cryptic update

Yesterday I learned that I can hang around in my parents' living room for upwards of 20 minutes, which is a pretty big deal. Not only did I sit on 18-month-old leather furniture, but I did it near a wool rug, and all after a 14 hour car ride.

Today I learned that a bag of compost upwind of the tent is extremely bad news, and that put a pretty big crimp in things, so the only other thing I learned was that cherry pits won't kill you unless you work at it.

peepholes and humidity

Today I learned that those little lenses you stick in your door so you can see who's outside are called either peepholes or 'door viewers,' and they cost roughly $5 unless you want the fancy $40 kind.

So you might now be asking yourself how I managed to learn that and tell you about it from a moving vehicle, and the answer would be the other thing I learned today: it turns out that after breathing 80% humidity air while loading the car, which always takes longer than I expect, I wasn't in good enough condition to help drive, so it appears that I'm not invincible after all. We'll drive to California tomorrow.

Also, it says here that you can reach your tonsils with your tongue, and those hovels I predicted in LA are likely going to happen, although hopefully not as hovels.

bloating, tube fights, and more soda-related death

Today I learned that the reason I puffed up like a bag of chips at high altitude with the advent of monsoon season was apparently that my guts found digesting my food more of a challenge than normal. The cure for this problem, and I wish I'd known this in 1999 when I ended up having gut surgery, is to remember to take your betaine HCl with anything that's hard to digest. (And I have no idea why that site thinks betaine HCl is good for homocysteine levels, but whatever works. All I care about is no longer resembling a watermelon with legs.)

In other news, next month somewhere in Seattle there will be an epic battle between two groups of cardboard-tube wielding nuts, which sounds pretty entertaining, and, as usual, soda will kill you, except it might just be a marker for poor eating habits.

So back to high altitude, tomorrow we're driving over the mountains to California, so you probably won't hear from me until Wednesday. Then on Friday, we're going to disappear into the mountains for a week, so blogging will be thin for the next ten days. I promise to learn some things, though, so stay tuned.

how hard could it be?

Today I learned that everything I learned this morning seems really boring this evening, probably because I found out the hard way that today was one of those days I should have stayed in the house. Now, by studying the master, Dave Barry, who can take a slightly unusual newspaper article and turn it into something hilarious, I ought to at least be able to squeeze a little humor out of what I found earlier, so let's take a look and see what I have to work with:

• Cigarette taxes got raised in Texas six months ago to take the pressure off property taxes. No one can agree whether the resultant drop in sales is from people quitting or from stockpiling.
• A guy at the Chicago Tribune pointed out that raising gas taxes makes people whine, but it would be less expensive for your average Joe than Congress mandating better gas mileage, which would increase the cost of cars.
• Brad Paisley sings a song about wanting to check a pretty girl for ticks (lyrics) (somebody's homemade video).
• Somebody keeps leaving big bags of poop in a storm drain in Muhlenberg Township, PA.

So it seems pretty obvious that I ought to be working with the poop story, but I'm going to bed.

important words and immigration enforcement

Today I learned that the word in the beginning of the Colbert Report started out as grippy, followed by megamerican, Lincolnish, superstantial, freem, eneagled, and flagaphile. Just last week it changed to good.

In other news, I learned that whatever we call the INS now has arrested about 4,000 illegal immigrants in the first half of this year, up from 845 in 2004. It's not clear to me that they were really trying back in 2004, but we know they've got their noses to the grindstone now, so I'm going to assume they can get that total up to 5,000 arrests every six months. Heck, 6,000, mostly because I'm a physicist, so you know I'm about to do some estimating. At 12,000 arrests per year, and assuming we completely seal our borders, we will have worked through our illegal immigrant backlog of 12 million in one thousand years.

So, um, wow. Maybe somebody else did that calculation before now, but I've been sick. I'm going to see if I can't get that number down some using statistics I found on some website that indicate we imprison 1000 people per week. If we could arrest illegal immigrants at that rate, it'd only take 231 years to arrest them all.

I hadn't looked at it like that before.

the government is trying to kill us

Today I cleaned up the patio and developed another killer death headache, so about all I learned was that the FEMA-supplied, formaldehyde-soaked trailers in which Katrina victims were housed actually killed a man. So I may make jokes about how various commonly-considered-safe chemicals and products will kill you, but sometimes they really do.

nasty air and good shipping bags

Today I went shopping and learned that if I'm determined to go into Joann Fabrics, I really need to use that silicone respirator I tolerated for a while last year. I probably tolerate it again, so if I use it only in emergencies, I might be able to keep using it. I could also wait until January to go back in Joann's, or I could never, ever go in there again. In case anyone googles Joann Fabrics (and you might be surprised how much traffic I get from Google): Joann Fabrics has the worst air quality of any store I've been in in the last six months, and that includes Home Depot, which is full of formaldehyde and pesticides. Stores full of synthetic chemicals are bad for you, so think before you breathe.

In other news, today I discovered trash compactor bags. They're just like large kitchen trash bags but much thicker, so if you were to, say, encase the parts of your canvas wall tent in them, you could ship the tent to your parents' house without worrying about it getting contaminated in the mail.

It's about time for the monsoon season yearly exodus. I'm all excited about this.

hair and medicine

Today I learned that people put glop in their hair to make it feel dirty, and they'll pay $9 an ounce to do it. From that same article, it appears that if you get a guy to put styling putty in his hair, you get quotes like this:

"One thing I don't like: the fragrance. It smells like peaches and I'm not the kind of guy to wear food in my hair."

Alrighty then.

In real news, I learned that the New York Times has reported that chronic fatigue is real. So now if someone claims CFIDs sufferers are hypochondriac slackers, we can label them terminally ignorant. In a similar vein, The Washington Post reports that in the last fifteen years, doctors have started referring patients to chiropractors, so that indicates that chiropractic medicine is going mainstream, too. Next thing you know, people will start banning extraneous chemicals so people with chemical injuries and asthmatics can wander around loose, and the 'most physicians and researchers' cited in that last article will catch a clue and start understanding environmental medicine.

And last but not least, brought to you by my curiosity about bot flies, please enjoy the University of Florida's "Overview of 'Lumpy' Squirrels."

thunder, a cow town, and Jesus

Today I learned that if a serious thunderstorm passes right over your house and you put your hand on your sliding glass door, you can feel the door flex with the wind gusts, but it really jerks when you hear the thunder. Also, if you're used to storms blowing in from the northwest, but you get a really slow one coming from the east, all that stuff you won't allow in the house that's sitting on your patio gets a little damp. I suppose it'll dry now that the storm is over, much like the four wet doves who perched on my back fence with their feathers all fluffed up.

In other news, there's a town named Bovina in Texas, and Jesus lives in Siberia.

not much

Today I'm suffering from trapped pollution again, so I learned that if I really work at it, I can actually accomplish something on days like this, but only if it can be fiddled with in five-minute increments. I still didn't accomplish much, but it was much better than nothing.

Also, I can't stand watching tv anymore. I tried between little bursts of activity, but all I learned was that The Horse Whisperer (I trust the rest of you saw this years ago) has a horse in it, but it seemed to be more about a pushy married lady and a cowboy who fall in love, which I found icky. I guess I still don't understand why affairs make good movie plots unless there's going to be a murder or something.

drinking

Soda pop'll kill you! I suppose I already learned that multiple times, but this article says that the phosphorus in regular or diet soda leaches calcium from your bones, so as you develop obesity issues from your taste buds adjusting to sweeter and sweeter foods, your bones will crumble and you'll be stuck lying in a little puddle of your own drool until you die. Oh, yeah, and it's bad for your kidneys. See? I told you it would kill you.

In other drink news, as we suspected, wine critics are full of it.

plastic is evil, but coordination is good

Today I developed a sensitivity to the plastic of my cell phone. For various reasons, I've been spending a lot of time on it, and I thought I'd noticed that I was starting to smell funny. That would explain the funny smell, and that reaction really sucked.

Then I learned that since the last time I sewed hooks-and-eyes onto a skirt, my coordination has improved to the extent that the procedure takes minutes instead of hours.

So to heck with the phone; I'll get over that. I still had a pretty good day.

a church, xylene, a little black snake, and some eggs

Today I learned that according to the locals' comments on today's Dear Abby, judging by appearances, the pastor of The Cool Church (warning: noisy sound effects) is very obviously gay. Since The Cool Church is very much against gayness, this could turn out to be pretty entertaining down the road.

In other news, scientists like to test fish to see what chemicals accumulate in the food chain, but now they've found a class of chemicals that include a host of pesticides and musk xylene, a synthetic fragrance used in soaps and perfumes, that accumulate in people and Arctic land animals, but go right though the fish. There's going to have to be some rethinking of some safety standards, and let me not pass up this opportunity to point out that pesticides and synthetic frangrances will kill you.

I mean, musk xylene, and people couldn't figure this out? Uh, oh... can't... stop... making... fun... *errrgh* ....

Ok, back under control. I also learned how to scare the heck out of a little black snake. I was tramping along a trail this morning minding my own business when I came across the back end of a little black snake that was rooting around in a hole on the side of the trail. I stopped and admired it for a minute (it was very industrious, whatever it was doing), and then I stepped past it. It apparently heard that, so it yanked its head out of the hole, took a good look, and bolted.

In other wildlife news, the most recent daddy bird is currently not sitting on three eggs. One is dirty and may be the one that was left before. Another looks fine, but the last one has dings in it that don't look to have leaked, but, as a baby bird, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to be in that shell. We'll see what happens.

And one more thing - I feel a whole lot better today that I have lately, and so does the lady who lives sort of near here, so something has changed, and it's not just me.

hugeness

Today my hairdryer died, and I don't want to redevelop a sensitivity to slowly-drying shampoo residue, so I learned that if you air-dry your hair outside and upside down, leaning over the packaging for your new hairdryer, your hair comes out huge.

newspeople, roads, and street signs

I suppose I'd heard about Mayor Villaraigosa's affair with the telemundo anchor before this, but today I learned that sometimes people in the news get pretty cozy with the newspeople who cover their stories. Maybe people whose wives have disappeared after announcing an intention to kick said people out of the house always invite newspeople to bring their kids over to go swimming. I don't get out much, so, as I said, it's news to me.

Then I learned that LA is thinking about what to do about its roads before the population grows by a projected 60% by 2050. They're expecting a 400% increase in truck traffic, so my initial thought that they should just ban cars with fewer than two people in them may not make much of a dent. Maybe they'll have to make all non-local freight take a train. Oh, or they could re-institute servants' quarters to reduce the number of commuters. See those little hovels on the edge of the parking lot? That's where the housekeeping staff lives. How quaint. I don't think you'll have to remind me not to move to LA.

And in case you needed to know, you can buy a used street sign for $5 to $10.

walking the tortoise, weather, and more birds

Today I learned that there's a tortoise named Newman who goes on two mile walks in Burbank, CA, following along purposefully behind his person. If you've never seen a tortoise go for a walk, there's a video.

In monsoon news, we're feeling it, even if it isn't yet official. Tweaking the EI grapevine has revealed that we all feel crummy, and we were all quite used to feeling better than this. Apparently water and strong sunlight are great for producing ozone, and the wind that goes with the thunderstorms kicks up a lot of dust, so that goes a long way toward explaining why we feel like we do, and that completely leaves out the problems we have with mold.

In birdy news, more twigs were wrestled this morning, but that leftover egg is still in the nest. I had meant to trim the vine after the nest-renovators took off for the afternoon, but this morning I completely discounted the possibility of going outside today. I read that book I mentioned yesterday instead, and it turns out that the book (in the bag) is safe; I didn't get a headache today.

Not having a headache was fine.

birds and books

Today I watched a new set of doves straighten out the nest that was just vacated. They spent the morning wrestling with twigs. I was expecting them to kick out the third egg laid by the previous tenants, which, since it's still an egg, clearly didn't hatch. The soon-to-be mommy bird scratched around some, perhaps incidentally kicking the egg, but she never got it out of the nest.

There were two eggs abandoned there earlier this year, and I never did figure out what happened to them since there weren't any shells to be found.

The other thing I may have learned is that the chemicals in a library book I'm trying to read are giving me a killer death headache. It could be something else entirely, but I was doing fine when I was just staring blankly at the tv instead of reaching into a plastic bag to turn pages.

inexpensive entertainment, lead, birds, and a pig

Today I learned that there's a Corningware outlet in Milpitis, CA, which is not that far from my parents' house. Corningware makes Visionware glass pots and pans, the holy grail of EI cookware. Since I'm doing fine with stainless steel, I suppose that's not a great excuse to go shopping, but I'll take what I can get. Shopping is high entertainment if you don't get to do it much.

In other news, this morning I read the Washington Post and learned that lead exposure gives people a tendency toward violence and some lady from Manassas, VA feels like she's out in nature when she hears the birds chirp inside the Home Depot. I think she has very low standards.

Speaking of animals and low standards, I learned that if you know anything about farm-raised vs. wild pigs, Fred the enormous hog, who was shot by an 11-year-old, was obviously farm-raised. He was also essentially a pet, in that he played with the grandkids and the chihuahua.

In still more animal-related news, the latest batch of doves fledged today. They spent most of the afternoon napping in the shade of a chair, so they were really easy to photograph, but we're having minor technical difficulties, so the picture isn't postable today. I still can't believe the birds put up with us.

things you can do indoors and a minor tv relapse

Today I confirmed that the day after a fancy, violent thunderstorm, I get heart palpitations if I go outside. This situation had better resolve itself somehow during monsoon season, which is due any minute.

Other than that, I learned that:

• A fabric scrap I had big plans for was too small to make the skirt I wanted. I could have made a skirt I didn't want, and that might actually have turned out better than anything else I tried to make today.
• Fox Mulder has a psychology degree. I think everyone else learned that back in the '90s.
• Going tv shopping sounds entertaining. Not like I should be wandering around in electronics stores, but it's too bad the tv shoppers I talked to live 2000 miles away.

a vent and social skills

Today I learned that the vent fan on the bottom of my over-the-stove microwave vents to the great outdoors, despite the fact that it's mounted on a wall that doesn't reach the vaulted ceiling. Apparently there's a duct in that wall that goes to another wall that does reach the ceiling. I would never have learned this if my laundry closet door wasn't still made of plastic and tape and thus swayed when the pressure changed.

Then I learned that the key to public speaking is confidence, and that's all. Also, you can issue effective blanket compliments to enormous groups of people you will probably never even meet. I apparently still am stuck with fantastic social skills for a physicist, so I found the whole blanket-compliment concept pretty surprising.

In other social skills news, I accidentally learned how to tell someone his cologne reeks. This morning I went to the bank at the grocery store I can't actually shop in, and there was a perfumy poison cloud emanating from the bank area. I assumed it had come from a customer who'd already left, and, loudmouth that I am, I said as much, along with something about perfume and its tendency to linger. After I had chosen a teller and partially completed my transaction, it occurred to me that the fumes that made my hands shake so much I had to move away to sign my name was the cologne of the male teller in front of me. So I hope his coworkers teased the heck out of him for the rest of the day for his perfume habit.

warning: really depressing

Today I learned that yet another friend of mine is going to have to move out of his safe housing. An acquaintance is already homeless and living out of her car in 110 degree heat, and if you think healthy people don't do well in hot weather, you haven't seen an EI. The three men I know will not make it in their cars; two of them don't even have functional cars. They won't make it in section 8 apartments, either, smushed up next to a bunch of people who, like 90% of the population, can spew whatever they like into communal air and not get sick, and that doesn't include the possibility of getting pesticided by the management.

So what can I, personally, do about this? Not much. I can't take any of them in because we don't tolerate their stuff, and they probably don't tolerate ours. I could probably sniff-test places for one of them, but I'd have to find something sniff-worthy and affordable.

I'm pretty sure I was born to be an engineer, but come January, when I was theoretically going to start looking for a job, I think I'm going to try to save the world, starting with the Tucson EIs.

fireworks and freeway speeds

Today I think I learned that you can see the 'A' Mountain fireworks from my house, but the ones at the Westin La Paloma are partially behind a bunch of trees. Neither display was all that compelling from something like 15 or 20 miles away.

Other than that, all I learned was that you can get a car up to 100 mph on the San Diego freeway at 2:15 am. And that Al Gore's son sounds like a moron.

bugs, cars, and malls

This morning I got two mosquito bites. I only had heart palpitations for a few minutes, and four hours later, it hardly even looks like I was bitten. For those of you just joining us, I used to have welts from this kind of thing for a week, so I am very, very pleased by this turn of events.

In other news, my husband assured me that people drive differently around you depending on whether or not your car has a rack on top. Today I happened to be rackless, and I was tailgated by a Mustang and a Corvette (not at the same time), and I can't say that's ever happened to me with the rack on. I wouldn't have noticed the Mustang in the line of slow-moving traffic I was in except that he attempted to pass me on the right just as the road widened from one lane to two and we all went right because the slow guy in front stayed left. I suspect people like that have lots of terrible mornings, and I bet this one was no different.

In just plain weirdness, you can get shot at the mall.

eggplant and the tv coma

Yesterday I learned that I am very definitely no longer sensitive to eggplant, but I overcooked the chicken that went with it, and that didn't go over so well, so I didn't end up reporting anything. It probably wasn't worth reporting today, either, but I didn't want you all to worry.

Today I learned that when I develop a tv coma, I really can just wait it out. This afternoon I was all set to watch yet another episode of Jericho on the web, and suddenly both bathrooms were clean, all the floors were mopped, and I had a partially-finished tank top. One of these fine days, I'm going to look around my living room, and there will be a bunch of wood furniture in here with all the unfinished bottom parts sealed with AFM Hard Seal.

It's kind of reassuring to confirm that you aren't actually a lazy slob.