almost November

Today I learned that the number of trick-or-treaters we get varies greatly each year. Besides a toddler pirate, we've only been visited twice, and everyone who came by reeked of laundry products.

In other news, Francis Simun breads will still kill you if you are an EI. I was able to eat one of our houseguest's bagels about a month ago, but yesterday I ate another one, one that our now ex-houseguest abandoned because they'd started making him sick. It passed the sniff test, but then I had heart palpitations all night. Russian roulette with food is not a fun game.

This October was still way better than the last two.

metal and peanuts

By locating a pair of earrings with small posts, today I learned that after three years of not wearing earrings, I do, indeed, still have a total of four earlobe holes in which to put such things.

I've worn my wedding ring through this whole illness, but no EIs I know habitually wear earrings. Maybe it's the hassle factor, but I suspect it became a trend when somebody had a serious reaction to jewelry that turned out to be nickel-plated, and the rest of the community thought, I'm not going to mess with that stuff. So you know, I think I react to the earrings I bought yesterday, but it could be the residual glue from a sticker on one of them that I haven't felt particularly motivated to remove. It could also be that my $8 sterling silver Mexican earrings have an uncertain heritage, by which I mean for all I know, the posts could be made of uranium.

In other news, in preparation for Halloween, my husband brought home some Snickers candy. Snickers are packed with peanuts, and last time I checked, on a scale of 0 to 15, with 15 being a food whose coexistence in the universe would kill you instantly, I was a 9 on peanuts. I'm thinking maybe if I feel compelled to cheat, I'll try it with the Three Musketeers, not that that's a good idea either. And if I recall correctly from my last attempt, mass-produced candy is much, much too sweet anyway, so it's mostly good for, um, throwing. Although you get a better cringe/surprise combination pelting people with marshmallows, particularly if people mistake them for something like golf balls.

road trip

Today I learned that going to the dentist on the Mexican side of Nogales is pretty much just like going to the dentist here in town, but you have to park a few blocks away and take proof of residency. Or just look like one o' them Amurrican tourists.

Since this blog is all into unnecessary details, here they are:

• There are several handy parking lots just on this side of the border. The one we chose cost $4 and closed at 7 pm.
• I didn't sniff it, so for all I know it could be coated into unusability with overly perfumy cleaning products, but there's a restroom on the US side of the border.
• Very close to the entrance gate, all the stores are pharmacies and dentists' offices. If you turn a corner, they are all souvenir places, and at a glance, they all appear to carry the same stuff.
• My friend (who actually went to the dentist) said he read that there is one good restaurant on the Mexican side, and we didn't eat there.
• The air quality on those little streets with the totally unregulated car exhaust is pretty bad.
• I'm not going to develop a habit or anything, but Sprite is kind of yummy. I suppose I should have tried sweetened-with-sugar Coke, but I forgot. I was too busy being impressed that I didn't react to anything in the Sprite.
• Observant Jews don't eat corn during Passover.
• I think I paid a shopkeeper $8 for entertaining me. I got some earrings out of it, too, so maybe I should look at it as $5 earrings I'll probably never wear plus a $3 tip for letting me talk her down from $15.
• If you whack your kneecap on a rock, the trick is to hit the edge more than the middle part with the tendon going over it. Then just two days later you're able to wander around loose in Nogales while your friend goes to the dentist.

one of everything

Today I learned that:

• Rumor has it that you can get prickly pear spines out of your skin by putting Elmer's Glue on the problem and essentially waxing them out.
• Bras came into existence in 1907.
• Based on today's efforts, the only place belt sanders don't throw tons of sawdust is right where the operator's head is likely to be. Everybody else had better be wearing a space suit.
• Back in July, someone else learned about dogs and exploding toilets.
• The guy in charge of Britney Spears' visitation rights is Commissioner Gordon.

There is no word on whether Batman will be called in to babysit.

history, hiking, and silliness

Today I saw a documentary called Gay Sex in the '70s and learned that the stereotype of gays being really, really promiscuous is rooted in things that went on at least in the New York gay community. Actually, according to what I saw, I don't think really, really promiscuous comes awfully close to describing the actual scale of the promiscuity.

I really thought the rumored promiscuity was just a stereotype, which just goes to show what happens when you fail to teach recent history in school. I really don't know anything about anything that happened between the about the Korean War and 1985.

In other news, because of the east wind today, we decided to go hiking east of town, so we chose Kartchner Caverns over Madera Canyon. Thus I learned that there was very happy-looking desert broom the whole way along the freeway, so we got in a little pollen trouble at the park, but we at least got up to a saddle with a really nice view. And a breeze, which had just enough pollen in it to do in our ex-houseguest, who was a good sport about it, but I'm going to stop taking him to places that have nice views until the pollen dies down again.

Ok, to be fair, I was going to take everybody on the loop trail, but I think there's something about guys where if you give them a choice between a loop trail with a spur to a good view and a trail that is too long but gets up to 7000 feet, they always pick the one that goes up to 7000 feet.

Anyway, the Guindani trail into Coronado National Forest is really overgrown in the low part, and the tall grass hid a knee-high rock, on which I bonked my kneecap on the way back to the car. So that isn't the kind of penalty points we usually talk about when we goof up on trails in Arizona, but we had fun anyway.

And here you can see the Star Wars episode of Robot Chicken.

going for a walk

Today I researched good places to go hiking that aren't two hours away but aren't in the Tucson basin, either. So far I found several trails out of Madera Canyon, which some times of year are overrun with birders, and some trails out at Kartchner Caverns, where, unlike the caverns, the relative humidity will not be 99%. I'd pay more attention to Picacho Peak, but not only is it too low to escape the pollen, it is having an event tomorrow, which to me just means that the trails will be crowded and stinky.

We may not be particularly spry, but we sure can plan.

doing my best

Today I learned that the air quality by the meat counter at the Wild Oats seems to be improving, but everything else I learned was bad. It's all fires and droughts and things that'll kill you, and that's not including what's coming through the grapevine, which is uncharacteristically annoying.

So I'm going to start over. Today I learned that Jethro's mother is Pearl, and Ellie May is Jed's daughter.

pollen, broccoli, and dead cacti

Today I learned that despite 20 to 30 mph winds all day, I did ok. I got really dizzy looking straight up watching the space station and the shuttle cross the sky this evening, but I can totally live with a little dizziness.

In other news, smearing bald mice with broccoli-sprout extract protects them from skin cancer without blocking vitamin D production, and the effect lasts for days. Ok, they tried it on people, too, but bald mice are funnier.

Also, if monsoon season waters one of your cacti too much, it can get some kind of bacteria, and then you have to throw it away.


And if I have a jack-o-lantern this year, it's going to look like this.

department stores and serious thoughts

Today I learned that it's a good thing I intended to use the Macy's gift card I had on sheets instead of something that would have been on the same floor as the perfume department. I also learned that it will be fine with me if I go another two and a half years without setting foot in another standard mall department store.

Then I got to reading a book a friend gave me called A More Excellent Way. It's written by a preacher who, in the first chapter/lesson, points out that there's a bible verse that says essentially that if you don't forgive people who bug you, God can't forgive you, so if you're sick and hoping to be miraculously healed, it won't work.

Church always freaked me out, and I know now that I was just reacting to the crap people spray on themselves when they dress up, plus the Sunday-morning sob stories the minister told. So I know I have church issues, and I don't expect miraculous healing, but I see no harm in forgiving people.

It turns out that you get some perspective when you get really, really sick, so it's much easier to forgive people than I expected.

Well, everybody except for me. Apparently I find being young and having excellent social skills for a physicist borderline unforgivable, so I'm going to have to work on that.

chocolate, mountains, and cauliflower

Today I learned that the place that sells the soy-free chocolate is a farmer's market, so they weren't open today, but in honor of the 30 mph wind gusts this morning, we left town anyway.

We went to the Chiricahua National Monument, which has pinnacles a lot like the Pinnacles National Monument, but with an old guest ranch with a porch that smelled so much of attic that I had to get off it instead of truly tremendous views of the middle of California. The key thing I learned there is that if you get off into a canyon without much in the way of pollen or dust, I do fine in the wind. Also, you can see one of the mountains in Saguaro National Park from the Chiricahuas, and it may have been my imagination, but it sure looked to me like there was a Tucson-basin-generated dust plume coming over it.

The other thing I learned today is that a cup of cauliflower has 100% of the US RDA of vitamin C.

tomorrow should be more interesting

Today I learned that:

1. I felt pretty good this morning, so it is somewhat likely I was reacting a little bit to our houseguest.
2. I react a little to the soap they use over where I help out a couple of times a week.
3. I reacted pretty hard to something in my dinner tonight, and none of it was experimental.

Conclusion: October sucks.

new stuff

Because our houseguest moved into his own place today, today I learned that it turns out we know a bunch of good places for sick people to buy furniture, even though we don't have very much ourselves, and that the Futon Furniture Gallery makes a bunch of their futons with pre-washed cotton outsides.

In other news, it takes upwards of seven hours to get a new stereo installed in a old car on a Saturday. If you're going from a simple radio with a tape player to one of these newfangled stereo thingies, the new one is so hideously complicated you have to read the manual to figure out how to switch radio stations.

The car also got all its door-dings fixed while it was in the shop getting the pickup-induced dent in the hood repaired, so now I'm going to be afraid to park it anywhere.

air quality and UV readings

In honor of the 'moderate' PM10 readings across town this afternoon and the funny feeling I get from that in my chest, I went over to the Saguaro National Park East pollution monitoring page and learned that they don't measure particulates, but they do take hourly measurements of the solar radiation over there, and unlike wunderground, they keep them in a data file. Radiation measurements don't affect how I breathe, but since I don't feel compelled to screw around with sunscreen chemicals, I'd just as soon know how likely I am to cook myself if I go out for a ride. Not that I'm going for a ride any time soon with the air like this.

So back to the radiation. At the pollution site, they report the radiation in langs, and I need to know how that translates to the handy 1 through 16 scale used by whoever it is that likes to report that if sunlight touches your skin, you'll burst into flames immediately like a vampire. You know, the skin cancer people. First I need to figure out what a lang is, and for my first attempt I got this:

Definitions of lang on the Web:
* A lang, or lhang, is a Tibetan bull (ox).

Then I learned that there is some guy whose last name is Lang who studies things like solar radiation, but I still only understand solar radiation units in terms of W/m². So I'm probably overlooking some obvious web search term or something, but I think I'll just settle for checking the UV index on mornings when I don't go riding to see what time I'd like to be home by.

And instead of riding with the air like this, I'll probably go hiking out in the middle of nowhere, where they reportedly carry soy-free chocolate bars.

funny stuff and ethanol

Today I learned that thedailyshow.com, where you can theoretically see clips from every Daily Show ever aired, isn't quite working yet. The minute it works, I'm going to watch the train-wreck Richard Lewis interview, which is in my top three funniest things I've ever seen on television.

In other news, corn ethanol is going to use up or contaminate all our fresh water. The thing is that water doesn't matter if everybody croaks either from increased ozone pollution or starvation, so it's not clear to me why people are worried about this.

lots of things that'll kill you!

Today I learned that drinking alcohol will kill you! In any amount! And it wasn't the grapes in red wine that lowered your risk of heart attack, it was the alcohol and/or the lifestyle.

So, in a thoroughly unresearched, off-the-cuff year in review, chocolate is good for you, except if you eat it until you're grossly overweight, and alcohol will give you cancer, and roasted veggies will rot your teeth, and toys will kill your children, and air fresheners will wipe out everybody, and we're all going to get wrinkly from UVA rays unless a sunscreen company saves us, but the sunscreen will probably contain a bunch of parabens and such that will kill us, so we'll all be dead instead of wrinkly, particularly because the medications prescribed to us to control the things that'll kill us will kill us.

And so will going to the hospital.

With all these things that'll kill us, it makes you wonder why the roads are so crowded.

weirdo food and homelessness

Today I learned that pound for pound, garbanzo flour doesn't cost a whole lot more than wheat flour. If you're on a rotation diet and want muffins on a non-grain day, you don't particularly care how much your garbanzo flour costs, but it's still nice to know those muffins I made this morning don't cost as much as buying stuff at Starbucks, unlike those cassava biscuits.

In other news, an EI friend of ours is getting jerked around by a potential landlord, and I'm too upset about it to figure out what to say. A while ago I mentioned that three local EIs were about to be homeless. Two of them have found not-so-safe interim housing, and I don't know what's going on with the third. In the meantime, our friend came to town to get jerked around, and someone who had to live in her car all summer (in Tucson, where it gets up to 110 ^oF during the day) finally saved up enough to start looking for a place. We need a safe apartment building right now, and all I'm doing about it is not writing that thing I said I'd write for the newsletter, which has absolutely nothing to do with housing.

This situation is upsetting enough that it needs two distractions, but the Blogger picture uploading thingy is currently broken, so all I have is the cockatoo who sings along and dances to the Back Street Boys.

destruction and more phthalates

Today I learned by reading my archives that last year I recovered from October a week or so into December. My big goal this year is to do better than that. To be fair, I can handle working as a caregiver for roughly twelve hours a week without killing myself, which is a huge improvement over last year, but it's putting a pretty serious dent in my efforts to put something together for the local sick people group's newsletter. Well, a dent on par with what Godzilla could do given a week or two with no interference.

In other news, California has banned phthalates in toys intended for children younger than three. I'm quite confident that if kids shouldn't be chewing on phthalate-containing toys, they shouldn't be inhaling phthalates, either, so California screwed up royally by not banning air fresheners in households that include small children.

I got nothin'

Today I learned that cat pee is one of those things EIs can smell when everyone else thinks it's been cleaned up. I'm pleased to report that I didn't learn that firsthand.

chinese food and a cat

Today I learned that you can make rotation-diet-legal potstickers (aka fried dumplings or, if you're from around Boston, Peking dumplings). The hardest part was when my hands got tired mushing little chunks of dough into circles of dough. The easiest part was ignoring the multitude of directions I found on the web describing precisely how to enclose the meat mixture with the dough circles. The way you wrap the dough around the filling is exactly the way you'd make an air bubble the size of your thumb in a piece of silly putty so you could pop it, thus sort of replicating the sound of elementary school students popping their gum, a feat which was infeasible at my house due to lack of parental appreciation of chewing gum.

In other recipe news, it required a little cheating to have chocolate chip cookies for dessert, but less than normal because I learned that unsweetened chocolate doesn't contain soy lecithin. It just contains chocolate, and if you cut up some chunks of it and throw a little extra sugar in the dough, you get some excellent cookies. I suppose many people would object to the texture of the chocolate, which is why major corporations are always throwing soy parts and milk fat into it, but the flavor contrast -- slightly bitter chocolate next to sweet dough -- was a very pleasant surprise.

Ok, enough with the EI Food Network. This evening I learned that when cats drink out of the toilet, which I had heard of, not all of them jump up on the seat first.

holy bloodhounds, Batman

Today we got an estimate for replacing our time bomb pipes from a nice, man-shaped cologne bomb. If I didn't know better, I'd have to assume that people who wear that much cologne are actively trying to kill people, but he seemed awfully nice.

To be clear, a lot of EIs are single ladies who have to talk to these guys themselves, so they politely request over the phone while scheduling a visit that whoever gets sent over not reek. (Not in those words.) My husband schedules these things, so I don't worry about it. I can always air my house out afterwards, right?

I had no idea how much one person could reek of cologne. After I got the place aired out, I had to go around figuring out what he touched. So far, I think all he got was a cupboard, the dishwasher, and the back of the couch. I have never been happier that my couch is completely washable.

So today I learned that it's quite likely asking this guy to not put on cologne in the morning wouldn't have helped at all. I mean, if it's oozing out of his pores to the extent that I can track his handprints, a shower is not going to help.

milk and sinks

Today I learned that what actually gets that laundry contaminant out of my stuff is milk. I'm going with non-fat powdered, which very likely is not as effective as whole milk, but I really don't feel like going to the store to buy gallons of fresh milk that I'm just going to use as a solvent, and it is at least making my stuff much better.

In related news, having a two-bowl sink in the kitchen does have some use. I'd pretty much concluded that the divider between the bowls was there exclusively to keep me from washing large items - oversized cookie sheets, for example - down in the sink, which would keep me from splashing water all over the place. Right now, I'm using half of my sink to soak my worst-contaminated clothing, and most conveniently, I can cover that half almost exactly with one of those cookie sheets that doesn't fit in the sink.

I also learned how to embed a video of the worst Price Is Right player I've ever seen, and as hard as it is to sit through, it's worth it to get to Bob's reaction when she's done.

if you're squeamish, skip the first paragraph

Today I learned that two or three times per semester, a drunken college student will vomit on the 24-hour shuttle between the Metro and the GW campus. The university is going to start charging those people for cleaning costs and taxi rides for stranded students, which I'm quite confident that some people will take as permission to spew all over the bus. Ok, but here's the quote of the day:

Supriya Shah, a freshman from Pennsylvania, said: "To just target the [shuttle] seems random. People throw up all the time in the dorms, they throw up in the elevator, they throw up everywhere."

I'm really glad I went to college before that became commonplace.

Other than that, I went to a HEAL meeting and learned that when a chemically sensitive chemist explains to a bunch of chemically sensitive civilians that ammonia is a gas, so that when the water in which it is dissolved evaporates or is otherwise removed, the ammonia is gone, they don't believe it. I understand that these people have been lied to by all kinds of people selling purportedly harmless products like weed killer, which gives some of my friends seizures, but when one of their own speaks up, they don't believe it until someone who uses ammonia in her laundry offers to let everybody smell her shirt.

So I got my shirt sniffed, but I think someone would have noticed before now if I had gone around smelling of ammonia. Also, that ammonia doesn't leave any kind of residue in laundry was about the first thing I learned when I came to Tucson, so this very community that taught me about ammonia apparently just up and forgot.

Well, probably not the lady who told me, but you'd think this kind of information would stick around a little longer than, say, ammonia fumes.

product safety, continued

Today I learned that exposure to DDT, which is used to save children from mosquito-borne illnesses, gives children an increased risk of developing breast cancer when they're older. Also, kids in the stone age -- um, I mean 1948 -- used to play in DDT spray.

It might be time to quit reading the news again.

death and goofiness

This blog would like to report that it learned something funny today to make up for the fact that it feels crummy in October (October sucks, despite the weather being nice), but instead it learned that a Home Depot brand grout and tile sealer will kill you by essentially burning your lungs so you can't breathe. The manufacturer apparently changed the formulation to make the spray "somewhat less chemically pungent," but the new active ingredient's MSDS said not to use it in aerosol form because it could cause respiratory injury, and lo and behold, it did. If this kind of thing keeps happening, I don't think it'll be just toddlers missing their lead-painted toys who are going to develop a profound mistrust of product safety.

Ok, I dug around and found something funny. Charlie Sheen has a tattoo, which he's getting removed, of a note pinned to his chest that says 'back in 15 minutes.' He said it was supposed to be an ashtray, but it got goofed up.

I also learned that

If we use the same absurd extrapolation techniques demographers used in the 1970s, Japan, with its current low birth rate, will have only a few thousand citizens left in 300 years.

more things that'll kill you

Today I learned that I've been living in Southern Arizona long enough that 88 ^oF sounds like a very reasonable outdoor temperature, and not one that would send 302 marathon runners to the hospital and kill one. I've completely forgotten what humid air feels like, so I looked up the relative humidity. According to wunderground's data, the humidity when they called the race was 51%, so the heat index was only 91 ^oF. And if you need to make fun of my temperature adaptation, you should know that my house got down to 74 ^oF overnight, and I got cold.

In other news, 130 farm workers near Reno got poisoned with pesticide because an inversion layer held the fumes in. I suppose that means that inversion layers, not a WWI-era asphyxiator that makes a great pesticide, will kill you.

In more chemical news, you're supposed to dispose of expired sunscreen and liquid cosmetics by pouring them on kitty litter, waiting until it gets absorbed, and then throwing it away. Old medication should be mixed with coffee grounds so that no one will eat it. I'm going to stick to my current strategy of not owning any of these things. It'll save you time and money!

I also learned how to spell asphyxiator.

nuts

Today I learned that going riding on Saturday morning, when everybody else on the planet is driving around or making scented-product contrails all over the trails, is actually worth it. Not only did I make excellent time riding over to Fantasy Island, which turned out to be uncrowded despite a full parking lot, I got a shoe rack, two belt sanders, and a vibrating sander for only $52. Ok, my husband got all the sanders, but I found the garage sales.

In other news:

• Mike Golic has a BMI of 31.1, which would classify him as obese, except he looks fine -- he's just enormous.
• Vegans sometimes produce recipes that fit nicely into a rotation diet. The author of this buckwheat muffin recipe gets full points for honesty in that they aren't like regular muffins, and it helps if you like buckwheat to start with. As someone with experience concocting moderately bizarre foods out of buckwheat flour, I have to say that these weren't nearly as bad as we were expecting, so we'll probably have those again. Unless I put nuts or raisins in there. Then it'll just be me.
• If you make a bridge for squirrels (pdf) so they can cross the road without getting squished (people on other continents care more about this kind of thing), you need to make it wide enough so they can pass each other without getting into a fight.
• My husband has been identifying my handwriting by process of elimination, and now that we have a guest in the house, it's not working as well.

shoplifting tools and things that'll kill you

Today I learned that if you place security-tagged items you wish to shoplift in a shopping bag lined with aluminum foil, you can discreetly carry said items past the security scanner at the door undetected, thereby avoiding time-consuming, evidence-laden, in-store tag removal. Also, this information is strewn all over the internet.

In related news, someone took 350 bras from a Flagstaff Victoria's Secret, and those bras each cost roughly $43, which is more than I paid for the entire outfit I'm wearing right now.

In 'things that'll kill you' news, my local paper conveniently grouped warnings about salmonella-tainted white chocolate, a myriad of lead-containing toys, and Cub Scout badges all in the same article. But thanks to alert reader Linda, we have an even better death article, one that says that heavy users of cosmetics can absorb five pounds of chemicals in a year. Better yet, eye shadow has arsenic in it. Arsenic!! [Ed. note: Miss Molly has been rendered somewhat inarticulate by amusement over a staple old-school murder weapon appearing in cosmetics. She'll be ok again in a minute.]

Anyway, in this article, two British women in their 20s were convinced to give up their beauty products and try some safer ones for a week, and lo and behold, they decided most of their scary products were easily replaceable. Thus we learn that by not switching to safer but just as effective formulations, cosmetics companies are trying to kill us.

I bet they can't pull that off when today's preschoolers reach their 20s; if they have any sense at all, they will have developed a profound mistrust of product safety.

wrong, wrong, and wrong

Today I learned that people who continue to have health problems after contr*** BREAKING NEWS ***
Pregnant and nursing mothers are supposed to eat at least 12 ounces of fish per week or their kids' brains won't develop properly, unlike the last six years or so when eating more than 12 ounces would give your kids mercury poisoning.

God, how I love hot-off-the-presses epidemiological studies. Anyway, many people who don't seem to recover from Lyme disease think they should be on long courses of antibiotics, and the conventional medical community doesn't agree with them. I got curious about that, so by searching the web for two minutes, I learned that the doctors who actually know what's wrong with these people don't think long courses of antibiotics will work, either, because the bacteria changes forms, and you need something else to work on those kinds of things.

And in case you needed to know, it takes upwards of five and a half weeks this time of year to make enough snow in Georgia to make a proper snow mountain for a soda pop company.

kangaroos and no sleep

Today I learned that one way kangaroos keep cool is by licking their forearms, which have lots of blood vessels near the surface.

Other than that, I started reacting to my sheets and the top layer of my couch, all of which I washed recently. I'm washing the sheets in vinegar right now and hoping the problem is that I contaminated the washing machine with the zippers I sewed onto some barrier-cloth pillow covers I made, which promptly contaminated everything I washed them with.

The thing is that I didn't wash the pillow covers with the couch cover, so I think I made a minor sensitivity much worse by washing it into the sheets and then sleeping on them. Either that or something else is contaminating the wash, and I'm doomed to not make much sense until I figure it out.

I had hoped I was done with this kind of thing.

bump in the road

Today I learned by helping out at the house of an EI who is only just this side of bedridden that I'm really not necessarily able to work part-time two days in a row. I'm going to rest up and try to learn something entertaining tomorrow.

measure of illness and a tree

Today I learned that Microsoft products suck as much or more than they did in the past. Also, I'm still a little too sick to handle that kind of frustration well, but I am very pleased that it didn't keep me all hopped up for hours like it used to.

Have a picture of one of the local trees that fell in the forest.