homelessness

Today I learned that there are relatively new and exciting places to be homeless (airports) or to prepare to be homeless (near your parents' expensive Bay Area house). I also learned that teaching skills honed on explaining the intricacies of a dilution refrigerator* come in handy when you need to show a woman who has lived in her car for 25 years how to load a dishwasher.


* The thing in the picture in that article is not actually a dilution refrigerator. That's just the controls.

some geology and a helpful hint

Today I learned that the latest Mars lander might have ice under its little butt, which would be neat. In semi-related news (if ice counts as geology), people accidentally type 'granitie' and get it published more often than you'd think.

And apparently leaf blowers have many uses, particularly if you leave a place for people to make suggestions.

sleepy, hot birdies

Today I learned that some of the birds in the aviary at the Desert Museum are so accustomed to people that you can take a picture of one, who seemed to be falling asleep on a railing, with a cheesy non-zoom cell phone camera and have it look like this:

shoes, langs, and air quality

Yesterday I learned that shoes are designed with a spring to spring you forward because they keep your toes from working right. Shoes also screw up all your joints. Without even discussing obvious foot-insults like high heels, I knew that overly padded shoes screwed up my knees, and most flat shoes, particularly sandals (which let my left foot tilt inwards), do something quite painful the back of that knee, but I hadn't really thought about why I never have any of these problems when I wander around the house, where shoes are not allowed. However, I have no idea what people with plantar faciitis have to say about shoelessness, except I'm pretty sure it's along the lines of 'ow.'

In other news, I finally figured out how to search for the solar radiation unit 'lang,' thus turning up the definition of a langley. So never mind that someone already told me the definition, now I can find it on the web, not that I remember what I did.

Today I learned that I really can't have an unfiltered air source near my dryer, so hopefully I'll shut up about the laundry soon. It came to a head today because there was pollution so horrible that it made my saliva taste funny, and I went looked for a new construction site to blame it on.

There is no construction upwind of me. The air was so bad that it made my tongue sting, and it barely even registered on the air quality website.

getting less sick

Those of you who have been following along know all about the bad pre-filter for my house pressurizer that, since the dryer is right next to the output of the pressurizer, contaminated all my laundry. Today I learned that the best way to remove that contaminant is to run the contaminated laundry around in the dryer with a decent outdoor air source for upwards of three hours.

I report this while wearing:
1. a man's undershirt;
2. a curtain.

Lookin' good.

important news-related information

Today I learned that our illustrious local paper uses 42 point type in the headlines. There was a lovely headline to that effect, promising a whole article about it, but it turned out to be about John McCain's physical results, which I, personally, didn't need to read because if there were something wrong, I would have seen a 42 point headline about it in a higher-quality newspaper.

lame update

Today I learned that one of our emergency replacement house-pressurizer filters, installed after the exciting smoke incident, was causing laundry contamination, which was pretty much killing me after the shampoo, the smoke, the hormone reaction, and the air pollution. We were worried about the hepa filter, but it turned out to be the pre-filter, which is before the charcoal and the hepa filter.

The upshot is that I've been doing laundry all day, and I'm feeling better, but I'm still bloated to the tune of 3 or 4 lbs, and I just want to go home.

Which is where I am, and it didn't help much last week.

more boringness

Today I learned that occasionally dogs live into their late twenties, and that if I'm going to try Chinese food (the kind without MSG, and I'm not going to play with soy sauce, either), I think I might try Panda Village, which isn't more than about 15 minutes from my house, or Guilin, which is pretty close to the Whole Foods.

Also, I guess I learned that I can caregive for nine hours, but being a caregiver is not really my goal in life, plus it's not clear how often I can pull that off.

pathetic post

I'm doing it again, which I consider pathetic:

Yesterday I learned by getting in the car and driving east for a while and then, after turning up a map, south, that some BLM land is at least a little bit developed. Lehner Mammoth-Kill Site, while not as entertaining as the name implies, has a little trail with big signs to help you understand what you're looking at.

Mostly it looks like there's a trail that meanders along and across a wash, but theoretically you're supposed to be able to see the layers in the ground. One of them was black because the sea level rose and made a lot of algae; the one under that had a bunch of Paleozoic animal bones, not that we got to see any of them.

Today I learned that if a really gusty wind blows away the pollution, I feel better. I don't feel good because there was a gusty wind, but at least I didn't have to leave town.

cranky nerd alert

Yesterday I learned that despite my love of horribly cheesy movies, I couldn't sit though The Core, where the earth's magnetic field gets unstable, and bad things happen, so people decide to stabilize it using a nuclear bomb. Maybe it had something to do with the recent shampoo problem in combination with the smoke on Friday morning, all topped with a nasty hormone reaction, but instead of being hilarious, the following lines made me turn off the tv:

scientist: The core of the earth has stopped spinning.
military guy: How could this have happened?

To tell the truth, they would have been funnier if I hadn't recently concluded that I probably won't be able to get a real job for at least another year, and there's nothing like a frustrated nerd to get all cranky about things like missing angular momentum.

In today's news, there are some researchers here in town who think the sunspot cycle might fade away for a while, which, last time that happened, caused the Little Ice Age. Their paper got rejected by Science for being only based on statistics, which I take to mean it was a little too speculative. I was going to say that it wasn't clear to me why it got newspaper space, but here I am reporting that the Little Ice Age had something to do with sunspots, so I guess I'll shut up.

too tired to make sense

Today I learned that even if you trim a tree is by pointing and telling your husband where to cut, it's still tiring. Also, I'm not the only one who, when chocolate re-entered my diet, couldn't stop eating it, and apparently there's another, easier way to treat intracellular bacteria, but I don't know any details yet.

And it is embarrassing to have learned something like this, but it sounds like Matthew McConaughey's aversion to smearing himself with chemicals only applies to his armpits.

campfires and prairie dogs

This morning I learned that despite the fact that the air quality website said the air was fine, and it looked like the smoke had cleared, the great outdoors smelled like an enormous campfire until about 11 am. Then my worst problem was that my house pressurizer air cleaner smelled like a a campfire, leading to the discovery that the secret hepa filter that can only be purchased from AllerMed is a Glasfloss Puracell II mini-pleat 90% efficiency 12x24x4" filter, and you should theoretically be able to get one of those someplace else.

In other news, there's a book that's probably been out for at least a year by now all about the language of prairie dogs. Their chirps have sections for what kind of beastie they're looking at (coyote, hawk, person, cow, ferret (even though they'd never seen ferrets before)) and also important details like size, and coat color in animals or shirt color in people. So rodent chatter is actually more informative than anything you can find in People magazine, in that they cover style and what's most likely to kill you.

hair, marketing, and smoke

Today I learned that you can pick your new, easier-to-dry (and thus less likely to lead to shampoo sensitivities) hairstyle online, but since you still can't get it online, it doesn't really matter. What matters is forming a deeper and longer-lasting bond with your hairdrier.

In entertainment news, I see why Axe sent Matthew McConaughey a year's supply of their product - so they could say they'd done it. But it's really insulting to send a bunch of chemicals to somebody who has said that he doesn't want to smell like marketers want him to, so what's he going to do? Give it away so other people can smell like marketers want them to, or send the whole load to the landfill and destroy the dreams of countless 13-year-olds who would love to have some but freely admit that walking through a cloud of it gives you a headache?

In smoke news, as I predicted, since they were still burning the side of the mountain today, we got a yard full of smoke down here. Actually, it's not just here - people are reporting smoke all the way on the west side of town and to the south, toward Nogales. For future reference, this kind of event fills up the filters in the house pressurizer pretty quickly, so it's better to turn the pressurizer off before you screw up all its filters.

So we're all going to get deep vein thrombosis and die, but,

said Deputy Santa Catalina District Ranger Sherry Tune, “Should the smoke be heavier than what we planned for, we apologize for any inconvenience that might bring.”

In yet more smoke-related news, this blog saw a Fox News segment about new electronic, smokeless cigarettes (it's online somewhere), but since they're not available in the US yet, the prop department had to fake part of it. Key quote: "That looks like a suppository you're holding."

all goofed up

Yesterday I was going to have belated CFIDS Awareness Day (it was on Monday), except I developed a sensitivity to the shampoo I'm using, and I didn't figure it out until tonight. So go listen to a song I really, really like, and I'll go wash my hair in vinegar.

And corn will kill you.

fire, fire everywhere

Today I learned that despite the not-much-progress report on the Solano fire (south of Kitt Peak), the air quality in town is improving. Either the guys who fight fires for a living have made some progress since that article came out, or the wind has shifted.

Speaking of wind and guys who do stuff with fire, the guys who burn hillsides for a living got good results from their test fire this morning, so they're burning part of the big hill east of town that I like to ride up. They're aiming for a two-day burn, which would make them finished on Tuesday evening, and that would be good because the wind is supposed to be northeast on Wednesday morning, which would blow all the smoke right into my back yard.

They have permission to have everything smoldering all week. My tent is packed*.


* My tent is always packed. It lives in the coffee table, which is a plastic tub.

all about television

Today I learned that in Los Angeles, if you actually want to see news instead of fluff, you'd better watch the Spanish newscasts. Since about the last time I watched the news here, they reported on the opening of a Beni Hana restaurant, I think I'd better get more serious about learning Spanish.

In somewhat related news, and I will preface this information by revealing that we watch a computer because our television reeks (and lives in the garage), your television will kill you. As far as I know, my computer screen will kill me, too, but that's beside the point - it hasn't yet made the news.

appliances, thumb whacking, and fire

Today I learned that you can replace your recently deceased, builder-model (read: freakin' cheap) over-the-range microwave with a new one with more features for only $200, which is considerably less than the $700 I was expecting and couldn't possibly have afforded on a ten-hours-a-week editor paycheck.

In other news, if you hit the funny bone in your thumb (where the nerve crosses the joint) on a piece of frozen asparagus, not only will it make the tip of your thumb numb for around 20 minutes, it will fix it so that even just brushing that part of your thumb against something three days later will remind you not to brush your thumb up against anything for days to come. If the air quality/pollen concentration doesn't improve soon, I bet I can parlay this into a proper case of full-blown tendonitis.

And speaking of air quality, there's a fire near Kitt Peak, so we're getting smoke. I was expecting a better sunset given the particulate reading here in town, but it wasn't that great.

recap

Today I didn't go outside into the palo verde pollen, I didn't get in the sauna, and it's been four days since my last foray into a restaurant, so I started remembering things I learned last week.

In no particular order:

1. There are amino acids in dirt, and some critter at the Desert Museum eats dirt. There's some clay with some food value in the South that people make cookies out of, but the rest of the US thinks that's revolting.
2. Early May is a great time to be a tourist in Tucson because the weather is pretty decent, but the winter crowds are gone.
3. I didn't expect much of the Tubac Presidio, but it has a pretty neat museum that we didn't finish going through and a trail I didn't even get to see. Also, the ruins that the teacher at the one-room schoolhouse kept forbidding the kids to play around had interesting potsherds and such, plus a layer of things like little toy cars.
4. The bighorn sheep at the Desert Museum stare back at the tourists like they're afraid we might catch them not looking. If you choose to look away so they might relax, though, you always miss one of them moving to a new location on the practically vertical rock wall in their pen.
5. If you ask me to find six screws you spilled on the patio, I will find you six screws. Then I will gloat when you report that you actually only lost five, because that sixth one I found, which wasn't the right size, got converted into pure gloating material.

In semi-related news, here's a picture of a javalina butt, from which we learn that eating prickly pear while standing in a cholla is not a big deal if you're a javalina:


This is where the rest of the javalina were, all crashed in the shade of a bridge:


And this is a car in the local grocery store parking lot with post-it notes all over it:

stuff that lives in water

Today I learned that there is a shrimp farm in Phoenix, AZ.

That some fish have visible-to-the-naked-eye bacteria in their guts can't really compete with shrimp in the desert, but I thought I'd report it anyway.

a better kind of hat

Today I learned that you can stop your repeated abduction by aliens by wearing a hat lined with eight layers of 3M Velostat film, which is electrically conductive. I guess Velostat is more durable than tinfoil. Plus eight layers of tinfoil would just be funny looking.

air quality at tourist destinations

Today I learned that I can pretty much only eat in restaurants that have patios, but I can eat in restaurants that have patios. Ok, only if the patios aren't near any traffic, but still.

Also, the air in Nogales, north or south of the border, is so nasty that no one should go there unless they need cheap dental work. The air quality in Tubac is really pretty good, and so is the air in the missile silo complex at the Titan Missile Museum. I did better there wandering around underground than I did in the gift shop.

This concludes our series on tourist destinations until somebody else comes to visit. Tomorrow we'll go back to things that'll kill you, unless I spend all day watching tv and don't learn anything.

more ostriches

We have out-of-town guests, so today I learned that you can stand on an ostrich egg, as long as you weigh less than about 300 lbs. The guy at the ostrich ranch (banjo music alert) who appears in the postcards and things is quite the showman. Also, they now have monster bus tours, which I think are new. We decided to save that for next time. And ostriches lay eggs indiscriminantly all over the place, and if you aren't carrying food, the ostriches are much more like a bunch of turkeys instead of combination dinosaurs and malevolent snakes.

The other thing I've learned lately is that I can get up and go for pretty much six hours a day, which is a huge step up from last time people visited. Last time I could go for about four hours a day, but only every other day.

rant alert

Today I read an article about people getting environmental injuries at work and their efforts to remain on the job. I just want to point out to people that if they continue to expose themselves to things that hurt them, they, too, can end up just like me. My doctor said I'd be better in two years provided I lived someplace safe and sweated out the chemicals I'd inhaled; things didn't go completely according to plan, and here I am almost three years later. I am able to work again now, but I'm only managing 10 hours a week from home, where it's safe.

In other news, yesterday I read an article about a lady who had to give up custody of her autistic son because he kept clobbering her. If you google chemicals and autism, you turn up a bunch of tiny studies that indicate that if you get chemicals away from autistic kids and figure out their food sensitivities, they act like normal kids. I don't think that plan will work for every autistic kid out there, but we, as a society would lose what, exactly, by trying it?

Really, what do we have to lose? Autistic kids and grown-ups on disability. I think the air freshener industry can adapt. The perfume industry can adapt. After all, the bisphenol A companies are going to have to.

One more thing - there's a line in the NY Times article that is inaccurate:

In other words, an allergy can kill while a sensitivity just makes you miserable.

As I said before, sensitivities can worsen with continuing exposure, and then you develop sensitivities to other things, and those things include food. Then you can have life-threatening allergies with your sensitivities, and if your sensitivities cause things like heart palpitations (that's heart trouble) instead of headaches, your sensitivities are life-threatening. And that doesn't include asthma, seizures, rage reactions, and stupid mistakes caused by brain fog.