“Family raising $10,000 to buy guide dog to help son of San Jose police pilot - San Jose Mercury News” plus 1 more |
| Family raising $10,000 to buy guide dog to help son of San Jose police pilot - San Jose Mercury News Posted: 24 Jan 2011 05:17 AM PST By Lisa Fernandez Louis Navin wants a dog. But this isn't your typical 9-year-old's request for a pet. His parents want the dog as much as Louis does. That's because the chocolate Labrador named Button may be able to save Louis' life, and definitely, give him more freedom. The Navins are trying to raise $10,000 to buy the highly trained medical service dog, so he can join the family by summer. "The dog is going to go everywhere with him," said San Jose police Sgt. Tom Navin, a 25-year veteran who is the department's chief pilot at Mineta San Jose International Airport. "It's going to give him independence." Along with a host of medical issues such as hypotonia, which means he has weak muscle tone, and hypexemia, where he suffers from low oxygen levels, the most severe health concern for Louis is epilepsy. Most attacks occur at night, which is why he still sleeps in his parents' room on a cot. His dad and mom keep special magnets on their night stands. When Louis is having a seizure, they quickly place the magnets over a pacemaker-type machine, called a VNS generator, in his chest. That magnetic force field is able to calm the seizures by controlling electrical activity in the brain. But Button, a medical service dog trained at Gold Star Service Dog Center in Las Vegas, could do some of the work his parents now do. Button would wear a magnetic collar and sleep with Louis. If Louis were in trouble, the dog could circle Louis, creating a magnetic force field around the boy."Dogs can sense these seizures coming on," Navin said. "My wife and I are physically exhausted. It's been incredibly difficult for us." That might be putting it mildly. Louis is the youngest of seven siblings, one of the many facts his mother, Andi Navin, has blogged about at louisnavin.com and written about in a book, "The Angel I Walk With." She knew from early on that Louis had medical issues, and she and her husband worked hard with doctors in Fremont and Los Gatos to get their son diagnosed. But the Navins didn't have much luck getting their son the extra medical and educational attention they felt he needed. So, after much research, the couple discovered Louis could be best cared for in the Douglas County School District. So they moved from Gilroy to Minden, Nev., five years ago. Andi Navin now works as a teacher at a high school there. Her husband still works for San Jose police, doing airplane surveillance and commuting about 200 miles each way, once a week, over the Sierra to Silicon Valley in his worn Jeep. Louis is a fourth-grader at Pinon Elementary School, where his parents say he's doing relatively well, despite the recent development of a breathing problem where he needs to wear an oxygen tank. Louis spends half the week in mainstream classes and the rest of the time with experts who help him with speech and occupational therapy. His dad said he has "lots of friends." But Navin added that it seems like many parents are wary of having Louis over to their homes, fearful that his son might lapse into a seizure while they're watching him. The Navins are hoping that Button might change much of that. If they can raise the money by June, the dog is theirs. "We're just so excited," Andi Navin said. "Being able to have Louis in his own room with his dog, this is just going to be huge for him." Contact Lisa Fernandez at 408-920-5002. If you'd like to help buy Louis navin a medical service dog Visit http://louisnavin.com, where you can click on a Paypal account. Or you can make checks payable to Louis Navin Donation Fund, Account No. 8303882107, and mail to any Wells Fargo Bank. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| The Guide: Raf Simons - New York Times Blogs Posted: 23 Jan 2011 04:38 PM PST Nearly six years ago, in a review of a Raf Simons show, I wrote that the Belgian designer deserved a Swiss bank. The reference was to the Swiss Textile Award that Mr. Simons had won that year and the difference the prize money made in his future-minded collection. Since then, many people have said I favor Mr. Simons, both in his men's line and the women's collections he does for Jil Sander. Look, I just think Mr. Simons consistently turns out interesting collections, and in 2005, I looked at videos and photographs of all his shows and presentations going back to the mid-'90s, to see what I had missed — which was a lot. At both Jil Sander and Raf Simons, he makes it fairly easy for journalists and others to follow what he's doing, because his work is really a progression of ideas and assumptions. Working for Jil Sander has also opened his mind to new ideas, in particular the traditions of haute couture and dynamic materials. Am I enthusiastic about a designer whose goal is to move fashion forward? You bet I am. Before his show on Saturday night, Mr. Simons announced that he had severed his dealings with his manufacturing partner, leaving open the question of when he will be able to sell the fall 2011 collection to store buyers. Perhaps he will be able to do so by the women's ready-to-wear shows in February. Unfortunately, small and independent designers face challenges of this kind all the time. He'll just have to work it out. As many people who attend his shows would agree, what is discouraging is that many of Mr. Simons's clothes deserve a wider audience — and under his own label, not those of brands that copy and profit from his designs. He has some experimental pieces (that's a necessary part of the creative process), but most are wearable, and he doesn't have stuff that is plainly ridiculous. For his latest collection, Mr. Simons said he was influenced by craftsmen, perhaps in contrast to the influence of Internet technology and the treatment of luxury fashion as a commodity. Certainly, apart from one or two aprons in coarse mohair tied over coats, the connection to craft wasn't so pronounced. That would be pretty tedious anyway. What I found most interesting about the collection were the shapes and the subtle play between classic men's styles (the stadium toggle coat, the anorak) and the roundness and loft that can be achieved in couture. Remember, in Mr. Simons's last Jil Sander show, he did a lot of styles that combined iconic haute couture shapes and Japanese synthetics that had a spongy lightness. A goal of Mr. Simons is to make his clothes believable on the street, and I thought he did that well this time with his new, slightly rounded coats and jackets. I didn't grasp the point of pod-shaped coats that looked bulky and closed like a hospital gown in the back, but the shape and the stiff material give us something to think about and maybe Mr. Simons as well. Black, liquid-looking trousers were intriguing (again, as a proportion and a texture), but what I really loved were the suits and the patch-pocket camel blazers. In a season of a lot of foolishness directed at suits — a tweak here, a tweak there — Mr. Simons brings a confidence that is a result of making the young man's suit his dominant obsession for 15 years. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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