parties are fun

Today I learned a bunch of trivial stuff, like that some people honk when they drive under the 4th St. bridge in downtown Tucson, and no one has a clue as to why; that I still can't have very much fabric around in the bedroom; and that my friend's dog, Bradley, given about six hours, will relax enough to let me pat him. Also that there's a Hilton in the middle of O'Hare Airport, and etiquette is spelled like I just did it.

So there you go: a bunch of random-seeming esoteric trivia. Happy New Year.

new math and free lunch

Here's the quote of the day, from this NY Times article:

Even the most significant energy savings mentioned here are modest when compared with what it would take to limit global warming. Joseph J. Romm, an analyst at the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions and a head of the Energy Department’s efficiency and renewable energy program during the Clinton administration, said American carbon dioxide emissions come to about 44,000 pounds per person per year. Stabilizing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide would require cutting that by 26,000 pounds to 35,000 pounds.

The 44,000 looks right, but I can't find either of those other two numbers anywhere.

In other news, if you tell Tom Brokaw you can't find anyone but Latinos to work construction for $14/hr, that's some powerful free advertising for help wanted.

sucking soaps, smoking nurses, parading stormtroopers, and entertaining writing

Today I learned that one wash is not enough to get the new detergent I tried and don't tolerate out of my favorite shirt, and I went and wore it anyway, and now I can't sleep or write. I appear to be pretty good at whining, though, so I have this pain under my ribs that isn't too bad until I go to sneeze, and then it fixes it so I can't sneeze, so [bad word].

In other news, nurses smoke, stormtroopers are marching in the Rose parade, and this thing about parents and middle-school-age girls and inappropriate behavior is as horrifying as it is entertainingly written.

death's door, goats, and shampoo

Today I learned that, according to this one website, I have 27 of the 41 signs that your body is in crisis, so clearly I'm two-thirds of the way into the grave.

Speaking of graves, inexpensive Chinese cashmere will kill not just you, but everyone else, too! By buying Chinese cashmere, we're encouraging Chinese herders to raise goats, which eat the grasslands down to dust, which blows clear over to the western US. Since the goats have eaten everything, it seems that they aren't feeling too good anymore, so pretty soon we'll just have dust, which causes respiratory damage, heart disease, and cancer, but no more inexpensive cashmere to show for it. I'm not too concerned because global warming will most likely melt the glaciers pretty soon and cover up the deserts before this gets too much more serious.

In other news that doesn't concern me too much, I developed a sensitivity to my shampoo, but only while my hair was drying. I don't think I react to my back-up shampoo, but worst case scenario, I make good on the threat I've been making since the late '80s to pull a Sinead O'Connor.

floor show

(Only two days later than expected.)

acid reflux, subway maps, and polar bears and Republicans

Acid reflux pills will kill you! Well, really they'll just block calcium absorption so your hips break.

If you were curious, EIs don't tolerate acid reflux pills any better than any other medication, so we don't eat foods we're sensitive to and if necessary take things like betaine HCl, which help with our notoriously poor digestion. I expect this sort of thing is spelled out in Sherry Roger's book, which I haven't read, so I don't know, but it is my understanding that poor digestion, or not enough acid in your stomach, is the cause of acid reflux, and taking acid reflux pills will go ahead and fix it so your esophagus doesn't get burned, but then you really aren't digesting your food, so then where are you? Anyway, if I hadn't gotten well and truly sick, I would never have learned this stuff and would still be sentenced to life on Zantac® and sleeping on a tilted bed, so as much as I'm not happy to be sick, thank God I got sick enough to learn some things and stop spending money on Zantac®.

In other news, here's a proper map of the New York subway system - one with the smells marked. I could right now draw you a similar map of my neighborhood, but it mostly only has a few houses that perpetually smell like laundry fumes instead of say, vomit, so it'd be boring.

On the political front, the Republicans have decided suddenly that global warming is a threat to polar bears, so global warming is real. Having denied it for so long, I can only attribute their abrupt change in position to my recent post about their environmental policies arresting my slow drift to the right and returning me to my collegiate raging liberalhood. Apparently they were counting on me.

ouch

Today I learned that all it takes for me to suddenly develop a Three Stooges appreciation is very little sleep.

fluffy towels

Today I learned that I have the greatest mother-in-law on the planet. She sent us nice towels, which is pretty cool to start with because they are both more attractive and much fluffier than anything we've ever bought for ourselves, but she washed them (six times) so I tolerate them, right now, today.

Merry Christmas!

smoke, a singer, and tea

Today I learned that if we have the wrong weather pattern overnight close to Christmas, the smoke from everybody's festive fire will wake me up at four in the morning. Actually what woke me up was the sound of an unbalanced washing machine, which turned out to be my heartbeat in my ears. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if your heartbeat is making banging sounds in your ears, it can't say anything good about your blood pressure.

Since I was up, I wandered around and discovered that the smoke was coming in through the vent fans in the bathroom off the bedroom. I was able to turn up the air cleaner and go back to sleep, but tonight we blocked up the vents. One was easy; we masking-taped a piece of paper over it. The other one was hard to reach and has a door between it and the bedroom, so we closed the door and put laundry under it. That little room already smells noticeably of smoke, and it's only been closed up for about fifteen minutes. Oh yeah, and the inside of the dryer smells like smoke, too. Yeesh.

In other news, Thurl Ravenscroft sang the songs in How The Grinch Stole Christmas!, and something like half his work was uncredited. Also, there are reasons your green tea might not turn out green.

extremists and funny stuff

Today I faced up to the fact that I have returned to being a raging liberal. I expected to be one in college, but I was getting all moderate and thought that one day I'd wake up a Republican. Then I got sick, and Republicans keep trying to loosen industrial air quality controls on lead and other stuff, so I've about decided that the ones in power are evil. Not as individual people, but as a group. Maybe someday they'll shift their stance on the environment, just like they did the national debt, but I'm not going to count on it.

So for the second day in a row I had to go find a distraction, which today is this great article about a young Jewish couple deciding to do Christmas, but not in any kind of religious sense.

Also, this skater was drawn at an angle relative to the ice, so we may assume she's going around a corner. However, if that is, indeed, what she's doing, her scarf is going the wrong way unless she's in a very strong wind. Because there is little evidence to support a strong wind, the position of her scarf indicates that she's actually falling. Nothing says 'Happy Holidays!' like bruises and wet clothing!

turkey roasts, bad physicists, evil coats, and clip art

Apparently things are getting a little out of hand at grocery stores already because my husband was accidentally sent home with a turkey breast roast instead of turkey filets. When I went to dismember the roast into filets, I learned that the net holding the roast together had elastic in it. Maybe it's just because I'm chemically sensitive, but 'turkey roasted to perfection wrapped in baked elastic' sounds like a lousy menu item to me.

In other news, there's another gay conservative Christian pastor in Colorado who I hadn't heard of in this article, and in our newer and far more unfortunate category, in that it involves actual crime, there's another physicist with an unhealthy attraction to children. This guy had the biggest collection of kiddie porn ever seen in the UK. He's an astrophysicist, but all the astrophysicists I knew got out of academia, so they probably haven't met him at a conference.

I also learned that men's jackets with fur trim around the hood are called snorkel jackets, and that lately some of the 'faux' fur has been coming from Chinese raccoon dogs, which are raised for their raccoon-patterned fur, not their doggie personalities. In trying to find a picture, I clicked on the first link Google supplied for 'raccoon dog,' and I learned that the Humane Society was not kidding when they said these dogs are not humanely killed. I didn't need to learn that today.

Now I have to wash out part of my brain, so I'm going to do that by making snarky comments related to clip art images I found on .


It's the dove from Noah's Ark! It says on Wikipedia that when God was done drowning all the bad people, he sent the dove to signal the end of his war on bad people, so that's why it's a peace symbol. This is an approach to Peace on Earth that I hope does not occur to my government.




Everyone knows that a halo marks people/things who were good when they were alive, so somewhere out there, some kid is mourning a dead teddy bear.





A huge, inflatable version of this guy parked next to a saguaro in front of a gas station when it's 70 degrees out does not evoke any sort of holiday spirit in non-native Tucsonans. It makes them laugh, and I'm sorry I don't have a picture.


Ok, I feel better now.

unfamiliar terrain and religious texts

Today I rode through a maze-like unfamiliar neighborhood without a map or any wrong turns, thereby confirming the 'follow the trail of speed humps' theory. I ended up over there because right before that I confirmed the 'you can't cross this one big street near my house without going to a stoplight' theory.

In other news, because I'm total sucker for Bible quotes, the quote of the day is from comment #18 (scroll down) under this article about that guy in Virginia who's all upset that Minnesota elected a Muslim congressman. It's too long to reproduce here, but it's full of good, old-fashioned Old Testament death and mayhem. Comment #21 from the Quran was a nice one, too.

warm is good, but gas heat is bad

Today I learned boring stuff, like if we tape up the vent in the master bedroom and I stay there, then we can turn on the heat without making me sick, which is only interesting if your husband has to apply a bunch of caulk before we put down flooring, and the surfaces have to be above 60 F. It's been cold around here lately.

So have a picture of Montezuma Castle.

a pug, a bad man, Matthew McConaughey, and stuffed food

Today I learned some good news and some bad news. Also some weird news, but we'll start with good news: a little dog got run over by a train but emerged from under it without a scratch.

Here's the bad news: a physics professor from the University of Colorado - Denver was convicted of molested a kid he was mentoring, which, since I'm a nerd, made me wonder what kind of physics he did. It turns out that he's in atomic and molecular physics, and he's roughly my age, so people I went to school with could conceivably have met this guy at a conference. And you know what? After reading that abstract, I realized how much I hated sitting through talks on atomic and molecular physics. That stuff is boring. Shooting things with lasers is kind of cool, but hearing about it after the fact? Holy cow.

Back to the harmless news. Matthew McConaughey publicly said, when discussing why he doesn't wear deodorant, "Who wants to go around smelling like somebody's name brand?" So all you celebrity watchers out there, you can still wear fragrance-free deodorant, so if you go quick, you can get to the health food store before it closes this evening. I'll wait.

Ok, now that you're back from the store, we're going to discuss fake food. You can buy stuffed-toy food. For $20 a piece. All I'm going to say is that any middle school sewing teacher who is still teaching her kids to make pot holders is entrepreneurially blind.

disclaimer: Miss Molly has cabin fever

Today I learned three things, and they're all connected, so pay attention:

1. In yet another article about a Christian in a position of power in Colorado resigning over some kind of sex thing, it says that Ted Haggard is in Arizona.
2. People can track scent trails on the ground, but not as fast as dogs and rats. The researchers weren't sure people would do very well with tracking smell contrails in the air, but since I used the word 'contrail' and they didn't, I think that says something that I have a term for it.
3. With the exception of one mooched ride to a Christmas party, I have not been in a vehicle for three weeks, which means I have been home waaay too much.

So I need to get out more, and here is my plan:

1. Practice my tracking skills,
2. Figure out where all the Christian counseling retreats are around here, and
3. Track down Ted Haggard.

I'll get right on that right after I figure out what Mr. Haggard smells like.

mild rant alert: the Compactors

Today I learned that there is a group of San Francisco friends who made a compact at the beginning of the year to not buy anything new for a year except health and safety items, like food and toothpaste and brake fluid. The idea spread, and now there are something like 1,800 people spread across the country who are reusing, recycling, and potentially doing without.

There are two quotes that as an EI, I feel compelled to discuss:

1. "Some have called the Compactors un-American, anti-capitalist, eco-freak poseurs whose defiant act of not-consuming, if it caught on, would destroy the economy and our way of life."
2. "Judith Levine, author of "Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping," went really cold turkey in 2004 with her husband. The couple split their time between Brooklyn and Vermont. She applauds the Compactors, but says that not buying stuff for a year is only taking it halfway. Not going to the movies and restaurants for a year -- now that's cutting back."

To these people I say, you want to see a group of people not shop, go visit the EI community. To the Chambers of Commerce, make your stores safe and sell safer products, or as more people get sick, the economy will tank anyway. To Judith Levine, if you want to see people who haven't gone to restaurants or movies in years, I know of some people you should meet.

If every consumer in America shopped like I do, there would only be organic food in grocery stores, the most complicated packaged foods would contain two or three ingredients at the most, and there would be no movie theaters. Hair would be cut at home, and there would be no perms, or perfumes, or home-use pesticides. There would be no 'new car smell,' no fabric softener, no polyester clothing, and no pizza, and no donuts.

Which would be too bad because pizza and donuts have started to smell really good.

recruiters and decorations

Today I learned that military recruiters here in town were running cocaine out of their offices in a midtown strip mall. To balance that kind of serious information out, I also learned how to make an outdoor-decoration Flying Spaghetti Monster.

good news, spin, and weird food

Today I learned that the European Parliament voted for a law that will, when phased in over eleven years, seriously restrict chemical use in industry. US companies whose products will be affected are whining like crazy, but they admit they'd better just get their acts together. So, buy European! I guess, except for that thing where everything gets sprayed with pesticide when it enters this country. I think I just became an advocate of smuggling.

In other news, Netflix sent me Thank You For Smoking, and I learned that the actress who played the ex-wife character has the part of Rambo's wife in Rambo IV, so Rambo got married! But a while back, PiquedOff asked to know what I thought, so here is my no-spoiler review:

I now have a much better grasp of how spin works and how lobbyists can say what they say. I would also love to be able to do that, but I will have to settle for appreciating it better since I could never do it with a straight face. The movie presented it with all the gravity to which many lobbyists' statements are due, which is to say that I found it hilarious.

In food news, I made another mudpie and was shocked when it turned out well. So, in case I ever need to make it again, here's another weirdo recipe:

1 cup ground flax seeds
3/4 cup tapioca flour
maybe a cup of water, but definitely more than 2/3 cup
two lumps of fructose roughly the size of a heaping tablespoon (I guess)

Stir those things together, taste it, declare it a disaster, bake it anyway (about 30 min in my smallest glass bowl @ 350 F), and have something that vaguely resembles oatmeal cake, but only if your memory of oatmeal cake is pretty fuzzy.

Note: This recipe should make fine biscuits with no fructose and 2/3 cup water, but you'd have to let the tapioca flour absorb the water before you try to shape the biscuits.

fun with floors

Today I learned that it's hard to take effective pictures of the dust I cleaned off some high shelves this afternoon. I'm sorry you can't see them because the dust was impressive. Anyway, I got some other pictures, so I'll show you those.

The mottled dark pattern leading toward my feet is dirt that we found under the carpet. Carpets are icky.


This is a bike track from when my husband rode in the front door because he forgot the garage door opener.


Here's the grinder in action. You can see those rock bricks I was telling you about, and the mud always reminded me of the way cake batter looks when you use an egg beater on it.


This is a little pile of mud, and that's not my hand.

vegetarianism

The last time I checked (in college), the least-strict vegetarians were allowed at most eggs, milk products, and honey. Today I learned that you can be a vegetarian and still eat fish and chicken. So I am vegetarian for nine to eleven of the twelve meals in my rotation. Who knew? Now that I think about it, my used-to-have-a-roast-on-Sunday parents are vegetarians. I gotta go make a phone call.

Oh, right after I report that you can eat saturated fat and then either exercise or eat nuts to make your arteries look ok again. The study mentioned in that article was about walnuts, but I'm guessing from this data that at least the hazelnut people will try to cash in on it, too.

scary stuff

Today I learned that you can use dead crows to repel live crows and that The Polar Express, an animated Christmas movie for kids, freaks me out. Just like The Little Prince and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Here's why these are such horrible stories:

• The Polar Express has this freakishly introspective looking kid getting on a train in his front yard in the middle of the night, and tickets get lost, and there are wolves running next to the train, and there's a hobo, and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to stick it out much longer to see what happens.
• The Little Prince changes planets all the time, but he has no spaceship. I'm not quite sure why that bugs me so much.
• Dorothy had to go wandering off down some yellow brick road with no parental support, which, when I was three, sounded like a tremendously horrible idea.

I had a boss once who said I was a bottom-up thinker, which means I have to have all the details straightened out before I'm willing to cook up a plan. I think this was evident even when I was three.

bad behavior

Today I learned why there have been so many remarks lately about removed comments on my local paper's site. Since I've been able to link to some very inappropriate comments recently, I will agree that something needed to be done, but if the comments are all civil, I expect they'll lack that extra oomph that makes you want to point them out to your friends.

Unlike this article about a bunch of frat pledges who cut down a 20-year-old blue spruce outside a condo complex, like no one was going to notice. That definitely makes you want to point.

advertising, word of mouth, and stupid post-Christmas-party activities

Today I learned that adding various advertising sites to Firefox's ad blocking filter is a pretty good spectator sport. If the ads hadn't been flashing or covering up newspaper text, it wouldn't have been nearly so entertaining. And if you don't have good ad blocking, the Chicago Tribune has the fewest ads of the papers I frequent.

In other news, I went to a party and heard that TJ Maxx and/or Marshalls carry thick, all cotton comforters for around $40 for queen size, and the UNICEF store out by Grant and Country Club had (and may still have) all cotton coats from Europe (or somewhere people aren't completely dependent on polyester, which still makes me sick). Since that information is now recorded here, I have some chance of remembering it.

The party I went to was the local HEAL group Christmas party, and in the spirit of doing nutty things after Christmas parties, I rode my bike home. It was only five miles, but I didn't feel too good until I got off the big roads and onto the side streets I'd planned to take, so it was a totally stupid idea, and I won't do it again soon.

It was still really fun.

I believe!

Yesterday I learned by reading about another married gay megachurch pastor in Colorado that if you regard homosexuality as a sin, and you can choose not to sin, then being gay is a choice. I hadn't understood why people thought being gay was a choice before, and I also now understand the corollary: you can believe that you're not stuck being gay if you are. I suppose if I were something I didn't want to be, I wouldn't want to be born like that, either.

Oh, wait a minute - my mother has been borderline EI all her life, and I am definitely an EI, but I'm going to squeeze my eyes shut and concentrate really, really hard....

In other news, the fastest way to finish grinding your concrete subfloor so it's flat is by calling up the flooring company and asking why, exactly, the subfloor should not vary by more than 1/8 inch over 8 feet. When they say that it's so that the floor won't see-saw over a bump, not that anything bad will happen to the flooring itself, you can go around declaring the areas around various bumps places no one is ever going to step, and then it all goes a lot faster.

So in today's news, I learned that the way to get your blog noticed is to pick your niche and be obnoxious, which you can't do if you're essentially writing editor-pleasing newspaper columns, or if you, say, have a problem with controversy.

I may not do controversy too well, but I do enjoy cooking up conspiracy theories, so here's the latest: It says here that even a small nuclear war will cause a nuclear winter. Since our the current administration is determined that global warming is not an issue, we don't need to worry about them deciding maybe they should just have an itty-bitty nuclear war to even things out.

Now I'm going to have nightmares.

uh...

Today I learned that I'm only good for physical labor about every other day. I pushed it and worked a half day today, so now I'm too tired to write and will have to tell you what else I learned today tomorrow.

nifty trick

Today I learned how to increase my floor-grinding speed. Here is the trick: I go outside and trim bushes while one of our non-EI friends uses the hand grinder. It's dusty instead of muddy, but I can work with that.

poaching, mail-in ballots, and dump fees

Today we scheduled a day off after deciding that we were too worn out to do anything sensible. All I learned was that we in the West are developing a poaching problem and that some Tucsonans are freaked out by the concept of voting by mail. Also that it costs $10 to take a living-roomful of carpet pad to the city dump, so despite taking a day off, I guess we did something.

arm-flapping, Dykes, and the bad example Santa sets

Today I learned that the Nintendo Wii requires players to flail their arms, which numerous people have noted should reduce the incidence of childhood obesity. (Don't miss the video.)

In sports news, if you are as clueless as I am, noting that the following headline came from the sports section won't help you, either:

Hiring Dykes would get Arizona off the ground

As a side note, in comment #13 under that article there are two four-letter words, so, um, Go Free Speech!

In unintentional chimney sweeping news:

The Westminster Fire Department reminds citizens that they should never attempt to climb down a chimney.

In glacially-paced floor-grinding news, we should be finished grinding tomorrow, but here's what I know about floor grinding:

• Old concrete is harder than new concrete, which is why this is taking so long.
• The top layer of our subfloor, which doesn't have pebbles in it, is a lot harder to grind than the layer underneath, which does have pebbles in it. Once you can see pebbles, you're pretty much done, but before that, it's like watching paint dry, which I hope to be doing on Sunday.
• When people say the grinder uses rocks, they mean a lot of little rocks all stuck together in blocks with some black substance that doesn't smell bad. The blocks slide into slots under two big horizontal wheels on the bottom of the grinder, and you can easily check the rock blocks for mud or dullness by tilting the grinder up. The trick is that since the blocks don't actually attach to the slots, it's a hassle to get them lined up in the slots again. If there's a way to do that that doesn't involve two people and some crawling around in the mud peering at rocks, someone please let me know.

flat subfloors

Today I learned how to run a 225 lb (102 kg) floor grinder. I also learned how to get it out of the back of a pickup truck.

Running the thing wasn't that hard. You pretty much turn it on and push it around like an incredibly huge vacuum cleaner, except it makes dust instead of sucking it up. What you do to keep the dust all contained is have somebody standing by with a garden hose to keep the floor wet so you end up making mud instead of dust. Your assistant is also in charge of scooping the mud off the floor every so often and dumping it in a bucket.

My living room floor has a dried mud puddle in it.

And if you needed to know how to get a 225 lb grinder out of the back of a pickup truck, the easy way is to have an extra guy around to help your husband lift it down. The hard way involves staring at the contents of your garage until you decide to potentially sacrifice that grungy aluminum ladder you bought at a garage sale for $5. Then it's still a bit of a struggle, but nothing got crunched or hurt.

There is as yet no word on how you get the grinder back in the pickup truck.

hydrogen peroxide and mold

Today I learned that some people think that in some situations you can kill mold with a 20% or 30% solution of hydrogen peroxide, but the EPA is pretty squishy about it. I also learned that you can get a gallon of 40% hydrogen peroxide solution for about $5 at Sally Beauty Supply. I mean, so you'd know where to get it in case you were to find very small amounts of mold behind the baseboards on either side of your sliding glass door, which you promptly removed (the mold, not the door), so you don't really need any kind of mold killer, except you would just feel better if you were to be armed with something. And so you know, Mold Across America is confident that you should use borates on mold, but I suppose they haven't sensitized themselves to those yet.

Ok, so we may have removed a total of an entire square inch of mold from three little places, and it didn't feel like stachybotrys to us, but we were pretty careful about not inhaling it. Actually, I'd be pretty surprised if it were stachy because it felt to me like the kind my in-laws have, which they haven't had identified, but based on our relatively minor reactions, couldn't possibly be stachy.

So anyway, it's gone, and now we have all this 40% hydrogen peroxide solution lying around, so I guess I'll be bleaching my whites.

actual progress

For those of you just joining us, chemical sensitivies are not a preference. They are an illness typically brought on by exposures to synthetic or natural chemicals, hence the term environmental illness or injury (EI). The EI community is in general pretty sick, so we make terrible advocates for ourselves. Thus it is with great satisfaction that I introduce this blog's first instance of EI-related breaking news:

BREAKING NEWS: San Francisco told the company responsible for advertising on bus shelters to lose the chocolate-chip-cookie smell strips.

In other news, it appears that it either takes about five days to adapt to sleeping on the rope-strung cot, or I finally got away from the detergent residue long enough to feel better. Either way, I slept pretty well. As a bonus, my guts unbloated, so overall this has been a pretty good day.

slow day

Today I learned that we're going to have a green hospital not too far from my house. In other health news, George Clooney's pig passed away, and my brother's old dog, Louie ('Lulu' to my nephew) is getting weak in the back end.

It was a slow day on this lady's blog, too, and she even gets paid.

coffee and cake

I've about decided that fall is evil. Maybe it's just that I lose laundry detergents when I start using more blankets at night, and that's enough to make anybody weird, but I'm feeling kind of off-kilter, just like last year. In the spirit of being kind of off-kilter:

Yesterday I learned that you can pack 580 calories in a cup of coffee and that 'breve' is code for half and half. I can't at this point imagine why I could need either of those pieces of information ever again.

A piece of information that I seem to need again and had to go recreate is my pound cake recipe, so today I'm going to record it here for posterity.

Assuming a half pound each of sugar, butter, eggs, and flour:
1 cup sugar
2/3 cup oil (or a cup of butter, but I still don't regard butter as food)
4 eggs
2 cups flour (whole-grain spelt works fine)
Stir it all together and bake it at 350 F until it's done, which in a 9x9 square pan takes about 45 minutes.

And another thing, when it's really windy out, no matter how entertaining it looks to go out and play in it, I should stay in the house.

sleep tight

Today I learned, and it wasn't boring, but it wasn't fun, either. It was all about health insurance, car repairs, and how you have to put two space heaters under the rope-strung cot if you don't want to freeze to death at 4 am.

I really thought I was going to tolerate the bed again.