enter text into the blog as my typing skills had all but disappeared since Parkinson’s.
I tried various voice to text options and it worked reasonably well but as my voice worsened due to PD, it struggled to recognize my speech and I abandoned that. Now after month’s of painful retraining of the remaining neurons in my typing pathway, I can type well enough – when I am tired or multitasking like typing while speaking on the phone, there just aren’t enough neurons left for the brain to rope in, and my typing skills disappear again – as the brain gives priority to the phone conversation I am having. This type of experience is important to share and the site will be used for things like that! For that to be effective, as well as for the school, one needs to communicate.
At the moment, as intended, only some of my family and close friends actually read my blog postings and I appreciate and rely on their feedback and advice – but they know how to contact me and don’t need a Contact Us page.
I hope to journal my experiences with Parkinson’s. I plan to cover several different topics that are of importance to me now:
Why HMD?
I still had kept the domain name “hmuellerdesign.com” for sentimental reasons, and also to keep the email account active. So I am using this domain name to point to my blog. Although it sounds like a business website, it clearly is not. For example, there are no pages, like About Us or Contact Us, etc. other than this explanation home page.
Finding Information
The blog post entries are stored by the date they are created and will be displayed by date. This makes sense when I discuss the chronological progression of my Parkinson’s. From time to time I put in a post that came up in a discussion or I read about online, at that time.
I have identified several topics that I intend to cover so I will further organize the Blog articles by topic, or category in WordPress language. When you select a category via the HMD Blog drop down menu on the right, the posts in that category is displayed in date sequence.
Special Case of Christianity
I think it makes sense to read my posts in the Parkinson’s and Care Home categories as I post them, you can easily scroll back in time to see older post you may have missed to pick up where a particular story or topic was started – but I will try and follow a logical date progression.
However the Christianity category is different and special. I recommend that you start it in the beginning at least so you can understand my Christian journey, which is really unusual. I am grateful how God has allowed me to learn at my own pace until he revealed the key to understanding all of the bible. This is a fantastic story, very exciting how I was led to discover it! I found out that I, and almost all of Christianity have it wrong! Surely that cannot be?
But yes, God has led me, a Jewish misfit in Society, to see the splendid truth of his love and his unlimited power and glory! This is magnificent news that everyone would want to hear, right? It appears not to be the case. People just don’t accept new information easily and they are loathe to listen or read about new concepts. And, as I found out, people with Parkinson’s have an especially hard time being given any credence.
For a while I hesitated to do anything with this information. What if I was wrong? I had been a member of the Worldwide Church of God for years, I had listened to Herbert W. Armstrong preach dozens of times and I found him genuine and sincere. His arguments were logical – and it was intoxicating to believe that I was a member of the only true Church of God.
And it turned out to be false, it was a cult and Mr Herbert Armstrong was not God’s Apostle to the end time church. But I had staked my professional reputation on the belief that the Worldwide Church of God was the true church of God, that the world would soon end, but before that happens, we, the members of the True Church, would all be taken to a place of safety, Petra in Jordan, while the Beast Power, the Antichrist, terrorized society for 3.5 years until the return of Christ!
Yes I believed that and I was ready to tell everyone about it so I got a colleague to help me put up dispensers to dispense The Plain Truth, the flagship magazine of the Worldwide Church of God, in the busy emergency waiting rooms that saw thousands of people per day. It flew of the shelves. It turned out not everybody was happy…
I was told by my boss that management was not happy. So I had to remove all the magazines, I had put my professional credibility on the line to spread the gospel. I was sincere in my belief but I was wrong about the Worldwide Church of God. I had learned a lot through them and I am grateful for that.
A friend got me a job at the Medical Research Council and several months later our application to immigrate to Canada was approved and we were off to Canada. My journey in Christianity has definitely not been boring.
So I encourage you to read from the beginning as I journey from ignorant atheist to discovering the True Gospel. It is a long story and I give a lot more detail.
You can also search for a specific word or phrase using the search feature.
As a new development I have decided to create some online courses for a fictional charity called Happy Monkey Design (HMD). Of course, training needs to be followed in a specific sequence, not by date. For that purpose I will create a menu item specifically for HMD Courses, which will probably renamed to HMDLearn.
Page Appearance
This page looks awful but I plead for patience – I have had a lot to learn. The WordPress theme (2020) was installed by default. There is a whole new world of website design with WordPress to get to know and my mind is really slow these days – I will try and make the website better as I learn more.
But I realize my time is limited so I feel a sense of urgency to get the information down…