caterpillars and morons

Today I learned that Giant Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillars look like bird poop and eat citrus leaves. They look as much like little space aliens as any terrestrial (as opposed to aquatic) animal I've ever seen, and I gotta say, ew, so you know I took pictures. I'll post them when the blogger picture posting thingy works again.

In other news, if you've been paying attention, you will have noticed that I enjoy making fun of Palo Alto, CA, where Silicon Valley got its start and where you can now buy a house for roughly $1000 per square foot, which seems to attract the kind of people I like to make fun of. Just lately a third-grade teacher and her Stanford research engineer husband hosted a party for their teenage daughter, and the neighbors called the cops because teenagers were throwing up all over the lawn. So, I'm betting there's still a substitute teaching Ms. Swagerty's class.

Iowa, SUVs, and UFOs

Today I learned that sex offenders are pretty much not allowed to sleep in Iowa. Also, 2002 Ford Explorers have metric bolts, and the History Channel has shows about UFOs, complete with pictures.

more flooring

Today I learned that our floating snap-together hardwood floor does indeed look pretty.


You may have noticed that unfinished edge at the bottom of the picture. Going around this one particular obstruction (below) really slowed us down because we had to coordinate rows not just on both sides of that pocket door, but also in the alcove (above) off to the right of the door.


In terms of screwy flooring tips, I learned from my husband that you can use those cruddy CDs that previously served as toys for your niece as spacers to make sure the wood is in the right place.

quick update

Today I learned that I can sleep in a room I don't tolerate if I have a really, really nice air cleaner in there. It still isn't perfect, but it's better than outside with the remaining pollen, so that's saying something.

The room I really don't tolerate has too much cork in it, so we'll see, hopefully by the end of the day, what it's like with wood covering up all the cork.

cars and an ad I actually noticed

Today I learned that California pays decent money for polluting clunkers just to get them off the road, not that you could probably buy a whole lot less of a clunker for the money they give you.

In total fluff news, this article tells you all about that couple on those ubiquitous Classmates.com ads.

all about yesterday

Last night I learned that Blogger was down, so I didn't get to tell you about being able to go outside again because the pollen died down. It's not perfect yet, but to say that I like being able to go outside again is a huge understatement.

The change in the pollen level was good thing because all this flooring upheaval finally got to be too much for me to sleep in the house, so I learned that Orion is overhead at 4 am and that we stepped on one of our irrigation system sprayer thingies and broke it, so it sounded funny when the water came on.

oops

I read it in the news, and now it turns out it's wrong. I don't believe everything I read, but I thought I checked when the news media reported that the FDA banned Vegemite. I mean, the Boston Globe said it. Blegh.

Ok, well this was reported everywhere, so it must be right: being fat lowers your gas mileage.

good news, bad news, food, and an unfortunate wiring problem

Bad news first: we didn't feel very good this morning, and the cork underlay we wanted to put down today really has to be offgased more, so we didn't make much progress on the floor.

The good news is that we figured out why we felt so bad. I felt bad because we had a roll of cork underlay in the house, so we fixed that by taking it outside and putting it in the sun. My husband felt bad because the sewing machine was inside, with tiny bits of linen fluff in it. For once he felt worse than I did, so I got a turn at cleaning items with no perceptible (to me) contamination. I know the drill, but I've said this before: when your ESP doesn't work, it's kind of disconcerting.

So we learned that we have to air out cork, and linen, although gorgeous, is really freakin' evil.

In shopping news:

• The frozen wild salmon is only $6.99/lb at the regular grocery store across the street from the closest regular grocery store.
• I've gotten comfortable enough shopping in regular stores using my respirator that I bug employees to find things for me and chat with cashiers. And this is a big measure of progress: today I made an impulse purchase. It was only a $2.50 package of cheap mechanical pencils, but I was able to recognize something I didn't quite need, evaluate the price, and make a decision, all no more than 15 yards (15 m) from packages of Bounce.

Here's a quick round-up of everything else I learned today:

• Spelling mistake of the day: 'creamate.' It just sounds like something you'd put in coffee.
• Product of the day: Cocaine. It's a new energy drink with upwards of twice the caffeine of coffee that reportedly numbs your throat just like the real thing. So, apparently cocaine numbs your throat, but I hope people aren't going to try snorting the drink. Or, well, if they're going to drink something like that anyway, they probably wouldn't care if they got it up their noses. I mean, what do I know?
• Wacky medical problem that made the news of the day: stress-related amnesia.
• Headline of the day: Toddler gets stuck in vending machine.

Also, I seem not to be able to shut up.

dental floss and things we call food

Today I went in the closest regular grocery store and learned that they only sell the little packages of my favorite dental floss, and bags of Halloween candy are 2 for $5.

And as long as we're talking about things you can buy in the grocery store, Jimmy Dean makes chocolate-chip-pancake-wrapped sausage on a stick, which is definitely the product of the day, even though it's already been blogged all to death by everybody on the planet.

cows and rotting plants

Today I learned that you can see a few of my uncle's cows in the satellite picture of his house on Google maps. I knew you could see cars, but I hadn't thought about cows.

The really important thing I learned today is how flax is made into linen. It involves a practice called field retting (less expensive these days than water retting) where the flax stems are left to rot in the field after they're cut, and when their outsides rot away, you can get at the interior fibers. Hemp is handled the same way.

Now I understand why, when I tried to make linen sheets for a friend of mine who's allergic to cotton, my chest hurt like it used to in Illinois, where they rot corn stalks in the fields. In case I needed any more evidence, my husband developed some of the most spectacular allegic shiners I've ever seen. Holy moldy fabric, Batman.

It is, however, really beautiful fabric, even if it isn't allowed in the house.

more food

Today I learned that Vegemite is banned in the US because the FDA thinks it has too much folic acid in it. It says here that when they set the upper limit, they thought that too much folic acid could mask anemia from a vitamin B12 deficiency, which is reversible, while spina bifida is not.

In other news, a bus trap is a bunch of bars over a pit spaced so bus tires can go over, but car tires fall between. Technically I guess that's a car trap. Anyway, I think they use these things in Canada to make bus-only areas or shortcuts, and I can't find a picture (or confirmation) anywhere.

Also sugar is twice as dense as flour. This is important if you want to make a pound cake without a scale and cheat horrifically on your rotation diet.

food(?), floors, and a lizard

Getting sick and staying home removes you from the world, and while you're not looking, it goes all Twilight Zone on you. I thought there were some weird products on the market before, but just now I had to invent the product of the day award for Kraft Fast Franks. I mean, there are people out there who can't put a hot dog on a bun?

In other news, here's what the master bedroom floor looks like with the holes from the carpet tack strips filled, three coats of Mexeseal over that, and caulk all around the edges and on some of the cracks. The white on the floor near the walls is just sloppy wall paint.


Here's how it looks after you put Tu Tuff down over that, which almost instantly removes some half-smelled irritation in that room:


And here's our latest household visitor. I'd love to tell you what kind of lizard that is, but today I'm going to label it as a 1.5 inch (4 cm) baby bedspread crawler and leave it at that:

nerd alert

By rooting around here, I learned that mangosteen, which I hear is yummy, is in the same family as St. John's wort. That means I can throw mangosteen into my rotation diet anywhere I want since I don't have any conflicts, seeing as no one has reported that St. John's wort is yummy. Well, assuming I tolerate it.

Onward to the local spiders. I tried to identify them, but I didn't get anywhere. They're about 1 cm long, not counting the legs, and they're furry. They definitely aren't any of these. Anyway, this one was inside the furnace closet, which we don't spend a lot of time in:


And here's the one that was in the hallway last night:


It's fairly distinctive, so I recognized it when I found it in my kitchen sink before lunch. And yes, I didn't wash the sink out after breakfast. I'm a terrible housewife, but it didn't look that bad until I took a close-up picture of it.

stupid, stupid, stupid!

Those of you who have not been following the Arizona news lately should know that we had this headline a couple of days ago:

Arizona ranks dead last in ranking of smartest states

and this one today:

First-grader set himself on fire during fire safety class

There was this other article in the middle that explained that our test scores are fine, but the study counted how much states spend per student, and Arizona doesn't spend much. That one contains this fine quote by Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne about the company that produced the list:

"Morgan Quitno's a stupid company, and I would estimate they have no employee with an IQ over 90," Horne said.

Anyway, keeping in mind that the comments on the Arizona Star site tend to develop a life of their own in terms of not exactly ending up on topic or being particularly civil, in the comments on the first article, someone suggested that states that voted for Bush were well represented at the bottom of the list, prompting someone else to point out that it was school kids tested, not voters. The response is the belated quote of the day:

Nits grow into lice.

things I shouldn't eat

Today I learned that Trader Joe's applesauce tastes like they used some moldy, fermented apples, or at least the batch I got ahold of did. Also, eating honey during pollen season is asking for trouble.

* NEWS FLASH *

If you have extra softgel-packaged supplements, they make excellent earplugs, and they don't stink.

a violin, microwaves, and successful products

Today I learned that if I play my fiddle for longer than about ten minutes, I can smell Illinois on it. That's not a huge shock because that's the last place I was well enough to spend much time playing it, but ick. (I think it'll air out.)

Then I learned that people who think microwave ovens are bad for you frequently claim that they were invented by Nazis. They were invented during WWII, so it's certainly not inconceivable that Nazis invented them, and then we stole the technology and said a guy at Raytheon invented them, but it sounds kind of farfetched. I mean, if we're ok saying that the Germans had better rockets than we did, why would we worry about something like a microwave oven, which, when first available to consumers in the early 1950s cost $1300, a sum that in today's money, using this handy chart (pdf), converts to around $8500? Imagine the demand.

Here's all the other stuff I learned:

1. Snopes addressed water 'rearranged' by microwaves.
2. People put placentas in shampoo, and other people buy it.
3. Foreskin face cream reportedly smells bad.
4. "If everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will not succeed." Apparently, somebody has to love it.

linen, FBI guys, snakes, and termites

Today I learned that you can't buy actual flax linen at regular fabric stores. They sell poly-rayon blends people call linen. If you want real linen, you have to mail-order it from big stores that do things like cater to the international reenactor community.

In other news, here's a story about a real undercover FBI guy who retired, so now he can tell interesting stories, and here's a snake that looks like a worm and eats termites.

As to our personal termites, I mentioned that the termite guy was going to use dilute nicotine on them. I'm pleased to report that I did fine afterward. However, the diatomaceous earth (food grade, not pool grade) that we put down apparently sent the termites scurrying over to the neighbors' house, so they had a termite guy visit, too. He used scary chemicals, but I didn't have any trouble with those, either, not that I went next door.

Update: there is now a link to the FBI guy article. The proofreader has been fired.

pollen and errors

There's some pollen outside that I just can't handle. It's been out there the last couple of days, and I have high hopes that it'll go away soon, but the result here is that I'm stuck in the house.

The first thing I learned today is that you should really, really not whack the top of your shin on the hammock stand. I would never have learned that if I'd been goofing off outside instead of inside.

Then I spent several hours sitting in front of the tv nursing the enormous bump below my knee, which was a huge mistake because if I watch live tv, I can't skip the ads, and then I'm likely to learn something. That's how I learned that Wild Oats has associated itself with an SUV. It's a hybrid, but it's still an SUV. Then I learned that...

Ok, whatever it was evaporated while I got through the back story, which means it didn't get learned, so never mind.

leaky spots and bariatric surgery

Today I learned that even though we sealed the concrete floors where we took up carpet, something is getting through around the edge at the walls. The source could be the 2x4s, it could be the bottom of the wallboard, or it could be the paper on the outside of the wallboard. My money's on the paper, but my directional nose is only good down to increments of about six inches (15 cm), so we'll have to actually go around with some aluminum tape or something so I can play process of elimination.

In other news, medical equipment developers are talking about performing bariatric surgery through people's, um, bodily orifices instead of poking holes in them to reach affected organs. Down toward the bottom of the article it gets into venture capital, and I know this quote probably makes sense if you know more about venture capitalists and ten-year horizons (read the article), but here's the quote of the day:

"A lot of us who didn't invest in this area five years ago are glad we didn't," Wrubel said.

tomatoes and diesel

Today I confirmed that I can't eat canned tomatoes, which doesn't come as any kind of shock since they're canned with citric acid, and the citric acid canners use is derived from mold.

In other news, the Arizona deadline for switching to cleaner diesel, which everybody in the US will be using by the end of 2010, is on Sunday. I don't know how many gas stations are waiting until the last minute to switch, but it would be interesting if we EIs notice a difference.

Last but not least, we have a headline of the day:

Taser not effective on runaway cows, deputy learns

chemicals, chemicals everywhere

If you are new to this blog, this post needs a little introduction, so here you go:

Everybody knows somebody who gets a headache from perfume. The article I discuss below mentions that the author's fragrance testing made her cat sneeze. These reactions to synthetic fragrance are not at all uncommon, and people think they're harmless, but they are an indication of an inability to process synthetic chemicals, and trust me when I say you don't want to experiment with that kind of thing. Disability is not just about wheelchair ramps and Braille on ATMs.

Today I learned that marketing has glommed onto the idea of a company scent, so companies are spraying their lobbies with synthetic chemicals. Also, people with any degree of celebrity feel compelled to have their own chemical signature, so a chemical designer called Slatkin & Company designed some smelly, washable, resin beady-rock things for Elton John, which brings us to the quote of the day:

It is true that Mr. Slatkin’s rocks are not shy. I did not attempt a wash test. However, merely brushing the lid of their package caused an aroma transfer to my own digits, which, despite repeated hand-washings, remained stubbornly rock-redolent.

That, my friends, is why fragrance chemicals are so evil. Touch the wrong thing, and you can't wash it off.

Ok, now here's a short rant if my introduction wasn't enough:
I keep saying that obstacles to disabled people should be removed, so synthetic chemicals in public places should be banned. That means perfumes of any kind, right down to April Fresh laundry products. I want to be able to work, or heck, I'd settle for being able to shop safely, and frivolous, trendy, marketer-driven preferences are standing in my way.

So if you happen across any highly-scented lobbies, please say something to the management.

more food

Today we're going to start off with the quote of the day from an article about a food researcher who has found that psychology significantly affects how much people eat:

He prefers to experiment on graduate students or office workers, whom he sometimes lures with the promise of a drawing for an iPod. “It’s easy to find undergraduates to participate, but with the guys nothing makes sense because they all eat like animals,” he said.

In other food-related news, I found a 2002 article on canola oil written by PhDs who use references and good punctuation and everything, and they say that eating all canola oil all the time appears to be bad for you, and that the problem has to do with too many omega-3 fatty acids and not enough saturated fats. As you might imagine, this problem can be addressed by putting a little variety in your diet. What a shock.

However, they did say there was a real problem with canola oil, and that is that when you process it, the omega-3 fatty acids turn rancid, so they smell bad, and that the deodorization process turns a bunch of them into trans fats, which everybody knows are bad. They said a study at the University of Florida Gainesville found up to 4.6% trans fats in bottled canola oil.

So having read that, I have to revise the ending of Monday's post: I will not longer accept erucic acid as a reason to avoid canola oil. As to the trans fats, I have to do a little math here...

Ok, if 1 tablespoon of canola oil has 14 grams of fat, and 5% of that is trans fats (from the study, not the label on the bottle), then that's 0.7 grams of trans fat, and God knows no one restricts themselves to just one tablespoon, so I'll totally accept trans fats for canola avoidance.

I think I'll just stay on my rotation diet and not worry about it.

learning under the influence

[As someone who was injured by mold, any kind of fermented food makes me sick, so you will never get an actual drunken post from this blogger. This is as close as you will get.]

Today I learned not to send email when I'm reacting to pollen. I sent it to the wrong place, but you never know - the people who got it might know the answer I wanted.

In other news, it says here that Posh Spice got tired of her hair extensions, which prompted me to go find out what the heck hair extensions really are. I've been hearing about them for years, but physicists and engineers don't tend to go for that kind of thing (they also tend to be men), so I don't know that I've ever actually seen any. Since usually what you hear about are bad ones, I had to look for those, and this is what I found, but all the pictures are tiny and I don't know what I'm looking for exactly.

I'm all disappointed now. I wanted to see Halloween-quality bad hair extensions.

So for fake, scary, and fashionable, I guess I'll have to settle for fake money, scary cars, and pink prison clothing.

canola oil

It has come to my attention that some segment of the population is convinced that canola oil will kill you, so today I went looking for more information. According to the Whole Foods website, this whole thing started with an article called "Blindness, Mad Cow Disease and Canola Oil" published in Perceptions magazine in 1996.

It was in that article I learned that covalent bonds will kill you, so I'm gonna go all out and name this Quote of the Year for 1996, even though this blog didn't exist yet:

Toxic substances in canola and soy oils encourage the formation of molecules with covalent bonds which are normally irreversible: They cannot be broken by the body once they have formed.

For just plain quote of the day fodder, I'll take either one of these:

• "Butter and tropical Fats are best used unhydrogenated," or
• "Rape oil is also the source of the infamous chemical-warfare agent, mustard gas, which was banned after blistering the lungs and skin of hundreds of thousands of solders and civilians during WW1. Recent French reports indicate that it was again used during the gulf."

Now my problem here is that this is a public forum, and there could well be some readers out there who are not, as we say these days, ROTFLMAO, so I may well be accused of being a misguided idiot for not recognizing the danger and blindly following the establishment. In honor of this being a place to learn stuff, I'm going to go ahead and spell out why these quotes are so hilarious, thereby rendering them not all that funny:

1. In the quote of 1996, instead of saying some poisons can't be broken down by the body, the author drags covalent bonds into it, which, since you can't have water or DNA without them, sounds like an uneducated person throwing big words around to impress other uneducated people. When I read the quote to my husband, he said, "That can't be serious. Lemme see that."
2. As to unhydrogenated butter, please go to the grocery store and ask for help finding the hydrogenated butter. If they don't have any, ask for the the dehydrated water.
3. If mustard gas was made from a plant, wouldn't you think it'd be made from mustard? Instead of a bunch of chemicals you never heard of (if you don't know what a covalent bond is)? And if canola oil was 'invented' in the 1970s, how the heck would it get into mustard gas in WWI?
4. I know there's not a fourth quote, but I just have to mention the bad, bad punctuation. Ew.
5. As long as I'm providing extra information, this whole argument has been covered less snarkily here and here.

The only arguments I will accept for not using canola oil are (1) a simple fear of erucic acid, or (2) a fear of eating selectively-bred foods, but then only from people who are highly suspicious of apples.

nothing

Technically I learned some depressing things from Sunday newspaper features today, so I guess you could say I re-learned not to read that stuff.

Also I learned that if you wash an organic cotton pillow twice that says not to wash it, it may still smell sort of like tobacco. That is the last time I spend money on organic cotton, pesticides or not.

gribbles and spanking

Today I learned that since New York harbor has gotten so much cleaner, gribbles and shipworms can live there again. Ignoring shipworms because their name is not nearly as entertaining, this article has a picture of a gribble, and under the picture it says gribble damage could cause part of downtown Seattle to fall into the Puget Sound. Now, I recognize that that would be really bad if it happened, but it sounds like a lame 50s science-fiction flick.

Speaking of flicks, another definition of a flick is essentially a swat, which brings us to something many of us raised before the 'time-out' era have suspected all along: if your parents swat you on the butt when you're bad (but don't beat the daylights out of you), you turn out fine.

vinegar, bees, and CO2

Today I learned that if you leave a big vinegar bottle in the hallway after you clean the bathroom, and you warn your husband that there's a bee loose in the house, he might trap the bee under the vinegar bottle, and then you could be stuck with a vinegar bottle in the middle of the hallway until someone feels like dealing with the bee.

I also learned that aside from leaving windows open, which makes my air conditioning really inefficient, and washing clothes in hot water, which is pretty important if you use little to no soap, I'm all energy efficient compared to this guy. Just think how much I save in CO₂ emissions by not having a job to drive to! Oh, yeah, and I've been known to take upwards of three showers a day.

I'm going to single-handedly melt all the glaciers, and then we'll all drown. Sorry, and it was nice knowing you.

smoky confused guys and good words

Today I learned not to stand near a smoker outdoors, even if he is not currently smoking. A somewhat confused older man who smelled a little of cigarette smoke came to my door today asking for directions to a very nearby house. To me his directions seemed pretty clear, but I have to admit that I live in a rat-warren subdivision where the streets sometimes change names just because they go around a corner. I pointed him toward the right road and told him just to follow it and it would turn into the one he wanted. The whole procedure took maybe a minute, but my smoke reaction lasted more like five.

In other news, you may think you only have one amygdala, one in your brain, but you would be wrong. Besides those, it says here that an amygdala is also one of the tonsils of your pharynx*.


* It's funnier if I don't explain (unless you took anatomy and already know this), but your tonsils are apparently almond-shaped, and amygdala means almond.

termites and pumpkin fungus

Today a termite inspector told us that he's seen five subterranean termite colonies on an acre of land around here, so besides being a great place to be a mourning dove, this is a great place to be a termite. Anyway, you can kill termites with a nicotine solution 1/1000th as concentrated as Frontline, which people put on their pets to kill fleas. (I don't think chemically sensitive people do that, but I haven't asked.) The termites get the solution on their feet and track it back to the nest, and roughly four days later they all croak.

The upshot here is that this poison is pretty dilute and it's going underground outside, and I think it'll be ok. If I'm wrong, well, that'll be interesting, too.

In other news, mold in Illinois is wreaking havoc on the pumpkin crop, which is going to mess up Halloween. So it's not just me; mold really is evil.

flamingos, the idiot box, Russian stuff, and a little mold

Today I learned that flamingos are considered geriatric when they're fifty and that you can get kids to tell you tv makes them stupid. Also, there's a blog about all things Russian that has a post consisting of pictures of buildings taken 60 to 100 years apart.

In other news, there is enough mold in this one package of flooring that neither one of us can get anywhere near it:


So ick.

cartoon hamsters

About all I learned today is that I can't figure out how to keep these cartoon hamsters from hitting the ground, which they do in a cartoony, harmless fashion, so they're kind of entertaining anyway.

In lieu of a hamster picture, have a couple of prairie dogs:

mesquite trees and milk

Today I learned that pliers are a great tool if you have to pull up a whole bunch of spiny, inch-tall (2.5 cm) mesquite seedlings.

In other news, I think we all learned in school about Louis Pasteur, who figured out how to pasteurize milk so milk didn't kill kids in cities at the turn of the last century. Nowadays, what with regulations requiring inspections of dairies and better refrigeration, it sounds like it'd be safe enough to let some people get ahold of the raw stuff, which they would really, really like. The FDA is pretty sure it'll kill everybody, but the people who are drinking it don't appear to be all that dead. There aren't a zillion of them, but they aren't dropping in droves or we would have heard about it.

So in that article, a lady said she couldn't digest milk properly until she got some of the raw kind, and then she was fine. Now, I haven't been able to digest milk protein correctly for about 25 years, so I generally don't consider it a food, but I got two spoonfuls of ice cream a year ago so I could get a milk antigen, and it was yummy. And now I'm thinking it's only about a four hour drive round-trip to get to the.... That's a freaking long drive to spend $8 on a gallon of milk. Just if I tolerated it, I would have grounds to be really, really annoyed that I missed out on 25 years of ice cream.