Should I try making myself one using this method?
Seriously. It’s a neat idea.
Alas, I fear it would not work as well for those of us who are a bit top-heavy. And she doesn’t show how to modify them for a nursing bra.
Too bad.
I’ve been eating way too many eggs recently…
Researchers in Japan found that women who consumed one or more eggs a day were more likely to die during the 14-year study than women who ate one or two eggs a week.
…
The researchers found that women who ate an egg a day were 22 percent more likely to die of any cause compared with those who ate only a couple eggs per week — regardless of factors such as age, smoking habits and body weight. Those who ate two or more eggs a day showed a still higher death risk, but only small number of women fell into that category.
Howard Dean wrote a rather interesting article on Bush’s War on Science.
To quote a bit:
Recently, a scientist and a bioethics professor were dismissed from the blue-ribbon Council on Bioethics when they disagreed with the Bush administration’s proposed ban on new stem-cell line development to cure a variety of diseases. In a similar vein and an unusual move, the nomination of public-health experts to a CDC lead paint advisory panel were rejected by Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, and replaced with researchers with financial ties to the lead industry. The Union of Concerned Scientists, with 20 Nobel laureates and several former scientific advisers to Republican presidents, has issued its scathing Report on Scientific Integrity condemning these practices.
That isn’t even the worst bit.
Our president believes what he wants to believe and refuses to be swayed by such unimportant things such as evidence and research results. He pays attention to science only when he can twist the results to support whatever it was he wanted to do anyway. He punishes those who disagree with him.
Oh, for an age of reason…
Here.
No fewer than two of the people on my livejournal friends list are going, and hearing them (reading them) talk about it constantly is driving me batty.
Jealousy is not a shade that becomes me, yet I seem to be wearing it anyway.
My brother-in-law and his wife and son - our newphew - will be ariving shortly for a visit. They will be here until Sunday. We’ve never had more than two people staying with us before.
The problem?
There will be four adults and an eleven year old boy staying in this house. We only have four sets of dishes. Four dinner plates, four salad plates, four tiny dessert plates, and four soup bowls.
Oh dear.
We do have a bunch of shallow pasta bowls that I bought, and I guess there are some plastic plates from a picnic set, but still this is a rather troubling situation.
We looked at getting some more dishes last night, but the set I like is about forty dollars for four place settings, so we would need at least two sets now, and I just am not comfortable spending eighty dollars on dishes until we get some other stuff taken care of. We also looked at some cheaper stuff, but I’d really rather wait until we can afford the ones I like instead of being stuck with dishes that I am not fond of because they are super inexpensive.
I guess someone is just going to have to eat off the table and have his or her soup in a coffee mug. It’s certainly not going to be me though.
Does anyone else find the current actions of the US house of representatives to be extremely frightening? I remember my American Government class as putting great emphasis on the three branches of the US goverment and the checks and balances between them that kept any single branch from gaining too much power. Yet now the House is trying to get rid of one of those checks and set everything out of balance.
It would strip the Supreme Court and other federal courts of their jurisdiction to rule on challenges to state bans on gay marriages under a provision of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act. That law defines marriage as between a man and a woman, and says states are not compelled to recognize gay marriages that take place in other states.
Amending the constitution failed, so now they are just trying to go around it.
“Marriage is under attack,” said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., referring to the Massachusetts state court decision allowing same-sex marriages. The legislation is needed, Sensenbrenner said, to prevent Massachusetts law from being applied nationwide.
Under attack? Where? Who is trying to force me to get a divorce? Oh wait. It’s only in Massechusetts that they are rounding up straights at gunpoint and forcing them to file for divorce. Whew. Glad I don’t live there.
Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind., the bill’s author, likened the Supreme Court to the Soviet Politburo. “As few as five people in black robes can look at a particular issue and determine for the rest of us, insinuate for the rest of us that they are speaking as the majority will. They are not,” Hostettler said.
Indeed they are not. Nor do they insinuate that they are speaking for the majoty will. Go take a civics class, bonehead, you should know these things. The courts are there to protect the rights of all people, not just to enforce the rule of the majority.
The United States is based on the idea of individual rights and freedoms, not just the right of the majority to dictate the behavior of the minority. This is why it is a constant balancing act to keep things going. This is why the right to stand up for oneself in court is such a basic right that should never be threatened.
I watched the season finale of Queer as Folk last night. It was a decent episode of a decent show; nothing spectacular or that I would normally bother mentioning, except that it left me quite angry with one of the characters. That character would be Lindsay.
And two things that aren’t that spoilery and aren’t unique to the show but that annoyed the activist in me…
1. Lindsay may have been tired of breasfeeding after a few weeks, and it is possible that indeed Mel will to, but it is by no means a given. It isn’t supposed to hurt at all, and if it does then something isn’t right and help is needed. It’s something that most women outside of the US generally do for years without getting tired of. I’m past ten months now, and still not tired of it. It’s not hard or painful or a pain in the ass, so why does television always have to treat it that way?
2. What’s with the nurse rushing in and snatching the baby away from her feeding for nap time? Hello rooming in! I suppose they just didn’t want the baby in teh scene where Lindsay was walking away, but Mel just seems to much the type who would want to be in control of things and would have educated herself as to what is best for her baby to allow something like that.
I wasn’t going to talk about the weather anymore as it is rather boring, but…
I wrote in my last entry that the weather of last Sunday didn’t actually ruin my day. That is true.
I also wrote that it was hot and dry. That was true at the time. It ceased to be true almost immediately after I posted.
Sitting in the living room, I heard a clatter. A minute or so later, I heard another. At first I thought it was some kids on a skateboard outside. Then I thought someone was throwing things at the house. Then it really started to come down, and I realized the truth.
M had run out to get some ice cream (it was hot, remember?) but returned home just as it was starting. He got hit by one on his way in, and boy did it sting.
He was okay though. My poor car was another matter. The weather may not have ruined my day, but it certainly did a number on my car.
That’s a reflection of the side of the house on the hood. Each of those whorles in the lines of the reflected siding is a little dent. The hood of the car and the top and the trunk are all covered in them. Click the picture to see the larger version.
The windshield and all the windows survived, thank goodness, but not so the poor tail light. We’re calling the insurance company tomorrow.
It’s thundering now loudly enough that I can’t believe Munchkin is sleeping through this.
The weather that I mentioned last Sunday didn’t actually ruin my day. No, despite being housebound for a bit I actually had a pretty good day. I even made it to the store for my yarn after it all cleared up.
It certainly did ruin the day for many other people though. The paper the next day carried a rather horrifying story about a woman who pulled off the road beneath an underpass to escape the worst of the hail. She was in a dip though, and before she realized what was happening, the road had flooded and water was coming into her van. She had to leave her five year old there while she waded out to hand her infant to someone who had stopped just above the flooding. By the time she got back for the older child, the water was up to the level of the seats.
Estimates for damage from the hail and flooding within the city are sixty-million and rising.
You wouldn’t know it now though. It’s been hot and dry since then. Or rather, the weather has been dry - the people have been rather damp. I feel like I’m drowning in sweat. My kingdom for air conditioning!
It’s better today though. Not that the weather is any cooler - it isn’t - but my husband developed a rather ingeneous method of cooling our house. He set up a system of fans in the stairway so that they will draw up air from the nice cool basement (we need to get it finished by next summer so we can hide from the heat in it) and spreads it throughout the main living area.
That mean old toofer which was troubling my girl so.
I think the one next to it is coming in as well. There is quite a bump there.
I love the rain, but it’s ruining my day.
I’m out of yarn, and I’m halfway through a baby sweater that I need to finish knitting and send off in a hurry. I’d planned to walk to walk to the store and get some more today.
M left for the gym right as I was getting up this morning. Alas, he inadvertantly took the stroller with him as it was still in the trunk of the car. It was nice out this morning, but as I spent anxiously awaiting his return, I watched he sky grow darker and darker.
He arrived home just in time for the rain to start pounding down out of the sky faster that GWB can invade a country he doesn’t like. Then came the hail…
Oh my poor plants - my poor garden. It came down in buckets, flooding the street, making us worry about leaks into our basement as it overflowed the gutters and the water swirled about the lake that used to be our driveway.
So much for a nice walk today. I don’t even really want to drive the way things are out there today.
And as I listen to the thunder I keep remembering how a suprise hailstorm with stones the size of golfballs totaled my brother-in-law’s car, and so far it is just normal sized hailstones here, but I really wish we had a garage right now.
Why yes, I did swear that I wouldn’t fill my blog with this sort of junk anymore, but this one is kind of cute…
Grover on Ecstasy
You’re funny, you’re loveable, you’re entertaining,
you like to call yourself “Super
Grover!”–You’re obviously on ecstasy.
But that’s why we love you. Be careful, ok?
Which Sesame Street Muppet’s Dark Secret Are You?
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I thought she had been a little more cranky than normal lately - although maybe it is just in retrospect that I think that; she really hasn’t been that unhappy.
In any case, if she was cranky, I now know the reason for it.
There in the front of her mouth on the bottom, so small I can barely see it and wouldn’t even be sure that it was there if I couldn’t feel it with my finger, is a teeny, tiny spot of the top of a tooth uncovered.
My poor big grown-up baby girl!
Do any mediums happen to be reading this? Anyone with strong psychic connections or who just plain is good at talking to the dead every once in a while?
If so, could you please give Douglas Adams a quick ring in whatever afterlife he is busy participating in and ask him what the heck he had planned for the rest of The Salmon of Doubt?
Note: Douglas Adams was an atheist, so if he is residing in any sort of spiritual afterlife place, I imagine that he must have been rather suprised to find himself there.
I knew I shouldn’t have started this unfinished book. It is really good, and now I have all these questions that will never be answered.
Strunk and White The Elements of Style is online. Wow. Can you imagine?
Now I no longer have to point idiot fangirls who murder the English language to their libraries for a copy. I can just send them a link.
How wonderful.
I finished Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake a week or two ago. I think I’ve written before that being a lover of Atwood’s work and having heard great things about this book I was afraid that my expectations might be a little high and worried that I would be disappointed.
I wish I hadn’t been right.
This book bored me. Through most of it I had to figh the temptation to turn to the last chapter just to find out how it ended. I just didn’t care enough about the whichever middle point I happened to be at. Now I used to almost always read the end of whatever book I was reading before I finished the first half then happily turn back to where I had been and continue on, but I’d overcom that addiction long ago, and it has been a long time since I felt the urge.
In this case, if I had turned to the end I don’t think I would have been able to go back and continue reading, but I withstood the urge. By the time I had rightfully reached the end I was wishing that I hadn’t though. Had I skipped a hundred or so pages to reach the end then I would have been able to move on to a more interesting book that much sooner.
I must go dig out my copy of A Handmaid’s Tale and read it again just to polish up my image of Atwood again. It’s rather tarnished at the moment.
Yesterday was Canada day and my Munchkin saw fireworks for the first time.
They started around eleven here; that’s when it gets dark. We didn’t actually attend an event, but there was one close enough that it was only a little walk to where we could at least see the higher ones above the trees. Munchkin didn’t think much of them though. She looked interested for the first couple, but then I think that a few were a little loud for her, and it was rather late to have her out, and she started to get a little upset. I think if she’d been in the stroller rather than safely snuggled into the sling it would have been a big upset. In any case, it was time to go home.
I do love fireworks though.
One thing that I really like about Canada day as compared to the Fourth of July is that I haven’t seen fireworks stands on every corner, nor have I seen anyon setting them off at home. I don’t know whether it is illegal up here or just not done, but I certainly appreciate it. I’ve heard to many stories about injured chidren and seen too many close calls to feel comfortable about those things when not in the hands of professionals at organized shows.
Yesterday evening before the fireworks we saw a few small bursts of lightening, but today the first real storm of summer hit. I’d been a bit nervous about this, as I wasn’t sure how Munchkin would take it, but she didn’t really seem to notice it. Right in the middle of the loudest thunder, she nursed herself to sleep and had a good little nap, so all was well that way.