entertaining fluff and the FDA

Today I tested the rule that I can't eat anything out of a cardboard box, and it turns out that it's still true, but I got to eat a bowl of cereal, which was kind of fun. I used to like cereal.

In closely related news, I sort of learned what goes into marshmallows, in case I come across anyone who can eat leftover one-ingredient cereal covered in melted marshmallows.

In other news, the following headline was splashed all over everywhere today:

Perchlorate Levels in Food Safe for Most, FDA Says

The article failed to address what exactly those other people are supposed to eat or drink instead, or even who's at risk, but I suppose it did make it pretty clear that some of us are considered expendable. So thanks, FDA, and remind us, why do we pay you?

nudity in the news

Today I learned that there's a billboard outside of Chicago that features a partially-clad model with arrows pointing to various horrible figure flaws, and it helpfully lists treatments and solutions for the aforesaid deformities. Motorists find the billboard annoying and/or replusive, but apparently as a postcard, it increased the business of the salon and plastic surgeon who sent it out. I get why people find the image upsetting - this is the US, where we don't expect to see an attractive woman who appears not to be wearing pants on our everyday commutes, but after that, I don't understand why more people aren't laughing. I mean, figure flaws on a model?

But nudity is not funny, so no laughing with the junior who is the starting center fielder and likely to be the starting running back at a local high school, and who streaked this year's graduation. The school is putting on its best frowny face over it because otherwise I expect it would become a tradition, but somehow I don't see the kid getting expelled. Handing over a prankster starting athlete to the other team somehow doesn't seem like such a good idea.

I have a PhD

Today I learned that if you react to your bedding at 4 am, later in the day you can end up doing things like asking the guy at the little portable post office in the Safeway parking lot how much 20 2-cent stamps cost.

The interesting part of this situation was that I had enough functioning brain cells to be environmentally conscious and ride my bike to the Safeway parking lot and then notice that not ten yards from me, an SUV sat idling, keeping the wife and kids of the guy in the front of the line cool and canceling out my contribution toward reducing America's carbon footprint, but I couldn't multiply 20x2.

I could have blamed my stupidity on smoke, perfumy people, idling SUVs, that weird Safeway smell, etc., but I was an aggressively clueless moron all day, so I don't think it made that much difference.

one more thing

This is why I have an infrared sauna.

new age weirdness that might work anyway

Today I researched liver cleanses because depending on recent chemical exposures, I get a pain under my ribs on the right side that sometimes gets referred up into my shoulder and neck. It's very much not fat-intake related, so I'm sure it's not gallstones. I'm pretty sure the problem is my liver, and since this is my blog, I can think whatever I want.

Anyway, I'd heard of liver cleanses, so I fished around on the web, where you can easily find multiple sites that spell out exactly what you're supposed to do to get crystallized crud out of your liver, but at least they all agree that after some variant of a short fast, you're supposed to drink some amount of dissolved epsom salts, olive oil, and citrus juice, and then you'll poop out a bunch of things that look like very small rocks, except for the bright green ones. They also seem to encourage people undergoing whichever version of this cleanse they have found most superior to collect the 'stones' that they excrete, and, as I understand it, store them in the freezer for what appears to me to be entirely for entertainment purposes.

Ok, maybe I'm overstating it, but there's this fantastic letter in The Lancet (free registration) about a woman with gallstones that needed surgery who showed up in the emergency room with a bunch of frozen green things. The doctors analyzed them and concluded that they melted at 40 C, which actual gallstones wouldn't do, and that they were actually a product of putting olive oil and citrus juice into a fairly empty GI tract.

Which doesn't mean that some people with weird allergies and other symptoms don't feel better after trying a series of these cleanses - you can find their stories all over these websites. It may be that some of them are hypochondriacs, as Gene Weingarten suggests, so any treatment that gives them something to do will make them feel better, but given my experience of the last few years, I am quite confident that there are some people whose health has improved after pooping out a bunch of saponified olive oil.

The thing is that if people are positive that the stones are made of cholesterol and really are gallstones and that you have to drink apple juice beforehand and lie on this side or the other after chugging oil at exactly 10 pm, then the medical establishment has every reason to believe that cleansing advocates are kooks.

My theory is that taking a whole bunch of magnesium (from the epsom salts) gives people fire-hose diarrhea, which I expect would potentially wash out gunk they'd happened to collect in their innards, and then adding the olive oil gives the bile production system something to work with, so maybe that gets rinsed out, too. Rinsing seems to help devotees of colonics, where you pay someone to hose down your colon. For all I know, it's the same thing, but cheaper because you wouldn't have to pay anybody to stick a hose in a fairly personal body part.

yet more soda pop and local vines

Today I learned that even soft drinks that don't make benzene will kill you. I guess since I already reported that soda will kill you twice, it's kind of lost its entertainment value.

In other news, we have two nests of mourning doves in vines on opposite sides of the patio. Here's the usual nest:


And this is the newer nest, but with older chicks (if you can tell what you're looking at):


As long as I was taking pictures of vines, I figured I'd get one of the sweet potato farm. You see, I had this sweet potato, and it sprouted, and I read that you could get something like 50 sweet potatoes from one that sprouted, and next thing I knew, I had plants. Tomorrow they'll get to go live outside.


I lied. It's not entirely a sweet potato farm. That thing in front is an aloe vera offshoot.

more low doses, climate change, and social characteristics of nerds

Today I learned from a friend who recently returned from a conference on pesticides that black plastic trash bags typically have pesticide and fragrance chemicals added to them during the manufacturing process, and that would be why they reek like they do.

In yet another installment of our unintentional series on low-dose chemical exposures, Gulf War Syndrome comes from a combination of sarin gas, pyridostigmine bromide (PB), and bug repellent. The quote of the day spells out how doctors started putting that together:

To Abou-Donia, the connection between sarin gas and Gulf War syndrome became clear after terrorists hit a Tokyo subway with sarin in 1995. Hospital workers who never were in the subway but who worked with sickened passengers came down with the same symptoms reported by Gulf War vets.

In climate change news, parts of the San Francisco Bay Area didn't get below 90^oF at night for four days last summer. Having grown up around there, I can say with all certainty that that's probably in the East Bay, but that's still way hotter than it used to be. And keep in mind that I still don't care whether or not people are responsible for our current warming; I just care that we stop polluting the place.

And last but not least, a woman with no discernible physics background has been hanging around using computers, going to seminars, and bugging people in the Stanford physics department since 2004 - and she'd have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that darned other kid who was sleeping in the dorms and likely prompted a physicist to remember to say something to someone who wasn't another physicist.

is there an echo in here?

Because I failed to learn this yesterday, today I learned that when you write a shell script, putting something between two of those little backward quote thingies that no one uses for anything else (`) means to run whatever command is inside. The output gets used by whatever command you put in front of it.

Ok, back to our regularly scheduled programming: chemicals that will kill you. Human fetuses are exposed to all the nasty chemicals I've fussed about here (bisphenol A, pesticides, flame retardants, mercury, etc.) plus some others that I should have covered, but didn't get around to it (pthalates, PCBs, lead, heaven knows what else), and the doctors in this article think these exposures are to blame for everything from obesity to Alzheimer's to ADHD.

So right there in print it says that we're poisoning ourselves, and with extremely low doses of chemicals. I believe I've mentioned that here about 300 times in the last year and a half, so I'm pleased that the medical establishment is getting a clue. Also, I'm kind of happy that I got sick now instead of even ten years ago because it seems as though we, as a culture, might start making some progress toward cleaning ourselves up. Unlike the Europeans, who got a clue years ago, although with all the diesel cars, for all I know it could be worse over there.

In somewhat car-exhaust related news, retired professional bicycle racers are coming forward and admitting to doping. A temporarily-retired-due-to-injury pro told me last year after a bike race that pretty much to compete, you had to dope. I didn't particularly want to believe it, but it's getting more and more believable, which is disappointing.

In just plain annoying news, Blogger has written the following word that I cannot erase below this last paragraph. If you don't see it now, it's not because of anything I could do about it.

warning: sick lady feeling good and returning to nerd roots

Today I learned that coyotes get heartworms, that some cell phones will kill your fancy electronic Nissan car keys, and that if someone expects you to do badly at something, you will not let them down, which as a female physicist, I noticed. I just assumed it was a character defect... because I was probably defective. (It turns out I was just getting sick.) We also got the quote of the day from a guy who admits he dances like a tiptoeing rhinoceros:

Once you've fainted waiting in line to give blood, the rest of your life is pretty much all downhill on the embarrassment front.

So then I learned to write a shell script, and I am fully confident that at least three of you are right now thinking, "She's never written a shell script before?" To which I can only reply that I've had bosses and jobs where everybody relied solely on DOS and QuickBasic, and later, Windows and Matlab, so I was, indeed, crippled until today. Well, not entirely, because Matlab is pretty handy.

Anyway, today I learned that 'kill' and 'killall' are really just for telling programs 'hey.' killall works on anything with the same process name, but kill is good for individual processes.

• Cntrl-Z = kill -STOP [process number collected from grep]
• Cntrl-C = kill -INT [process number collected from grep], and -INT (short for interrupt) stands for -2; -l gives a list
• kill -9 = kill -KILL = die

-STOP and -KILL don't talk to the program; they are no questions asked. Other signals can be handled by a signal handler in the program, so when you kill your computer-controlled irrigation system, you can have it close the valves instead of leaving them open, as a kill -9 would do.

Other key bits of information:

• '.' means here, so if you want to run your shell script, the path is ./ in front of the name.
• When you want to use all the variables you read in from the command line, conveniently named 1, 2, 3, etc., you call them $1, $2, etc.
• exit means exit 0, so the program exited normally, but exit 1 means exit and false, so you know something screwy happened.

$ echo=echo
$ echo $echo
echo
$

food that'll kill you, sweet words, and a mummified fairy

Today I learned that you can get the plague by eating a squirrel at the Denver zoo, and, assuming the quote in question is correct, you can still use 'rad' to mean 'cool' or 'groovy.' Ok, now I just learned that 'groovy' first came into existence in 1937, so slang has a longer shelf life than I thought.

And only the better part of two months late, I learned that the mummified fairy a prop maker turned up in his garden for April Fool's is totally rad. Dude.

one of those rules

Today I learned that if I put the car in the garage with the door up a foot and wash and dry my sheets without soap, they suck. Then I learned that if I roll the car out of the garage and air fluff the sheets, they come out fine. The thing here is that the dryer is in the kitchen, and I didn't park the car in the kitchen.

I think with any kind of breeze, the breeze can blow the garage fumes into the kitchen through little cracks no one else would worry about. Now I'm not sure I want to ventilate the garage; I think I just don't want to ever put the car in it again. Thus it only took me three weeks to re-learn one of the cardinal rules of EI housing: if you have an attached garage, you can't use it.

laundry update, a downtown mall, and potentially insane shoe-related optimism

Overnight I learned that between decontaminating the washer along with that canvas the other day, not keeping the car in the garage, and air fluffing everything I washed with just hot water yesterday, I tolerated the sheets again, so I got to sleep in the bed all night last night. That was nice.

Around noon I learned that no matter how many rooms you finish putting flooring in, you still never get to the point where the room just looks like it should, meaning that it has flooring in it. Each room, as you finish it, has the most gorgeous floor ever. It'll be a couple days before we start on the last room, so the wood is all stacked neatly so the car fits in the garage again. We'll see how that impacts the laundry situation in the next few days.

In newspaper news, the mall we went to once a year before Christmas when I was a kid is being torn down so it can be replaced with an actual downtown. Apparently Sunnyvale, CA tore down its downtown to put up a mall in the 1970's, and it didn't turn out so well. That was the only indoor mall I was aware of as a kid. It was a huge novelty, which still didn't make it interesting for more than about two hours once a year.

In shopping news, I tolerated this one bike store that I had a lot of trouble with last year for about 20 minutes, just long enough to try on all two pairs of road shoes they had in my size. One fit; the other sucked. It was an easy decision, and as a result, I've decided that I'm invincible, so I should start applying for jobs in January, when I should be over my next battle with laundry sensitivities. Obviously I'll let you all know how that works out for me.

warning: sick lady attempting to think

Today I learned that if we don't cover up the cork underlay overnight when we're in the process of putting down more wood flooring, I can't sleep anywhere in the house. This situation was aggravated by my increasing sensitivity to my sheets, which seems to be getting worse.

Since I'm having trouble with the sheets and seem to be unable to hold onto a train of thought, I'm going to worry about laundry on virtual paper, where it's harder to forget what you're thinking about, and see if I learn anything.

1. I was using baking soda on my clothing and vinegar on my bedding when I got into trouble.
2. Washing my favorite quilt with just water and then running it through the dryer on air fluff for 3 hours made it tolerable.
3. I switched to washing soda for my clothing, and I tried it in my regular sheets, but not my flannel sheets, and after air fluffing both sets, I tolerated the regular ones for one whole night. I believe I bragged about it, but I failed to mention they were bad the next night.
4. I don't tolerate my regular bed pad or my terry cloth substitute bed pad, and I know I tried the terry cloth in ammonia, since washing soda didn't seem to help.
5. Everything I own feels kind of extra-dry, and the terry cloth almost sand-papery, as opposed to fabric-softened.
6. My favorite quilt wasn't quite as tolerable after the last time I washed it, but the quilt I keep on the couch isn't as bad. I don't wash it as often, but it's totally in line to become my favorite quilt for a while. That'll probably last until I have to wash it.
7. I just washed 5 yards of new canvas eight times: once in ammonia, twice with just water, a soak in lots of vinegar, then water, 1/2 teaspoon of washing soda twice, and then just water. It smells somewhat like canvas still, but I react to it just like I do my non-flannel sheets.
8. The flannel sheets got air fluffed for 3 hours again a few days ago. I didn't tolerate them then, so I put them down on a metal chair in the living room and forgot about them. They're actually pretty good now, which is an indicator that if I hung everything up outside, I'd be in better shape, except for that thing where it'd all have acacia pollen and sawdust all over it from the floor construction.
9. I collected every type of potential laundry powder from next to the washing machine and sniffed them all. The baking soda smelled horrible, so we scooped out the garage-odor soaked stuff. The stuff underneath smelled better, but I react to it a little. The washing soda was fine. The borax and the Trader Joe's were both not too bad, but I wouldn't use them. The Seventh Generation was awful.
10. I heard from friends that ammonia leaves no residue, so if you're totally desperate, it'll work if you're careful with it.

Moving on to the conclusions I think I can draw here:

1. There's something wrong in the washing machine. It's either the 'soap' I'm using, a residue, or car pollutants because airing stuff out makes it better, as opposed to just washing it. I've been running the washing machine when the the garage door is part-way open to let out the car stench, but I can't rule out it polluting the washer overnight. But, this all started before the car went into the garage.
2. I've been mixing some clothes I thought were mostly decontaminated into the regular laundry now that they don't smell too awful. I should fish all of them out.
3. Since we've been fussing with the wood flooring in the garage, we haven't parked the car in there for two days. If my laundry problems suddenly disappear today, I'll know what the problem was.
4. There was one termite hole in the crack in the garage floor near the washer, so there was some termite poison injected into the floor near the washer. I'm not that concerned about it since the laundry was all wonky before that.

Well, there - that was about the least linear thought process I've seen anywhere, but at least I got to the conclusion part without ending up worrying about the laundry problems of a guy in Los Angeles I've never met or the scorpion I shook off a piece of cork yesterday in the back yard.

So here's the plan: I'm going to use plain hot water on everything except that stuff I said I'd fish out for a week and see what happens. I'm going to wing it with air fluff. I could also hand-wash some things and see how that goes, and then maybe I can concoct a way to test vinegar residue.

fish, rats, and an ok day

Today I learned that we have a pond in the middle of town that grows enough algae to kill the fish that aren't supposed to be in it, and rats in Africa grow to weigh as much as six pounds. They're also lazy at the beginning of the work week.

In other news, the pollen appears to be letting up, the air quality didn't feel too bad today, and my find-it ability returned suddenly such that without trying, I ran across my husband's misplaced car key on the garage floor under the shop vac, so things are looking up.

Ok, I'm sugar-coating it. My time sense is still pretty screwed up, so it's like living in a time-warp where time flies, but you're just not quite right instead of having fun. I expect better things from tomorrow, just like little orphan Annie and whatsername, the demented heroine in Gone With The Wind.

exhaust fumes, slump blocks, and bees

Today I got to go for a bike ride, which hasn't happened in too long to think about, and I learned that I can go for a ride on the outskirts of town on the road at rush hour and not get in much trouble with the exhaust fumes. So there was not exactly a whole lot of traffic out there anyway, but it was still rush hour.

In other news, a slump block wall is made with slightly sloppy concrete bricks, and according to some organic beekeepers, they don't have much trouble with colonies collapsing.

I would also report that getting back in shape makes writing hard, but I think I remember learning that already.

pesticide and Swimmies

This morning before the termite guy arrived I learned that if you build a little piece of wall in your back yard near a blooming acacia tree and inject your fake wall with foaming termite poison, the reaction I get from it is remarkably similar to the one I get from...

...the blooming acacia tree.

It also smelled sort of like Home Depot, and almost exactly the same as the leftover wallboard, which we meant to make into a 'control' fake wall, but we didn't get around to it. So I did react to the new wallboard, that is, unless I got downwind of the acacia tree, which, since the breeze wasn't overly steady this morning, was pretty much anywhere.

The upshot is that when he got here, the friendly termite guy offered up that spraying only outside might well kill off the termites in my bathroom wall, so we decided to wait the requisite 90 days and see if they're gone. By then the fake wall will be 90 days old, and I might be able to get near it.

For the record, I seem to have survived fine, considering a storm blew through this afternoon.

In other news, I was a bad news magnet yesterday, so I carefully only read stupid news today. Thus I learned that you can inject your muscles with synthetic oil that was designed for bodybuilders who just needed to touch up a spot or two. People have predictably started using it to inflate their upper arms until they look like Swimmies.

Now I'm wondering how well they float.

things to think about

Today I'm wrestling with whether or not to allow the friendly termite guy to spray really, really dilute nicotine solution into my bathroom wall tomorrow. I don't think my house will fall down if that wall gets eaten, so I'm leaning toward no, particularly since six months ago I could detect the solution when it was sprayed on a sidewalk. I couldn't once it dried, but there's no sun inside my bathroom wall, and not much of a breeze, either. I've also seen that old toothpaste commercial where they painted a piece of chalk with some colored fluid, and it soaked in, and I don't really want to try the same thing with wallboard and something that says on label, "Do not give fluids to an unconscious person."

I also learned when I took the trash to the curb that the great outdoors smells like smoke, and sure enough, the border somewhere near Sierra Vista is on fire. Since we have a west wind, I'm a little surprised I can smell smoke, but I think I mentioned someplace that I have superpowers, so check me out.

useless information, pollution, and places to sleep

Today I learned that Marilyn Manson keeps his makeup on all the time, Leonard Nimoy is a photographer, and there's a competition at rodeos called Mutton Bustin'. Also, the air quality issues around here will probably continue through Friday.

In other news, I slept through the night last night on the bed, not the cot, so running all the bedding through the dryer on 'air fluff' for three hours did the trick.

fluffy stuff, tar as food, and new car consumption

Today I learned that if I run the dryer all day on air fluff, having the house pressurizer running doesn't heat the house up so much because a lot of the hot air gets blown out the dryer vent.

In other news, there's a bacteria that lives in the La Brea tar pits that eats petroleum and releases methane. I read a novel about something like that once, so science fiction comes to life, but hopefully with better reviews.

Also, it says here that people like to get a new car every four years. If everybody did that, and the government stepped in, we could all be in much more efficient cars in something like five years, except those of us who were taught by example to drive cars at least until they're old enough to vote. So actually our car is from the early 1980s, when people still cared about fuel efficiency, so I still don't see why we need a new car.

paperweight

Today I learned that since Wednesday, the ozone levels around here have been getting into the 'Moderate' range after lunch. That would explain why I've been exhibiting all the traits of a quality paperweight in the afternoons, except that I don't usually sit on paper if I can help it.

The other thing I learned is that I tolerate my sheets better having run them through the dryer on air fluff for three hours. Now that I think about it, that's the first thing I did with the comforter I always seem to tolerate when I started to suspect baking soda and/or vinegar were causing a problem. So, that would be why I always seem to tolerate that comforter, and I guess I had some kind of baking soda residue. Or vinegar, but how you can use both in the same machine and still get a residue is beyond me.

See? Thinking just like a quality paperweight.

real-time laundry experiments

Today I totally nailed the doing-laundry-with-ammonia thing. The trick is to load up the washer, start the water, then quickly pour some ammonia in the bleach dispenser thingy, screw the lid on the bottle quick, slam the washer shut, and get the heck out of Dodge. I was pretty pleased with this solution this morning when I tried it while washing my sheets, but I would be happier with it if I didn't still react to them. The ammonia left them feeling sort of papery, a fabric condition to which I react. I think little cotton fibers break off when the fabric is like that, and I react to all kinds of other things, so why not little fabric particles?

So this condition requires fabric softener, which to the chemically-injured usually means vinegar. I'm about to go sniff the result to find out where I get to sleep tonight: the torture-device rope cot with the quilt I always seem to tolerate or the soft, comfy kapok futon covered in normal bedding, that is, sheets. Everybody cross your fingers....

Ok, vinegar made the sheets better, but not great, so like every night this week, I will lie down on the bed for 23 seconds, develop heart palpitations to some degree or other, and then go crash on the cot where it's safe.

So I may react to baking soda and vinegar; I could react to baking soda residue and not vinegar; I could react to papery-feeling fabric and baking soda residue; I could react to anything washed in the same garage as the car, even with the door opened enough to allow critters in; or I could - eh, you get the idea. I'll play Sherlock Holmes tomorrow. Right now, I'm going to bed.

ammonia and termites

Today I learned that when you put ammonia in the washing machine, holding your breath isn't the hard part. After all, holding your breath becomes a reflex when you've been trying to avoid breathing chemicals for several years. The hard part is getting the cap back on the bottle and the clothes in the tub while trying to keep your eyes shut because ammonia burns. It was definitely worse than cutting up onions, so I don't know how people ever scrubbed floors with it.

In other news, the safer termite guys have a foam they can blow into a wall that contains the same dilute nicotine solution they used underground near our front door. I didn't have a problem with the nicotine last time at all (not that I went out and took a whiff), so I didn't worry when the nice man said he'd have to put some in a foam inside this one wall inside my house that has two short termite tubes growing out of it.

Right after he left, I thought, "Foam?" I guess I'm not that worried because he's worked with chemically sensitive people before, but I'll still have to call and ask about the foam. Mostly what I learned was that I did ok while he was here, but it's distracting to have a cheerful guy who smells of laundry products standing in your bathroom checking your termite tubes.

Everything I know about foam and what I'm calling dilute nicotine, which is actually a nicotine derivative, is here and here (pdf), and apparently the nicotine stuff has a very low vapor pressure, so it doesn't evaporate much.

death and shuffleboard

Today I learned that the following things will kill you:

1. Dancing, if you do it very enthusiastically and goof up.
2. Hamburgers. Probably all hamburgers, but particularly those with metallic ingredients.
3. Rebates, but probably only those given to doctors for prescribing some drugs that will, of course, kill you.
4. Utility companies, but maybe only if you are a fish.
5. Rebates and utility companies, but that's only if you're solar power in Southern California, and it should get better.

I also learned to play simplified-for-people-with-bad-memories shuffleboard. We had a tournament, and only three of us had ever played before, but the final was between two people who'd never played before. I expect knowing everybody on the court makes a big difference, but shuffleboard is surprisingly entertaining.

fumes and dryers

Today I learned that petroleum product vapors are denser than air, so that's probably why opening the garage door just enough to allow critters inside is helping with the car fumes in there.

In other news, the dryer broke. Fortunately, the washing machine saga gave us plenty of appliance repair experience, so it only took one trip to the store and $46. It would have been less, but I decided as long as we were at it, we could replace the more dry/less dry thermostat, which hasn't worked right in months. So, check me out - I have a fancy new ancient dryer. With less lint in it, too.

Ok, I have the kind of dryer with the cheesy lint screen, and it totally collects lint below the screen where the air turns a corner to enter the duct. I never knew you were supposed to clean your dryer every year, but I can absolutely understand why. I'm just sorry I didn't take a picture.

fun with laundry

It's pollen season, and I still haven't made it through one without developing a sensitivity to whatever I wash clothes in. So far, in order, I have lost Seventh Generation liquid (Nov. '05), borax (May '06), Trader Joe's fragrance-free (Nov. '06), and, for variety this time, baking soda and vinegar (present). I'm pleased to report that washing soda takes out the baking soda or vinegar quickly, so I should be good to go pretty much tomorrow until October. Then I think I'll try soap flakes or just go for the fragrance-free ammonia, which I understand is most easily found at the hardware store.

I'll have to ventilate the garage pretty carefully if I want to work with ammonia, but I understand it washes all the way out and doesn't leave a residue, so if you can avoid hurting yourself when you load the washer, it's the safest thing out there.

I think I would like to be better by October. I'll let you know how that goes.

cake

Today the wind died down, so that was really good, but everything I write comes out annoying, and I'm out of pictures, so I'm going to maunder on about how to make cake out of garbanzo beans and fructose.

First you search the web for "vegan chocolate cake," where you will turn up a million recipes that are pretty much identical. Then you use garbanzo flour, which can be found at some health food stores and not others, for the flour, and two-thirds the amount of fructose instead of sugar. A little extra fructose and oil might not hurt, either, either that or figuring out how to make frosting out of fructose.

six hours of television

Today I learned that by not reading books since about 2004, I have forgotten the names of some of the science fiction authors I liked, but the ones I can remember have coughed up about two books each.

In other news, I did not get away with hanging around in the wind yesterday. I felt really, really bad this morning, but despite the pollen, I was able to get a ride in before the wind picked up around 9 am. I couldn't even ride up a curb, but since exercise really helps, I felt pretty decent by the time I got home. Then I sensibly stayed inside the rest of the day.

Stuck indoors I learned that if you talk on the phone to other EIs on a really windy day, it starts feeling like the blizzard of the century, but without the pre-storm shopping.

pulling wire in the wind

Today I learned about wire-pulling lubricants. The ones I read about online all said they're water based and non-toxic, and the one we found at the store didn't smell like much until I washed it off my gloves, and then it smelled kind of like WD-40, but only for a couple seconds. So, wire snot isn't my favorite product, but it did fine.

Because the other thing I learned is that pulling irrigation-valve controller wire through your old leaky irrigation hose under roughly 15 yards of sidewalk is not that easy. The trick to that is to accidentally choose to pull the wire toward the driveway, and when you can't possibly pull it through by hand anymore, you can go borrow a come-along and attach it to your car.

a hodgepodge

Today I learned that:

• You can get Maury ringtones.
• I hear that some kinds of dental floss are made of teflon.
• I'm pleased that I decided to stay home today instead of attempting the grocery store because John Edwards came to town and undoubtedly screwed up traffic.
• If you are making 124 dinner rolls, you should keep the dog away from the dough while it's rising.

And the quote of the day comes from the continuing Chinese food additives saga:

“Melamine is mainly used in the chemical industry, but it can also be used in making cakes.”

food rules

Today I learned never to eat anything out of a cardboard box. Stated like that, it sounds pretty obvious, but when you've been watching your husband snarf Triscuits safely for several months, it clouds your judgment.

In similar news, peppermint turned out to be a pretty bad idea, too. The fact that I could smell my mother-in-law's toothpaste through a closed door and down a hallway a couple of months ago should have been a tip-off, but it was toothpaste, and it could have been spearmint instead of peppermint. Ok, so I should probably have known better, but I got away with it the first time, just like the Halloween candy.

I can still taste the stuff, and it's been over 24 hours.

It's not something I'm going to want again for quite some time, I think.

trying to kill us

Today I learned that Chinese companies purposely spike their food products with chemicals to make them appear of higher quality. People are taking this opportunity to fuss mightily about the uselessness of the FDA for letting tainted food into the US, and I've fussed about them more than once here, but I don't see their ineffectiveness as the real problem. The real problem is that we buy food products from countries where soaking such things in chemicals sounds like a good idea.

I also learned that red wine vinegar is less acidic than white vinegar, and that technically (and cheaply) you can make white vinegar with no wine, just acetic acid in the right concentration. Neither of those facts tells me why some EIs swear red wine vinegar will decontaminate anything, but white vinegar won't. Maybe it's that natural vinegars have more kinds of acids, and that does something, but my resident chemist is asleep, and since us moldies have trouble with fermented products anyway, it may not even matter.