tiny backpacks and trigonometry

Today I learned that if you are determined, you can take a six-year-old backpacking. In a few years, I will have to borrow some six-year-olds and try that out.

In other news, today I sat down and resurrected a bunch of basic trigonometry that apparently still lives in my head. Thinking about it made the top of my head feel weird, just like when I first started copy editing geology journal articles.

I was inclined to not report that last bit because I think it is just really freakin' weird, but that's what I learned.

warning: light-sensitivity-headache related crankiness

Today I learned that it's not worth trying to go to the zoo on a nice Sunday afternoon because the cute little kids you see there are loaded up with the stinkiest chemicals you can imagine. It's a wonder American children survive to grow up, reproduce, and coat their kids in glop.

In other news, mozzarella cheese has citric acid in it, but it looks like you make jack cheese and cheddar cheese using pretty much the same ingredients, except I think you need salt for the cheddar, plus you do something different with the acid development. That, beside the fact that cheesecake is yummy, is probably just about everything I know about cheese.

monkey button-pusher instincts and predators

Today I learned that watching old NASA footage gives me a bad case of labsickness. I miss all the expensive metal boxes with buttons and knobs that tell you obscure bits of information about things you can't actually see. You know, the toys.

Also, the neighbors report that we missed seeing a bobcat sitting on our fence, which could have something to do with why the dove nest in the vine on the patio is all knocked off its foundation.

baking failure, Presidents, and Jackie Chan

Today I learned that either the powdered sugar or the yeast I made sweet rolls with turned out to be evil. I suspect the powdered sugar because the only other bag of powdered sugar I've had in my possession in the last four years was definitely evil, but I'd have to actually test it to find out, and I don't want to get sick again.

In more entertaining news, here's a handy list of all the US Presidents, and there are a whole bunch of Jackie Chan videos on YouTube, so you don't even have to sit through a silly movie to see cool stunts.

easing back in

Today I learned that:

• It is Thursday. Last time I checked, I think it was Monday.
• If you want to test a computer to see if it makes fumes, you can make it watch tv extra hard to keep its cpu busy, thereby making sure it gets as hot as possible.
• Early I Dream of Jeannie episodes have a different theme song than the one I learned as a kid.

And, via Fark, McDonalds hamburgers don't decay, and for once, I'm not exaggerating*.


*But maybe the nutritionist involved is. Who can tell without trying it?

itchy, smart, sugary, hidey, and useless

Today I learned that:

• Horses can get scabies and then pass it on to their riders.
• Some dogs have an instinct for calculus, i.e., figuring out how far to run along the shore before jumping in the water after a ball.
• Eating tons of sugar won't give you diabetes. It will make you fat, which will give you diabetes.
• Digital camouflage is pretty neat looking.
• Apparently 60 hours is not enough time to figure out how to pee upside down.

watery death, but you can forget about it

Today I learned that while you get most of your perchlorate in your drinking water from rocket fuel, it also comes from fireworks, fertilizer, and road flares. The EPA would like to assure us that the levels are fine and that the Bush administration did not tell them to say that. Whether or not we choose to believe them, we can at least report that water will kill you.

Also, Lipitor will give you amnesia.

unknown outcomes

Today I learned that the local paper put together one of those long, Sunday-morning articles about whether illegal immigrants clog up our justice system. I think what I learned is that no one really has any data that isn't anecdotal, so anybody who claims much of anything is full of it. Also, it appears to take the punch out of an article if all you can report is resounding cluelessness.

In other news, David Blaine has volunteered to see if he can make himself blind.

sleepy

Today I learned that if you use up more than 75 ft² of aluminum foil covering the underpinnings to your new mostly-metal, definitely not poplar, platform bed, the whole thing crinkles when you lie down on it. I don't care because I get to sleep in the bed again.

other uses for condoms and evolving language

Today I learned that you can make hair bands with condoms and that the new way to say 'everybody and his dog' is 'world+dog.' At that last link, I was supposed to learn something like password guessing is probably how hackers got into Sarah Palin's personal/government business yahoo account, but 'world+dog' is what stuck.

tired nerd alert

Today I learned by perusing the geologic time scale that the Nimrod orogeny sounds kind of kinky. It probably gave someone a Gascoyne Complex.

Also, you can make eggshell paint glossier by adding glossy stuff to it, which is good if you need glossier paint. It's certainly better than having to remove unshiny stuff.

accidental knowledge and good things

As usual, I was busy not paying a lot of attention to bad news, but today I got curious about the appearance of the Chevy Volt, which led to my accidentally learning that GM lost $57.5 billion in the last year and a half. This is not a new observation, but that's a lot of money, and it seems pretty clear to me that American car companies didn't learn anything in the 1970s.

Other than that, I can put one coat of paint on 10 16-ft baseboards before I get tired, which is better than last time I tried that, and the really, really sick lady has gotten enough better that I can help her all by myself again. She laughs again now, too, which is really good to hear.

7 Up and smoky stuff

Today I learned that Filipino cooks use lots of 7 Up. Apparently it tenderizes meat.

In honor of the four-month anniversary of our acquisition of the smoke contaminant, I can report that we learned that sanding your poplar bedstead to get the contaminant off of it doesn't work if you forget to do the headboard, but this kind of effort can also reveal a recently-developed minor sensitivity to poplar. The wall at the head of the bed is a problem too, but hopefully one that can be solved with a lot of Bon Ami and elbow grease, as opposed to sanding.

As to the laundry, and I hope this isn't a premature announcement, a combination of 2 cups of baking soda plus about 11 ounces of 40% hydrogen peroxide solution appears to get the laundry contaminant out of laundry, but then you have to rinse out all the baking soda, which requires another three washes.

A few days ago I got to wondering where my time goes, but if sometimes you have to sand your bedstead or scrub the walls or use untold thousands of gallons of water to reclaim your stuff (which is still easier and cheaper than getting new stuff), the days seem to go by pretty quickly.

things that could screw you up

Today I'm not sure I learned that steroids make your veins stick out. It's all based on internet forums.

In other chemical news, the LA Times put together an article about household stuff that'll kill you. They have a whole interactive thingy listing evil products room by room, the likes of which I haven't seen anywhere except EI sites, so I'm impressed.

Although I'm not sure how much it's going to help people, given the general quality of the air in Los Angeles.

buses, boring stuff, pigs, and birdies

Today I learned that school districts have been busing kids who live 1/2 mile from school in such a way that it takes longer to pick them all up than it does for them to simply walk to school.

In other news, I learned that whatever the problem is with the sound on my computer in its current configuration, if I launch AlsaMixer and fiddle with the levels on either end of the display, the sound will work so I can watch videos answering important questions like how hard it is to put lipstick on a pig.

Also, nighthawks hang around the Safeway parking lot after dark.

oops

Today I re-learned that if you have a gas stove, you can accidentally gas your EI friends if you try to cook anything for them. I was one of the sickest people I knew for a while, so all my friends assume I have an electric stove, and I forget everybody else doesn't tolerate my stove. It must be something about being a fairly pure moldie; everybody with even a little pesticide exposure seems to keel when exposed to natural gas. It occurs to me that I know an awful lot of people with pesticide exposure.

personal stupidity

Today I learned that the park service closed some of the trails I like to walk on because there's a mountain lion hanging around that part of the national park. Then, since I took a different set of trails this morning - trails that had actual hills in them - I learned that if you trot up the water-bar stairs because you think you're in good enough condition, you can shake something nasty loose internally and end up a detox idiot for the rest of the day.

Thus the only other thing I learned today that stuck was that there's a company in Japan that made a powered exoskeleton that helps a person be really, really strong, so it's kind of like that loader thingy Sigourney Weaver used to kill that alien in Aliens. But they named the device HAL, like the homicidal computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and their website is www.cyberdyne.jp, like the company that made the computer that killed everybody in Terminator.

warning: discussion of death by stupidity

Today I learned that:

• A man tried to rob the bank across the parking lot from the closest public library to my house. The thing is that there is a police substation right behind the library, which he would have known had he ever been there.
• An ultimate fighting champion wanted an adventure exciting enough that equipment failure could be life-threatening. He let his dirt bike run out of gas, with predictable results.

I think what we can take away here is that you shouldn't rob banks next to police substations or go wandering around the desert in August. Probably you shouldn't make toast while you take a bath, either, but no one has tried that recently, so the jury's still out on that one.

hardware store contamination and thirsty critters

Yesterday at 3:30 am I learned that if you altered one of your air cleaners to take a more efficient filter, but you had to put some recently acquired poplar wood in there as a spacer, the poplar could make you really sick. It wasn't sticking out into the air stream or anything, but it was in a low pressure part of the machine, so now it's all covered with aluminum tape. Less pollen is getting in, too, so it's all worth it. Also, there's pollen around here in September.

In other news, tarantulas can drink out of your swimming pool. Ground squirrels that look exactly like chipmunks but with fewer stripes can drink out of your swimming pool. We are astounded that the really, really sick lady's husband doesn't spend all his time fishing critters out of the swimming pool.

killing cats and small children, plus waterproofing

Today I guess I learned that toddlers have higher levels of various toxic chemicals in their blood than their mothers do. Moms are bigger, their detoxification systems are fully developed, and they don't crawl around on carpets and chew on remote controls, so it stands to reason.

In other news, this is about all I know about making waxed canvas, aka tin cloth. If you follow some links, you learn that theoretically you need turpentine as an ingredient and orange oil to cover up the smell of it, so that will not be a recipe I will try when I make the fly for my tent. There is also some possibility I could make waxed nylon, which would be lighter, but all my information is based on a $525 David Chu goose down coat, which really only tells you that, since they're marked down to the low, low price of $209.95, they maybe didn't sell as well as the manufacturer would have liked.

a war mule, a gila monster, and pizza crust

Today I learned that there's a guy in southwestern New Mexico who likes to hunt mountain lions, and his mule, after a few hunts, started beating the crap out of the mountain lion carcasses, which makes for some interesting pictures.

In other news, the gila monsters are out and about and moseying across trails in the national park as late as 9 am.



(This is the same critter from different angles; it deserves two pictures because the last time I saw one was three years ago, and I didn't have a camera with me.)

And by making pizza crust at home, I have now ruined store-bought pizza. I gotta stop making stuff at home.

all death, all the time

Today I learned that perfume use by pregnant women fixes it so their sons will someday not give them any grandchildren, which I've heard is worse than death. Also, incense will give you cancer, and besides making you into a criminal, the leaded gasoline fumes you were exposed to as a kid will make you clueless and out of it when you're old, when the lead you absorbed starts leaching out of your bones and into into your bloodstream.

Ok, that was a little heavy on the things that'll kill you, so have another picture of my tent:


Well, that is clearly a dragonfly that was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but apparently I can't help it tonight. Here's the tent in the foothills of the Sierras shortly before the turkeys showed up.