helping

Today I helped my husband run errands the way the dog used to: by staring out the window at God knows what along the road and waiting patiently in the car while he went into stores. I was good and didn't even try to hang my head out the car window and get dirt in my eyes. Anyway, about all I learned was that last week's snowstorm gave oleanders all across town a bad case of freezer burn. Being oleanders, I'm sure they'll survive, but they look pretty sick right now.

In other news, I'm starting to feel good enough to get bored, so I expect I'll start doing something interesting shortly.

That doesn't save today at all.

height, entertainment, social commentary, and some smell

Today we went fishing around on IMDb and learned that Kiefer Sutherland's dad is 6'4". His mom is 5'2". Kiefer himself is 5'10". We looked all this up because Farmer Hoggett looked too tall to be Jack's dad on 24. We were about to accept it, but now we have to think about it since we learned that the farmer used to be 6'7", but has shrunk a couple inches with age, so now he's only 6'5".

In other news, Kiefer sounds like a hoot - he burned up a Jack Bauer doll with his buddies in a parking lot in the middle of the night, not realizing it was the prototype. I'm a little surprised they gave him the only one without warning him, but technically doll-prototyping is art, and we have established that the artistic community couldn't figure out what to do with a plasticized kidney, either.

In social news, the bouncer explained yesterday that when the female member of a heterosexual romantic relationship is a nutball, any trouble she gets into puts her boyfriend at risk of bodily injury (bad language warning). I haven't known a lot of nutballs, so I thought, Huh. Then this morning I read about a guy getting run over because his girlfriend got in a fight, and I thought, Wow.

In roofing news, I learned that when roofers repair your tile roof (five months after you noticed the leak; there can get to be a roofing back-up in areas with monsoon weather patterns), they leave behind a WD-40 smell that can leak down through the bathroom vent you didn't tape shut on Christmas Eve when the smoke was coming in. Tomorrow maybe I'll get my act together and ask the roofing company what that smell is even though I care a lot less now that my guest bathroom is usable again.

larcenous minds and cheating on hills

Today I learned by fishing around on YouTube how to steal a bike in broad daylight in New York City.

In other biking news, I learned that when there's not much wind in town, there won't be enough wind on the low part of the road up Mount Lemmon for me to ride on it, even though there's always plenty of wind higher up the mountain. I suppose I could have driven halfway up the mountain and started from there, but that just seems like cheating. Which I appear to be totally fine with, as long as it starts at the bottom.

all about food

Today I learned that the reason Americans are so fat is because back in 1977, the meat and dairy industries wouldn't let Senator McGovern's health committee tell people to eat less meat and dairy, so we got fixated on food components, which by now would have given rise to sugar-free omega-3 whole-grain soda pop, if only people could figure out how to put oil and whole grains in soda.

Anyway, here's the quote of the day:

Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

I also got a great statistic on the sixth page of that article: women in this one big study weighed on average 170 lbs and reported that they ate only 1800 calories a day, which no one believes, most particularly the people doing studies because they know full well that everybody lies and can usually quantify by how much. Also, we as a nation produce 3900 calories per person per day, and it has to be going somewhere.

The other thing I learned is that meat loses roughly a third of its weight when you cook it, so based on what I cook in a four day period, I probably eat around a third of a pound each of beef and salmon but maybe a quarter pound each of turkey and pork, so I'm not too far off from the quarter-pound meat servings that big study considered 'medium.' I suppose that since I'm not overweight I don't need to ask things like that, but as you likely know by now, I'm just like that.

all about contamination

Today I learned that it takes me four days to decontaminate bedding I contaminated with borax from a previous load in the washing machine. The next time I want to get the formaldehyde out of something new in a hurry, I will do it in a washtub, not the washing machine, and I suppose I ought to use milk instead of borax. Either one is a pain to wash out of the new thing, but they're both a whole lot better than formaldehyde.

After that I learned that there's a 100-ton DDT deposit off the coast of Los Angeles, so I should have quit while I was ahead.

cars and dry cleaning

I've been noticing more and more environmental news lately, but I'd thought it was just because I have an environmental injury and tend to cherry-pick from six to eight newspapers a day. Now I'm starting to wonder.

From yesterday and today's pickings:

• Reports about lung damage in kids living near freeways is all over the place today.
• BBC2 reported on celebrity CO₂ emissions, which is something I'd actually been wondering about.
• Maryland is considering making some really strict new car emmissions rules, even stricter than California currently has.
• California passed a law phasing out the use of perchloroethylene as a dry cleaning solvent by, well, um, 2023, and they have no idea what dry cleaners should replace it with. The end of the article is today's quote of the day:

  California declared perchloroethylene a toxic chemical in 1991. State health officials told the air board Thursday that it can cause esophageal cancer, lymphoma, cervical and bladder cancer. The solvent, which has a strong, sweet odor, also can affect the central nervous system.
  
  Some business owners disputed those claims.

  That last line, to an EI, comes off pretty much as a punchline, except it's not that funny because some of those people are going to get sick.
• Consumers have short memories, but high gas prices really do have a long-term effect on driving habits.

In personal car news, we finally got the car back yesterday. It passed emissions with flying colors, and we can now report that the Motor Vehicle Department office on the east side of Tucson has the worst air quality of anywhere we've been in the last two years, with the possible exception of the Old Navy store at the mall.

grout scum and sunburn

Today I learned that you can clean the grout on your bathroom floor by spraying it with that 40% hydrogen peroxide solution my husband got at Sally Beauty Supply. You have to be careful with it not only because it's pretty concentrated hydrogen peroxide, but also because it makes an overwhelming locker-room floor stench, which only subsides after the floor dries, and God knows you aren't going to actually go over there and dry it off. This method, despite the odor, is essentially a miracle compared to any other grout-scrubbing method I am aware of.

In other news, which is pretty much always biking these days, I've been out for an hour and three quarters two days in a row, so I have more than doubled my standard ride length compared to last month, and I can still write. Now all I need to do is work on going riding earlier so I don't get all sunburned.

On the sunburn front, I can hear some of you laughing already, but for all you know you could be all vitamin D deficient and have a screwed up immune system and have to take supplements, so ha.

it all comes down to food

Today I made blueberry cobbler while the resident chemist stood by and made predictable comments about mud pies. Thus I learned that I either redeveloped a sensitivity to rice or I'm still sensitive to beet sugar.

I'm going through that calorie-deficit thing my husband did last year because the other thing I learned is that not only can I ride to the bottom of the big hill on the east side of town, now I can ride part way up it, and I did it into an impressive headwind. That was way more fun than yesterday's grocery run. It's really all about food either way, so here's an article about good vegan fake-Hostess cupcakes, or that's what I took away from it.

ye olde random assortment

Today I learned:

• In riding news, I can ride my bike almost entirely on back streets to the smaller of the two Tucson Sunflower Markets, which last time we checked, had expired anchovies and yucky-tasting almost expired soup, unlike the bigger store. Since we're still carless until the end of the week* and unlikely to need any anchovies or soup, that Sunflower is my new favorite store. I will admit to having trouble with the car exhaust at a couple of stoplights, but this trip was much better than the one after the Christmas party, so I might actually try it again sometime, not that I should be pushing it. I mean, way to relapse.
  
  
• In wildlife news, coyotes are wandering around more and more urban neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and residents are having conniption fits, not that it does them any good. Now, in my experience, coyotes pay as much attention to people as the average New Yorker does to fellow pedestrians -- you have to check them for threats, but then you just ignore them. Apparently residents of LA expect the coyotes to be afraid of them, but instead they are afraid of the coyotes.
  
  
• In expensive news, CDs cost a whole lot more in Europe than they do here in the US. Some of it is tax, but you can buy a CD there for around $30.
  
  
• In global warming news, companies like BP, DuPont, and PG&E have gotten together and are bugging President Bush to do something about global warming, most likely so they can have their fingers in the pie when rules actually do get made. But the fact that oil, chemical, and power companies are worried about global warming makes me wonder if we're all going to be under water next week.
  

* We were supposed to get the car back weeks ago, but the mechanic got jury duty. That was just not something we thought to ask about when we handed over our only car.

squishy household items and toxicity

Today I learned that:

• A standard bed pillow is 20 in x 26 in.
• Microwaving your sponge for two minutes kills most of the stuff living in it, but I don't know what that would smell like. It's not clear that I'm interested enough to find out, either.
• Toxicity is nonlinear with dosage, so see, I told you tiny amounts of chemicals could mess you up (but probably not like me unless you're really lucky).
• Sites geared for the gaming crowd are big on flash and caffeine. They have caffeine drinks, pills, gum, mints, syrup, and soap. Also something called Nelly Pimp Juice, which we just don't want to know about.

my apologies if you're using dial-up

Wanna see some snow on a palm tree? That's too bad because I couldn't get close enough to the palm tree, but I got some pictures of snow on other plants that don't look too happy about it. (Click on 'em to enlarge.)



I'm pretty sure this is an ant hill.


The mountains don't usually look like this.



And from the lady who brought you a picture of a cow track, here are some coyote tracks


and an UGG track.


I think this may be as close to an actual UGG as I've ever gotten.

less flammable dust and non-stick snow

Dust'll kill you!! Oh, wait -- that article is all about how fire retardants will kill you, but they stick to dust. [Ed. note: I really enjoy poking fun at the local paper, but I'm really pleased that they printed that. People need to know these things.]

In other news, it snowed in my back yard this afternoon. I'd show you a picture except the blogger photo thingy isn't working again.

Tomorrow I may get brave and try moving this blog over to the updated version of blogger. If it eats it, it's been nice knowing you.

classics and poor relations

I was going to write a treatise on the prescience apparent in Stephen King's The Running Man (the book, not the movie) in reference to the increased cancer rates near the shipping channel that goes past Houston as well as the rise of reality television and/or Jerry Springer. Unfortunately, my browser crashed, thus sparing you a description of the final scene in the book, which if you haven't read it, is remarkably similar to events in 2001 about which we do not make jokes, except that there were intestines and a rude gesture involved in the book.

So mostly what I learned today is that Snakes on a Plane is a bit like a cross between Die Hard and Animal House, but you'd expect that to be good. We were expecting stupid, which, as it turned out, was aiming a little high.

boobs, cars, Walmart, and smoking

Today I learned that women with saline breast implants can make them glow in the dark by putting a flashlight up to them. There are, technically, pictures of boobs (glowing in the dark) where I learned that, so click with care, and here's the link. I also learned that there are multiple ways to ruptu.... You know, if breast implants were used predominantly for things like cancer reconstruction surgery, in which case the ability to glow in the dark could be considered a badge of courage, I don't expect I would be grossed out by them, but I seem to have a big problem with sticking foreign substances into perfectly good boobs.

In other news:

• If you get a car that runs off compressed natural gas, you can fill it up at home. I totally want one of those.
• It appears that you actually can stop a Walmart, but it's not clear for how long.
• Since people have gotten used to having less smoke-laden air in public places, apartment complexes are looking at cleaning up shared air. Now if they could keep people from using synthetic fragrances and installing cheap, chemical-laden carpets, some EIs might be able to get into apartments instead of camping.

Also, in what may be TMI news, I have gotten off really, really easy from this big hormone reaction I was expecting. I slept through the night and everything. This is HUGE, and I hope it's not just some weird trade-off for two weeks ago.

two mistakes and an interesting approach to MCS

Today I learned that Consumer Reports' dangerous car seat article was goofed up and that those radio-frequency Canadian coins were made up.

In other news, here's the website the speaker at the most recent HEAL meeting referenced. She talked about genetic testing, defective genes that make you sick, and how to work around them. I will probably find this more interesting and actually get around to reading it if I don't continue to get better on my own, but now at least I won't lose it.

hiking safety

Today I learned that a hiker in New Zealand had an anaphylactic reaction to another hiker's perfume, and as she was lying on the trail waiting for help to arrive, people stepped over her.

I didn't learn anything funny enough to make up for that, so have a picture of a trail near my house:

funny show and outdoor stuff

Today I learned that you can watch CBC's Little Mosque on the Prairie online, and not only does it have Chloe's husband on 24 in it, it's much funnier than any US sitcoms I've attempted to watch recently.

In biking news, today was forecast to be windy. It was going to be strong enough that I figured I could take my road bike out, and if a stinky car went by, the exhaust would blow away and I'd be fine. So I got on my road bike and headed out: past the perpetual laundry-fume house, across the busy road, and up the less busy road, where I got totally gassed by about six cars. There was no wind at all over there, so I learned that sometimes Tucson has swirly wind, and my part of town didn't get much.

In other outdoor news, here's a picture of an optimistic aloe vera plant near my front door.


It's been attempting to grow flowers now pretty much since Christmas, but we'll see how it does now that it's gotten below freezing three or four mornings in a row.

it's coming to get me

Are you shy? Do you avoid taking risks? Are you always on time and often anxious? Are you a teetotaler, a nonsmoker and don't drink much coffee?

Then, believe it or not, you may be at risk for one of the dreaded scourges of aging today — Parkinson's disease.

Ok, so I got the always on time thing from my dad's side, the anxiety from mold, the teetotaling from laziness, the nonsmoking from, well, ew, and the coffee avoidance from an unfortunate smell association with the middle school nurse's office. I think I'd better stay away from... chemicals. Well ok, then.

speediness, cheapiness, and shortiness

Today I learned that I can do three laps on the bunny loop at Fantasy Island, and I did a lot of it in the big chainring. I'm all impressed with myself, but I still can't write.

Other than that, I learned by watching Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price that Walmart employees need $1.5 billion in public assistance, so we might as well have socialized medicine, and that the standard American diet stunts your growth.

winner!!

I am pleased to announce that baking soda is my new laundry detergent. A lot of EIs use it, but since it's so pervasive I was worried about developing a sensitivity to it. It turns out that I don't use it for anything else now, so I don't have anything to lose except a developing problem with my favorite clothes because there's only so much hot water can do for you.

In other news, here's an 1895 eighth-grade final exam from Kansas.

still incoherent

A few years ago I heard a rumor that my sixth-grade teacher stopped teaching a few years after I was in her class, and tonight we were talking about things we learned in sixth grade, plus I have an internet connection, so I just learned that

⇒ My sixth grade teacher quit to start a dog biscuit company. ⇐

Also it looks like she stopped jazzercising.

so that's where all the words went...

Today I finally put it together: I have made some pretty amazing progress on my bike this week, but I appear to have traded skill and stamina for my ability to write. I expect the exercise has stirred up the crap in my system, and once I get caught up with the extra crap, I'll be able to write again. Until then, anything I write will suck, much as it has all week, except maybe that thing about the soap*.

So here's something much better to read from my idol, Mark Morford, who has written a totally excellent condemnation of America's infatuation with stupid products using Glade oil candles as an example. I hate Glade.

Also, here's a cartoon to look at, and there's commentary below it, but it's more educational and less entertaining than Mr. Morford.

Since a picture's worth a bunch of words, here's the result of my most recent flat tire:


That's eight (8) great tires (for someone who won't win any races) for less than $20. They were on sale. I love it when my stuff is on sale. And how's that for a pretty floor?


* I have since learned that that particular bar of soap is much more fragrant than the others, even sitting outside unwrapped for several days. I think it's broken.

potatoes, uses of

Today I learned a bunch of boring stuff, like that if you haven't had potato chips for over a year, and you eat a few extras to finish the bag, you may never need to eat any more potato chips ever again. So, potato chips: not worth it. Hash browns: totally worth it.

At least I cleared that up.

* NEWS FLASH *

(on screen is serious-looking anchor guy; next to him is serious-looking, comically over-sprayed anchor lady)

anchor guy: A Tucson woman narrowly escaped injury this morning while attempting to shower with a bar of Clearly Natural unscented glycerine soap that she bought at Wild Oats yesterday.

(cut to videotape, woman wrapped in towel)

"The chemicals from it gave me heart palpitations," she says. "I had to take a second shower with the sliver of soap I was going to chuck, just to get the smell off."

(back to anchor guy; lady not in picture)

anchor guy: The woman reported that she usually keeps the soap in the back yard for a week or two before she allows it into the house, and that is likely the source of the problem.

(turns to anchor lady, whose hair is probably only eye-catchingly strange if you have been out of the loop, style-wise, for a couple of years)

guy: Well, Sarah, it sounds like she's going to be more careful in the future about airing out her soap.
lady: Yes, John. (looks to the camera) Remember, those chemicals from stores go home with you, so make sure you air out your purchases thoroughly before bringing them into the house.

(anchor lady keels over)

guy (in a panic): Oh sh*t, I think the hairspray finally killed-- (abrupt cut to station identification)

words all gone

Today I spent most of the day fishing for the right word, which indicates that I used them all up yesterday and the newsletter article is doomed.

I still managed to learn that Stephen Colbert and Bill O'Reilly are each going to appear on each other's shows on Jan. 18 and that the EPA rejected a carcinogenic wood preservative for wood sold at home-improvement or hardware stores, presumably for items like decks and, it says in the article, picnic tables. I thought people bought picnic tables whole instead of making them, but anyway, since it is apparently perfectly fine to use the same carcinogenic wood preservative in things like telephone poles and railroad ties, the president of Forest Products Research Lab, which makes the chemical, had this to say:

"I don't understand what changed," Morgan said. "We believe we provided the data to show this was a safe product."

So, um, like wow, y'know?

procrastination as an art form

Today I'm supposed to be writing an article for the local EI group's newsletter, but I was too busy feeling lousy lately, so I'm taking a day off. Thus I'm going to get all the latest global warming figures in one place because I find that interesting, which will probably result in roughly the same number of words I'm supposed to cough up for the newsletter.

Here's my one previously-known fact: Americans on average release 44,000 lbs of CO₂ each into the atmosphere per year.

Today I learned that

• A gallon of gas converts to 20 lbs of CO₂.
• According to Cecil at The Straight Dope, it's cow burps, not farts, that put so much methane into the atmosphere, but methane is responsible for 18% of global warming. Cows probably wouldn't be a big deal if we weren't cranking out methane in other ways, like burning down a bunch of rainforests.
• To keep CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere the same as they are now, we (the world) would have to cut emissions by 60% to 80%. Also, particulate pollution is keeping temperatures down by as much as 0.8 C (1.5 ^oF), but American and European sulphate particulate pollution caused the drought in the Sahel (below the Sahara) and killed lots of people whom we, as nations, did not know personally. So more particulates is probably not the answer.
• According to the EPA's worksheet, assuming I guessed my electricity bill correctly, my household is at roughly 30,000 lbs/person/year, which is average for a household of two and doesn't match the figure I learned before today, which I'll look up again in a minute. This calculator requires a little more information, but I did a bunch of math for it and it said that I am responsible for 144,000 lbs, which can't be right, so whatever. Anyway, it also says that individual emissions, like from your personal electricity use, are only about 25% of the per capita emissions in industrialized countries.
• I'm kind of annoyed I spent any time on that last calculator.
• This calculator says my entire household only puts out about 24,000 lbs of CO₂. They are trying to sell 'green tags' that are essentially donations to help develop more renewable energy sources, which sounds like a good idea.
• So, back in the article I linked to a week or two ago, it says that 44,000 number is per capita, and a third of it is personal stuff, like cars and electric bills. To be Kyoto Protocol compliant (which will not stop global warming but is a step in the right direction), we, personally, have to cut our emissions to 11,000 lbs/person/year, which means that I, personally, am going to melt the polar ice caps if you believe the first or second calculators, but not if you believe the third one.
• Flying is roughly equivalent to a month's worth of driving an SUV around.

So, that's a lot of bad news, but on the carbon sequestration front we have:

• Plankton poop. (This is my favorite idea.)
• Not trees, so much. Apparently you have to supply a lot of extra nitrogen if you want to accomplish much.
• Here's a comparatively boring Wikipedia page.

Since we aren't likely to stop driving, flying, or using way more electricity than we'd like to even if it kills us, maybe we'll die. I expect, however, that somebody will cook up a fancy way to let us keep doing it. Hopefully it'll involve something funny like plankton poop, and it won't backfire. (Sorry.)

a bunch of stuff you don't want to think about, plus squirrels

Today I finished learning that ovulation, if done in a less than ideal fashion, can really hurt for more than two days. The good news is that my husband says I no longer smell weird, so I'm definitely on the mend. And no, he's not the only man I know who can tell when a woman has some kind of female thing going on by how she smells.

In the spirit of wasting time until I felt better, I spent all morning watching tv. I learned that the Discovery Channel built a really entertaining-looking squirrel obstacle course for Craftiest Animals: Squirrels that only took the squirrels two weeks to figure out. Also, I got the quote of the day from a show about Basset Hounds:

Bassets are always underfoot when food is overhead.

Unlike every other dog we've ever met.

So back to news on topics people aren't necessarily comfortable talking about: toilets and condoms.

• We have white rats in the sewers in midtown, and every few years one swims up the pipe to somebody's toilet and freaks them out. Residents blame the U of A, but the U of A blames people with pet rats or snakes.
• I missed this locked-up condom article when it came out, but Chuck at News of the Weird didn't, so I learned that birth control was illegal in some parts of the country until 1965, when the Supreme Court said it was ok for married people. Everybody else didn't get access until 1972.

I had no idea about that last one, probably because parents don't discuss current events with their toddlers. And pretty much everything I know about the Vietnam War and Watergate I learned reading Doonesbury books. I kid you not.

more and better beauty products

Today I learned that expensive skin care products don't do anything more than drugstore products, but I don't actually care since I can't use any of that stuff anyway. You know what's good for dry skin? Whatever oil you're cooking with. If it's too greasy, wipe some off. This technique is surprisingly easy to master.

In a shampoo update, I learned that conditioner is kind of worthless. If I don't use conditioner and blow-dry my hair right after I get out of the shower, I tolerate my hair fine, and it doesn't tangle any more than it did before. I was a little surprised at first that it didn't get all staticky, but then I realized neither do my clothes, now that I only wear cotton. So anyway, I've moved into the 20th century enough to consistently use a hair dryer, but we'll see if I ever move on to the EI equivalent of hair gel, for which I understand some people use KY Jelly.

quotes of the day: I can't decide

Today I learned that:

• Somebody stole the kidney in the touch booth in the plasticized bodies and body parts exhibit currently in Seattle. The quote:

  "I have no idea what in the world somebody could do with a polymer-preserved kidney. It's one question that's puzzled us," said Josh LaBelle, executive director of the Seattle Theatre Group, which brought the exhibition to Seattle.

  I can't believe anyone could be puzzled by this.


• Titan, one of Saturn's moons and a pretty popular outpost in science fiction, has lakes 'like Minnesota.' That's not the quote. The lakes most likely are methane or ethane, not water, and there's not exactly air in the atmosphere, so here's your quote:

  In the dark of winter, one would need a flashlight to walk the shore.

  You think?


• There has been a three-year debate about what park rangers are supposed to tell people about the age of the Grand Canyon. There's a creationist book in the bookstore there that's causing the higher-ups a bunch of angst, but if you get to the end of the article, it appears that someone forgot to mention the controversy to the rangers actually at the site. But about the book in the bookstore:

  "As one park geologist said, this is the equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book titled 'Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan,' " said Jeff Ruch, the group's executive director.

  Heh heh heh. 'Nostrils of Satan.'

mannequin boobs and Pat Robertson

Today I learned that mannequin manufacturers are making mannequins with bigger boobs. I also learned that augmented boobs are higher up than natural big boobs. That made me remember that boob implants are stuck in under the mus--

Y'know, thinking about that has never failed to completely gross me out, so we'd better move on to less icky things, which, depending on your viewpoint, could or could not include Pat Robertson. Mr. Robertson has allowed as how God told him there's going to be a big terrorist attack in the US toward the end of 2007, and it could be nuclear. Also something about US policies pushing Israel toward 'national suicide,' however that works.

Anyway, I realized that I have not issued any crackpot predictions about the upcoming year. Unfortunately, I seem to have developed partial boob-implant-image-related writer's block, so here's all I have:

Since the Republicans recently decided that global warming is real, and we know they read this blog, they read my suggestion that a nuclear winter would counteract global warming. Since the Democrats just got control of Congress, they'll have a hard time cooking up a good excuse to drop a nuke, so they got Pat Robertson to suggest it to the terrorists. I'm not sure how he'll convey that we only need an itty-bitty nuclear winter, but I'm sure they'll think of something.

vinegar and towels, cocoa powder, PDFs, and drug accounting

Today I learned that vinegar really is the world's greatest fabric softener. It made my cheap towels all fluffy, but still not nearly as fluffy as the ones my mother-in-law got us for Christmas. Also they don't smell at all mildewy, which, since I'm sensitive to mold and am occasionally a sloppy housekeeper, is pretty impressive.

In food news, I learned that I totally can't handle caffeine. Not only did I recently learn the trick with a green tea bag whereby you make two cups of tea in succession, but you toss the first one because most of the caffeine comes out there, I also learned not to eat anything with cocoa powder in it that hasn't been baked for at least 25 minutes. I don't know what baking does to the caffeine or theobromine or whatever content of cocoa powder, but I do know that microwaved pudding makes me all zingy. There is a reason you're hearing about this in what I consider the middle of the night.

In other news, you can fill out PDF forms that don't let ordinary people fill them out online, online, but you have to take screenshots of them and dump them into your paint-type program. Then you can write all over them, show what you wrote to your husband, and re-write the whole works after he points out that what you wrote was not quite what they were looking for. This procedure is so much faster than printing forms out and attempting to write things on them in pen, particularly if you can't apply Liquid Paper to errors without a ten-foot pole, which, realistically, would probably be as accurate as putting the forms out in the back yard and hoping birds poop on the right parts.

And last but not least, I feel compelled to make fun of news-article math, so here's the quote of the day from an article about a drug bust:

The 81 pounds of cocaine has an estimated street value of $515,484, using figures from the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, the federal anti-drug analysis and intelligence center.

That comes to almost exactly $14.03 per gram, and I'm sure drug dealers count every last penny, just like the people who don't round off estimates in news articles.

vitamin C and glue

Today I'm pretty sure I learned that I don't feel good if I don't take my vitamin C. I base this on the fact that my back-ordered, non-corn based vitamin C finally showed up today, a week after I ran out, and I felt noticeably better after I took some. I think, if called upon, I could probably summon up a pretty decent sneeze without hurting myself. So laugh all you want (or not) at Linus Pauling taking 18 grams a day, but take away my 3 grams per day, and things don't go so well. (Could be because I'm two-thirds dead.)

In other news, if you get fed up with drilling holes in your concrete floor to screw down the anchors for the molding strips that go between segments of your floating hardwood floor, you can glue them down instead. Since the only kind of glue EIs can usually deal with is Elmer's, you know this required a sniff test, so yesterday afternoon, epoxy and Liquid Nails went head-to-head gluing short metal strips to the sealed back of a ceramic tile. Liquid Nails smelled much worse initially, but this morning it was only mildly worse than the epoxy until my husband tried chipping the metal off by hammering on the end of a screwdriver pointed at the junction. The epoxy never let go, but the Liquid Nails gave up pretty quickly, revealing that it wasn't even all the way dry. So, I have a little epoxy in my house now, and it ain't lettin' go.

drugs, banks, Fantasy, and some half-baked resolutions

Today I learned that drugs'll kill you! Even the ones coating stents that are supposed to keep your coronary arteries open.

After that, I joined the 21st century and used my bank's website to pay a bill online. It turns out that some time between when I got sick and now, all the fees went away. The stupid part is that if I don't get paper bills, I forget to pay things, so I can't go paperless, even though I'm still pretty sensitive to stuff that comes through the mail. Maybe next year.

Then I learned that it takes me 37 minutes to ride from my house to the north entrance Fantasy Island, but it's totally not worth it because the north end of the park still makes me sick, and it's pretty hard to get to the south end on a bike if the north end makes you sick. Maybe next year.

So here's some stuff I think I can do this year:

• Get a safe job, most likely by starting a small business or a non-profit.
• Ride in a bike race. (Note that I did not say finish a bike race.)
• Eat a donut. I tried some pizza the other day, and the taste didn't live up to the smell, but hope springs eternal.