mostly about social services

Today I learned that if you are interested in contacting social services, there is an information number on the first page of the phone book that should theoretically get you sent to the right organization. What I got out of that is:

• The mental health people really want people to sign up to come to them and probably have a substance abuse problem.
• The organizations addressing homelessness want people to come to their shelters, i.e., not have air quality issues.
• It is possible that if there were an advocate involved, a homeless EI could get food stamps and maybe meals on wheels, but I didn't actually call meals on wheels.
• There isn't any way to get a caseworker involved in any of this unless you have an emergency.
• The elder abuse/crisis organization sounds like the way to go if you are an elderly EI with behavioral issues, assuming you work your situation into a crisis.

In other news, the cute little kids didn't stink this Halloween, most likely because I'm getting better and losing my super-sniffer talent. If you aren't all blown over by the laundry care fumes, the kids are much cuter.

icky and sticky

Today I learned that there's a dentist in Phoenix who is adding colonics to his practice. He apparently fails to see the obvious 'both ends' connection that would stop the rest of us cold.

In completely different news, there was speculation that prices for things that ride on trucks would remain high because trucking companies buy their fuel on the futures market. From a comment on a blog that gets many more comments than this one, we learned that that isn't industry practice. Thus we conclude that prices will remain high because they're sticky.

Now I feel compelled to remind everybody to go wash their hands.

combinations that may or may not work

Today I learned that apparently combining cancer treatment with the wrong amount of DMSO will not only kill you, but will also take down ER workers.

In other news, people study people who recover from fibromyalgia, and if you leave out the garlic, peppers, and soy sauce and substitute rice flour for the corn starch in this shrimp with broccoli recipe, you still end up with better-than-local-restaurant Chinese food. We hear there's a good restaurant 40 minutes from here, but that recipe only took 15 minutes, plus an extra five sitting on the couch while the rice finished cooking.

In frustrating news, somebody mentioned food stamps to the lady who has lived in her car for 25 years. Somehow food stamps freak her out, so we can't go fix her car tomorrow morning. This is the kind of thing that makes people think people with MCS are crazy. Some people, with whatever the chemicals did to their brains, are just broken, and it sure enough looks like crazy.

banana advisory

Today I learned that those spotted bananas I saw at Safeway two days ago were not as ripe as they looked. You have to actually touch them to see if they're soft or not, and these still-firm bananas were very handy because I couldn't find any other ripe bananas for the really, really sick lady in a ten mile radius. So, if you're shopping for somebody on a rigid rotation diet who tolerates bananas, always check to see how the bananas feel even if they look terrible.

back to basics

Today I learned that warning labels on cigarettes make smokers want to smoke more (assuming it's not just seeing cigarette packaging), so PR will kill you. In other things that'll kill you, I must also report that a motoring journalist (he's British) has cheerfully listed all the ways motorcycles will kill you.

In semi-death related news, Ron Pawl is looking into whether or not cell phones give people nervous system tumors, and <nerd alert> the editors of that article allowed ELF as the abbreviation for electromagnetic field, when in fact, researchers are worried about extremely low frequency (ELF) radiation, not just any old EM field, or EMF </nerd alert>.

making a difference

Today I learned that it takes about 4 1/2 hours to drive from the east side of Tucson to one of the forest service campgrounds east of Payson, which is northeast of Phoenix. I learned that because my husband, a friend of ours, and another friend's pickup truck had to go rescue the lady who's lived in her car for 25 years by towing her car to Tucson, where it can be repaired. (We don't care if there is a repair place in Phoenix. We don't go to Phoenix if there's any way to avoid it.) The EI community is not large, but when one of its number gets in trouble, it can usually rouse itself enough to go bail them out, as long as it doesn't cost too much or involve letting anybody into your own personal house.

So today we say thanks to the friend who went along, the pickup-owner friend, and the friend who owns the driveway where the lady is parked. The driveway owner gets extra special thanks because even though the lady's arrival was expected, it still appeared that the actual event brought all the joy of a sucker punch to the gut.

playing catch up

Yesterday I learned by watching a friend give a talk to a pesticide advisory board that organic pyrethrums, the kind you get from chrysanthemums, are a lot less toxic than the synthetic ones, which are 3-D instead of flat. That's about all I know because about then I had to leave the room, which was full of non-EIs (except for the speaker) and carpet. A while later I learned that I can give a mostly-comprehensible, ten-minute talk about living with MCS while developing a good case of the shakes. My friend, who essentially handled the theory part of MCS, reported that when my short talk on applied MCS got to the part where I use ammonia in the laundry because everything else leaves a residue, she saw some lightbulbs over people's heads. Apparently this (admittedly sympathetic) audience got the idea.

In today's news, using chlorine to bleach paper products like toilet paper creates dioxin and other things that'll kill you, but 'chlorine-free' bleach could just be chlorine dioxide, which doesn't make dioxin. It makes some other things, but those are believed to be not so bad.

I can caregive today, but I can't edit, so there are definitely consequences to hanging around in buildings with non-EIs. I suppose if there weren't, I'd be an engineer again already.

persistent (and maybe crazy)

Today I learned that you can quite successfully use a turkey deep-fryer to boil intolerable sheets, thereby rendering them usable in a single afternoon, when washing them repeatedly had just gotten frustrating. Compared to the enormous pressure cooker a friend had lent us, the turkey pot is smaller, lighter, and lower to the ground, making it all around much easier to work with. My most enormous quilt may not fit in it, but I think I can live with that.

You may have (correctly) assumed from this information that hydrogen peroxide and baking soda have failed to completely remove the smoke contaminant. It seems to work at first, but then it appears to ooze back over time.

The sheets we made usable this afternoon were simply suffering from very persistent new-sheet chemicals. We'll see how the smoke contaminant fares tomorrow.

too much action and not enough

Today I learned that there are supposed to be four straight-to-video Futurama movies, and some of them are out already. That intellectual feat was about par for the course this morning, when the other thing I learned was that my hormone reaction, while still much better than it used to be, can progress as far as dry heaves.

Also, aluminum foil is approximately 193,000 atoms thick, which is about 1 mil (0.0025 cm), and dancing with a backhoe turns out to not be as action packed as you might expect.

actually learned something useful

Today I learned by reading descriptions on eBay that 'home theater' projectors, the kind of thing we always used for PowerPoint presentations back when I could work, all have roughly a 24 inch diagonal screen if you put the projector 1 m from the screen and a 300 inch diagonal if you put it 12 m from the screen. If you want about an 80" screen, you'd have to put it about 4 m (12 ft) from the screen. For the application I want, I don't think that's going to work at all.

In other news, denatured alcohol doesn't take the somewhat poisonous old finish off the wood chairs I have, but this soy-based paint remover stuff I got from EcoClean works fine. I'm going to have some tolerable wooden chairs one of these days.

general confusion

Today I learned that Mervyns is going out of business. If you grew up in California, Mervyns was a common stop during back-to-school season, and to me brings images of Toughskins jeans, which never really got comfortable because they came with reinforced knees, and is apparently a bit of a problem because you could only get them at Sears. Anyway, Mervyns sounded like a perfectly reasonable name for a store until I took a friend from New Jersey to one, and he proceeded to laugh his [tailfeathers] off.

And here we have a lovely description of a chemical sensitivity from a non-EI with a blog on the New York Times site. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I think she accurately described how I felt last fall pollen season.

This pollen season, I still feel pretty good. Also, surprised - I seem only to get brain fogged at the Sunflower grocery store, which previously was pretty safe.

weird

Today I learned that I can ride over the hill in the national park again, despite the fact that I haven't ridden much since June and it is currently pollen season. I feel really good.

Maybe pollen makes me high.

fluff and crap

Today I learned that if you tolerate fabric-store flannel better than store-bought sheets, and you decide to make flannel sheets, you end up with flannel fluff all over your house. The kind of flannel fluff where, if you didn't have time to clean it up before you had to go over to help the really, really sick lady, your husband could return home from the store and call you up to ask where all the fluff came from.

Also, it depends on where you live how much fecal bacteria you are likely to have on your hands.

lap mistakes and industry

Today I learned that if there is a sudden cold snap and you decide to wear your fluffy bathrobe while you work on your laptop, you can make the poor thing overheat. So don't let your laptops wear bathrobes.

In other news, if you get run over by a pickup truck by being a dope, you can sustain moderate industries. That doesn't sound like such a bad idea in this economy.

there are nerds, but then there are real nerds

Today I learned that when I first read the New York Times article about societal undervaluation of math nerds in the US, I didn't realize it also included science and engineering nerds in that category. I thought they were talking about pure math nerds, whom I consider to be about the same breed as theoretical physicists. You let them do their thing, and they come up with neat stuff, but otherwise you may as well stay out of the way because a decent proportion of them are kind of weird. Your applied types - most engineers - are what I consider to be regular people, and your experimentalists into basic research are fairly cool with some goofiness in the mix. They are quite different from math nerds.

I conclude that the New York Times article was written by an English major who, with a laughably pathetic math background, failed to make these obvious distinctions. It's sad when they let people like that graduate.

a proper member of society, sort of

Today I learned that with multiple breaks and greatly varying tasks between my two part-time jobs, I can finally manage to work 8 hours in a day. It only took me 12 1/2 hours, and I can't see it happening again tomorrow, but this is a milestone.

So never mind anything that happened in the news or anything -- enjoy a silly picture I found.


see more cute dogs and puppies

I know it doesn't fit nicely in the frame, but I've decided that I don't care.

still in the kitchen (and not worth much)

Today I learned that if you put a bunch of small pieces of swiss cheese on boiling-hot spinach, the small pieces congeal into a large, recalcitrant, amorphous blob of glop in the bottom of the bowl. I understand it is really quite a hassle to eat, so anyone melting cheese on spinach is advised to stick to something less stringy and amorphous, like cheddar.

Sneezy plays in the kitchen

Today I noticed that the desert broom is blooming. This observation coincided with the onset of a terrible cold that magically goes away when I breathe next to the air cleaner.

In unrelated news, if you want your house to smell like green pepper, putting green pepper in the blender will do the trick. You end up with what we can charitably call 'raw green pepper mousse.'

I made green foamy stuff. As of this writing, no one has worked up the gumption to taste it.

important stuff

Today I read a bunch of serious news about which I have serious opinions, but I chose to learn that the Stuffy Mart in Magnolia, TX is selling gas for less than $3/gal.

huh?

Today I learned that if you get really sick from mold, and then react to lots of things, but then you get enough better that you don't react to the pollen that shows up after monsoon season, you can tell when the ground dries up enough to release mold spores. Mold makes me confused, and you get sentences like the previous one.

good law and gibberish

Today I learned that:

• The song that plays during the credits at the end of WKRP in Cincinnati really does have gibberish for words.
• It is illegal to plant olive or mulberry trees in Pima County because the pollen makes people miserable.

I'm impressed that people who suffer from simple allergies managed to ban trees that bugged the heck out of them. I thought it was just EIs who got sick enough to want to pass a law about things like that.

uncertainty

Today I learned that the County Attorney's Office in Phoenix has, at the risk of making everybody nuts during election season, reluctantly reported that illegal aliens are responsible for about 19% of felony convictions but only represent about 9% of the population. So now we have some actual data to counteract the effects of that fancy Sunday-morning article, published slightly less than two weeks ago in this same newspaper, that was able to report that no one had any data on anything, anywhere.

To keep our cluelessness quotient constant, I will now report that despite knowing that sunspot activity follows an 11-year cycle, predicting how strong or weak the sunspots will be during the cycle is as easy as predicting the behavior of the stock market.

direct effects of bad things

Today I learned that the Silicon Valley school district where my mom teaches had a bunch of money invested with Lehman Brothers, so the school district is now about $25 million short. No amount of bailout money is going to bring that back unless Lehman Brothers unbankrupts itself first, maybe by discovering oil in its parking lot. Also, public schools have started endowing themselves, you can only assume so that they won't end up with no money when the economy tanks.

In other bad news, it does not surprise EI doctors when EIs exposed to cigarette smoke develop urinary tract infections. So that's the first 'normal' fairly immediate direct effect of inhaling secondhand smoke I've heard of, and I'm glad I didn't learn about it firsthand. Heart palpitations and 3-week bouts of laryngitis I've heard of, but there's nothing a 'normal' doctor can do about those.