cute little stinky people

My husband reported earlier this evening that trick-or-treaters are quite fragrant. I didn't think too much about it other than deciding to let him keep answering the door, not that he needs the extra chemicals.

It turns out that they're so perfumy that it blows into the house when you open the door. I'd turn off the light now, but we haven't gotten rid of the candy yet.

drunk drivers and chrome shelves

These two items have nothing to do with each other, but here they are anyway:

1. Gene Weingarten's chat has been debating the punishment for first-time drunk drivers who kill somebody. I won't rehash the debate for you, but since I'm a bored engineer, here's my solution to the drunk driving problem: instead of those expensive breathalyzers, every car should be factory-equipped with a Simon game, and if you do badly enough with the Simon, you can't drive.

2. Remember those chrome wire shelves that make me sick? If you scrub them with one of those scouring pad thingies for stainless steel pots, you get gray stuff off. The wire gets less shiny, but who cares as long as I don't have to look at them standing uselessly in my backyard.

why we take algebra

Fabric store circulars are more complicated than people give them credit for. Here's what I think I learned:

1. The four-day 10% to 75% off sale ended today.
2. There's a 40% off coupon, but it's only for any one regular price piece of fabric, and only until Nov. 12.
3. The fourth annual Fall Fleece Sale runs Oct. 23 to Nov. 12, but I don't care because I'm allergic to polyester.
4. On Nov. 11, a bunch of things will be 50% off.
5. Vogue patterns were 75% off last week. Simplicity patterns were $0.99 the last four days, but they'll be $1.99 Nov. 9-12. McCall's patterns are $0.99 for the next five days.

You got all that?

airplanes have the right-of-way

There's a subdivision northwest of Tucson where they have hangers instead of garages, and there are signs telling drivers to pull over for taxiing airplanes. Here's a link that explains it a little, but you have to scroll down to La Cholla Airpark.

we have graduate degrees

We are assembling an apparatus to assess the permeability of porcelain flooring tile and cementitious joint materials in regards to the outgassing of adhesive products.

Years of school, sacrifice, and low pay, and you have: a stepping stone.


Later, we're gonna sniff it.

most alarming statement I've seen all day

From the Environmental Health Coalition's perfectly good safe Household Cleaner and Pest Control Fact Sheet, on how the Electrogun kills termites:

"Volts of electricity are injected into the wood."

pumping on a cockroach

Today I learned that exposing a cockroach to vacuum for ten minutes will not kill it.

This is interesting first because somebody tried it and I could find the answer on the web, and second because I was thinking about how to keep insects off airplanes without using pesticides. So far all I have is a big hole in my hugely-impractical airlock idea.

It is unclear exactly how much pesticide is still used on airplanes, but Mother Jones published this in 1998, and this is a copy of a 2001 San Diego Union-Tribune article.

there's hazardous waste in your neighborhood!

The EPA has a map of all the hazardous waste sites in the US, and on it you can find your local gas stations, not to mention most of downtown.

It doesn't say what's in downtown; my first thought was that all the businesses downtown are secretly using tiny nuclear power plants.

weirdness in the news

I read this article in the Arizona Star twice. I thought it started to make sense the second time, but now I'm not so sure.

Here's what I have so far:
A guy robbed a rich lady. He and his girlfriend got caught on tape selling the lady's diamond. The guy went to jail, very impermanently, apparently, and the lady sued the girlfriend for way, way more money than any 23-year-old should have, but at least got $50,000 from the girlfriend's bank account. The girlfriend says she's innocent, and the guy took off. Now the girlfriend is gone, too, and no one has a freaking clue where the diamond is.

What I think I learned here is that crime does pay, and quite well, because I know I didn't have $50,000 when I was 23. I was in grad school, and I remember proudly showing my grandmother my ATM receipt, which showed that I had managed to save something like $300. She was a little horrified, and slipped me some money before I went back to school.

hairpins and requests

Unless you need something pinchy in your hair for construction purposes, hairpins are infinitely more useful than bobby pins. Buns turn out much better, and feel free to quote me out of context.

Also, by special request....

No more dead animals - just Sam, the very ugly dog.

ewwww

Miles O'Brien of CNN tasted Wilma flood water to see if it was fresh or not. I thought only fictional characters did things like that.

the coatless wonder

Today I learned how to make a coat out of a wool blanket without a sewing machine. Keep in mind I didn't say I tried it, just that I learned how.

kapok

If you don't have any good sleeping rocks in your backyard, you can buy kapok, which is a lot fluffier than rocks, won't mold like cotton, and smells kind of fruity (this may be a drawback). The only problem is that if you don't put it in something, it'll blow away, but life is hard.

thirsty cacti

Today I took a three-hour nap on a rock in Saguaro National Park. I learned three things:

1. You can hear cars and home improvement projects three-quarters of a mile away.
2. The prickly pear cacti are looking a bit 2-dimensional this time of year.
3. You can lie in the sun for three hours and only sunburn one wrist.

disappointing s-pam

All I ask for is a little creativity, and this is what I get:


Disappointing, but you have to give extra points for the last line.

back to the random information

You can put a Subaru Legacy engine in a VW Vanagon, and the Vanagon will actually go uphill.

post offices and cars

We had a mobile post office about a mile from here until hurricane Katrina. It drove away, and we'll probably never see it again. We tried going in a regular post office, but it was just as bad as we'd expected - it's a building full of people and mail, and both are surprisingly awful pollutants.

Today, I accidentally found the perfect solution: drive forty minutes to the top of Mt. Lemmon, and there's a little post office in the town up there. So not only do you get to leave the house and see some good views, you can also buy stamps.

glasses suck

I'm talking about the glasses you wear on your face. We all knew they were kind of a pain, but I just found out that I am freakishly allergic to the plastic nose-pads on my glasses, so I'm pleased I don't need them much anymore.

While I'm on the subject of glasses, we broke three drinking glasses in the last two days. That's pretty impressive, even for us. Everybody knows glass glasses and tile floors are a recipe for disaster, but add in the 'dropsies' (klutziness being a side-effect of neurotoxic encephalopathy*), and you go through a lot of glasses.

*that's doctorese for mycotoxins/chemicals in your brain, and yes, there's a test and everything.

cow tracks

I love to pretend I know everything, but as you've read lately, I just learned the mechanics of staplers, so I will admit here to being a clueless city slicker who until this afternoon, could only recognize clear cow tracks. Cow tracks in sandy soil look like this:


I apologize for the lack of scale. Cow tracks are about the same size as horse tracks, and if you look closely you can see the sand grains.

So once again, you are stuck with random information I learned that will just clutter your brain. Also, dachshunds are notorious house-soilers.

things I should have learned in elementary school

My husband informs me that I should have learned about the rotatable plate on staplers in elementary school. You know, the one that determines whether the staple looks like a staple, or like a splayed mistake? Apparently I spent too much time following directions and not enough time fiddling with tools other people might need to use. Another thing - you don't want to know what happened when I figured out how car cigarette lighters work, and exactly how embarrassingly old I was when I learned it. I just never knew anyone who smoked in a car, ever, and my parents disabled the things when I was little.

Tile Update:
Tile glaze can kill you. First we liked the stuff with the lime pops, and now we have ruled out the pretty stuff that gives me heart palpitations. We're currently aiming for whatever the heck works, as long as it isn't green or something. Standards are hard to maintain.

weird food notes

Arrowhead Mills amaranth flour is sooo much better than the Bob's Red Mill amaranth flour that they shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence. And their buckwheat flour is a lot better than the stuff they have in bulk at the grocery store, too.

There is probably some great reason why I'm totally wrong here, but if I have to eat weird food because I'm allergic to everything else, today I'm going on taste. So there.

Here's something else you need: two ingredient bread. All you need is two or three mashed bananas, a cup of say, oat flour, and 1/2 to 2/3 cup of water. I guess that's three ingredients if you count water. Stir it up, pour it in a square pan and bake it at 350 degrees for half an hour. No one has ever complained, even though it sticks to the pan like glue, and it certainly ain't cake.

chickens

Today I learned that there isn't just one, but two, flocks of chickens that live along the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles. The Freeway Chickens, and the New Freeway Chickens.

Also, today is the one-year anniversary of John Stewart's appearance on Crossfire, where he told the hosts they were hurting America.

heat addles the brains

I just went outside, and it smells like wood smoke. Since the hills are not burning, I can only assume someone has a fire in their fireplace.

It's 70 degrees outside; the high today was 80, and tonight the low is supposed to be 62.

You could freeze to death.

feeling better, so here you go...

It's only a little after 9 am, and I've already learned many, many things.

1. Gaucho pants are back in. From the description, I figured they were floppy at the bottom and bunchy around the hips, but they also looked equestrian, so they had to be tight all up and down. It turns out you can get these things for $6.50 at Target, and they look like bell-bottom capris, sort of. I know I'm at the right age to be horrified by what the teenagers are wearing, but, wow, those are ugly. Not revealing or anything, just ugly.

2. Walt Whitman isn't nearly so horrible if you aren't being forced to read poetry in English class. I came across a reference to "O Captain! My Captain" reading, uh, fan fiction I will not link to, and it turns out that in the poem, they did a good job and got back to port, all in three stanzas, but the Captain died. "Fallen cold and dead." That's awfully blunt, which I didn't think was allowed in poetry. I'm probably missing some interpretation here that has nothing to do with dead guys on deck, but I'm a physicist, so sue me.

3. My husband reads sites with quotes like this one: Take our PC screw quiz!

more thin-set

We found some knock-off C-Cure 911 thin-set, and it is better even than the Laticrete 317. We're going to get some actual C-Cure 911 and sniff that, too. Just so you know.

And those wire rack shelves? They're killing me. How chrome can be a problem is beyond me, unless since they're from China they got sprayed with some kind of scary pesticide or something. Whatever it is, they're standing in the backyard until further notice.

Since none of this is particularly entertaining, here's a picture of a Saguaro skeleton.

fake grass, and yes, I went back to reading the news

I first heard about plastic grass reading about Dilbert's ideal house. After I got sick, I started seeing articles about cities banning it because it would be inappropriately green some times of the year. I wondered what plastic it was made from, seeing as I'm allergic to most plastic. Pretty much if it's not polyethylene (plastic #2 or #4 in recycling terms), I'm going to stay far, far away from it.

Today I learned that plastic grass is made of polypropylene, which is a really bad one.

So stay away like the bugs will; bugs aren't as dumb as people think.

stinky rental cars

If you drive a 21-year-old BMW, you end up taking it to the shop sometimes. Last time this happened, we rented from the ever-so-convenient Enterprise around the corner from the shop. That only took one person, who got totally gassed by the perfumy stuff in the car. This time, Enterprise was out of cars, so we had to get one on the way. We found a National/Alamo place. Their cars smelled fine. Fine.

This prompted my husband to make the following comment:
"Enterprise is the French whorehouse of car rental companies."

food descriptions

In college I would describe the dining hall food before I ate it. I forgot what all I used to say, but I was raised by a biologist who trained me early not to be grossed out by anything, so it was probably disgusting. My best friend eventually had to ask me to stop because I was too accurate, and she could be grossed out.

I have since applied that skill to tile: looks like it has paint splashed on it, looks kind of burned, but I like it anyway, etc.

Back to the original topic: someone else has a similar ability to describe food. The hot dog gave me the giggles so badly I couldn't even read the description to my husband, who took this as more evidence that I'm nuts.

really big terrarium for sale

The company that built Biosphere 2 put it on the market yesterday. This is the place where, when you take the tour, they say all you have to do is close the doors and you'll have a totally sealed environment, despite the fact that there are big screens replacing some of the windows, and their pressure equalization system is shot.

Yes, we blew some money on the tour and saw a piece of wacky history. It was worth it once, even though I couldn't go in on account of the mold inside. I was in charge of smelling said mold from the outside through those screens I mentioned.

I asked my sister the geologist what happened in there that killed all the bugs, and she had heard at a conference that the concrete floor gave off CO2, which got back into the water, making it more acidic, so it broke down more concrete, etc., and all the bugs died. Not to mention the people gasping for air. (The tour guide admitted they had to pump in more oxygen.)

pineapple stinks

In honor of a rotting pineapple on my counter making me feel totally awful today, all you get is a picture of an airplane crash on Mt. Lemmon. I ran out of dead animals.


So you know, the airplane crashed in the '50s and the pilot bailed out fine.

I forgot and read the news

We're all going to get pesticided.

recalcitrant rice flatbread

So all you need is 3/4 cup rice flour, a soup-spoonful of oil, and 1/4 cup water, and you, too, can make funny rice flatbreads. You can add salt, too, but I just eat these things with salted oil.

The trick here is not to roll these out. Sprinkle flour on the counter and flatten 1/3 of the (wet sand) dough with your fingers until it looks like this.


Then scrape it off the counter with a spatula and cook it in an unoiled frying pan until it looks cooked. If you can't get it off the counter in one piece, wait a minute or add a tiny bit of water. That, or you might need to get more flour under it.

Then flip it over. The frying pan should be pretty hot, but not too hot. How's that for a recipe?


Also, you should use brown rice flour because white rice has no food value. It's all I had on hand; sue me.

Wild Oats and Bounce

Wild Oats, the organic grocery chain, started carrying Bounce recently, and the reason you're hearing about it is that today, it was GONE! Well, from one store. I hope it stays gone. That stuff is really poisonous if you are, say, unable to process poisons that most people tolerate.

two-for-one dead animals ll

I think this picture appeared in news outlets everywhere, but I only found it because it was on Dave Barry's blog. You will recall yesterday I decided to stop reading the news, so now it's Dave and the Daily Show.

blowing money in stores

If you know what you want at Borders, they'll put it on hold (hide it behind the counter) for you so you can just run in and buy it. Saves a lot of breath holding wandering around between the perfumy people.

In other news, those metal shelves you see all over the place, including on tv, make excellent hypoallergenic, non-ugly sauna-towel racks for those of us with saunas in our living rooms. Shiny and attractive, yet able to hold 500 lbs on each shelf. I guess I should get heavier towels.

We also enjoy decorating with tile samples and patio furniture.

the news

Today I learned that a priest/author said Harry Potter is gay, we're all going to die of the bird flu, and more kids are allergic to foods than ever.

So I'm going to keep reading the comics curmudgeon and hope the world doesn't fall apart while I'm not looking.

Update: the comics link should work now.

not supposed to be a tile blog...

We picked out tile. It was lovely, but my husband, the picky guy, just needed a couple boxes to make sure it was really wasn't seconds, and that's when we learned about lime pops (see yesterday).

Today he went back to the store, and the people there didn't quite believe him about the defects until they took a careful look at some they had in the back. Then there was a flurry of phone calls because people hate finding out they aren't selling what they think they are.

So I didn't actually learn anything today (yet). I just got 'believe no one and trust nothing' confirmed, again.

Tile can be boring, so here's another picture of the tarantula that visited us. He's in a glass bowl covered with the AEHF catalog.

lime pops

Today I learned about cheesy tile. If the lime doesn't get mixed up right before they fire the tile, it makes bubbles that can break when you step on them, or even with practically no excuse at all. This is only an interesting side note until you come across some tile you really, really like, and it turns out to be seconds, so all the tiles have lime pops in them. Then it's really, really annoying, and you have to go back and start the tile hunt all over again.

golf vs. landfill

Today I learned that it's not economically feasible to build houses on an old golf course because there's too much arsenic in the soil from herbicides and pesticides. Here's the article from the Reading Eagle, but here's the quote if they move the article:

Before becoming a golf course, the site was a municipal landfill operated by Sinking Spring in the 1940s and 1950s, said borough engineer Robert B. Ludgate Jr. That facility closed in 1959.

“The results showed that the dump was not a great concern,” Ludgate said of the environmental testing. “They (Belovich Group) were concerned that they would have to remove 6 inches to 3 feet of the site that was treated with arsenic.”

two-for-one dead animals (sorry!)

I came across this originally on snopes, but here's the link.

A python ate an impala, and then mistakes were made. I don't suppose biting an electric fence is such a hot idea.

dog intelligence

Gene Weingarten's column is usually pretty funny. This one is funny, too, but down near the end, where he's making a point about the intelligence of animals we eat, it sounds like he's had some pretty stupid dogs or hasn't met a lot of chickens. To quote my laconic grandmother: "Chickens are very stupid animals."

Captain Kirk's rock

Today I learned where Captain Kirk fought the Gorn. That episode was filmed at Vasquez Rocks, between Santa Clarita and Palmdale about a mile north of highway 14, north of Los Angeles. There is a park there with a parking lot and everything.