Topic: Personal
I tasted falling snow for the first time today. And walked on freshly fallen snow (it wasn't very much, I could still see the grass beneath it) and it's crunchy! 

All four kids were sitting in the living room eating chocolate and talking very animatedly about something (probably politics), which is great fun because as Sheven is passionate to the point of histrionics, her brother is dry to the point of laconic, yet they share the same world view and are perfect foils for each other. Suddenly their mom comes running down the stairs to tell us to look out the window - and it was white! Bare winter trees frosted with white, and when I slammed open the front door to run out, it was into a flurry of silence. Snowfall is silent. I never knew that.

Sheven's dad got such a kick out of my excitement over my first snow, that he took out the video camera and took footage of me running around their yard with my face to the sky, laughing and spinning with my hands out and trying to catch snowflakes on my tongue. Even their arthritic elderly cat came out to see what the fuss was all about. Sheven's mom threw a snowball at me and it went down my collar. When I came back inside, I couldn't feel my hands and my boots were wet.  I've never had such a good time while so bloody cold.

I never knew snow melted when it touched skin, but would stay in one's eyelashes, blurring the world beneath yellow streetlights into a series of prismatic halos.

Topic: Personal

We went shopping today. I caved in and bought replacement clothes. I'm leaving the jeans I wore here in her mother's Goodwill bag, because since I lost the surgery weight they no longer fit.  I had forgotten how much better jeans feel when they're the right size! 

Sheven's dad and I spent a good 45 minutes this afternoon talking about American conservatism, Libertarians, and Labor union politics, and I told him all about San Diego's pension/SEC woes.  It was an interesting conversation!

Milly wants to go out bar hopping, although this being Pullman, we would only be able to do it once, hopping from the one bar to the other in town. I'm trying to convince everyone that they want to watch Elizabethtown instead. I really like that movie, it's so quirky! And I love the sound-track.  The driving soundtrack Claire made for Drew's road-trip is exactly something I would do! It was well received here too - even Getch, who had resigned himself to watching a chick-flick with his sister's friends, said it was 'actually tolerable."

Topic: Personal

I took this photo today from the top of the Kamiak Butte, a 'quartzite steptoe 1,000 feet above the Palouse'.  The area in view is a part of the Palouse Prairie; undulating hills, lots of dryland farming, wheat, soybeans and lentils. In fact, Pullman has an annual Lentil Festival every August.  The concept of winter wheat was explained to me for the first time. We practically ran up the trail to stay warm, although the air was so cold I started to wheeze; not wanting to fall behind, I pounded up the final switchback and stood gasping at the top for a minute before I was able to straighten up again. There were patches of snow lacing the mossy branches along the trail, and a strong wind whipped through the treetops making a sound like a waterfall.

 

We've had our turkey dinner, and we sat around the table afterwards and just talked over homemade pumpkin pie.  The idea of illegal immigration came up and just about everyone in the room had a slightly different opinion on it, and of course as the representative colored immigrant in the room, I had to put in my buck twenty (more than 2 cents) on the issue too. It was wonderful to be able to talk about immigration policy, with people who have relatively informed opinions, with my experience as an naturalized immigrant, Milly's as someone working in the US on work visa and is considering going for a greencard, and then to find out what Americans (Sheven and her family), even liberal ones, know and/or feel about the issue.  Sheven was raised atheist by her hippy parents. Isn't that interesting? Most people who are atheist aren't raised in the non-faith, they turn that way,

I read this today in Fark... LOL'd
Topic: Fun

 

 

"Hey, look. A bunch of cows."
"Herd."
"What?"
"Not bunch. Herd."
"Heard what?"
"Herd of cows."
"Sure I've heard of cows."
"No, a cow herd."
"I don't care if a cow heard, it's not like I'm keeping any secrets from cows."

 

The Inspect A Gadget by Mil Millington
Topic: Review

I first got hooked on Millington's website, "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About" which is also the title of his first novel, and I didn't even knew he wrote for The Guardian until recently. He's teh funnay. The website is teh funnay. His books are teh funnay. Tech reviews are, generally, hardly ever teh funnay, but he tries. Examples following...

The musical knife
Mil Millington|Saturday May 27, 2006

I've set myself certain goals with these columns: one is to seed them with cumulative subliminal suggestions that will seep into the general consciousness and so prevent there being another series of Strictly Come Dancing. A second (and the hardest) is to avoid their featuring a tedious succession of mobile phones, digital cameras and MP3 players. Although those three account for 97% of all new products, I want to focus instead on less obvious items. But, every so often, a mobile, camera or MP3 player comes along that is different enough to earn the right to be written about. The Swiss Bit S.Beat is just such a creature.

The S.Beat is an MP3 player combined with a Swiss Army Knife. It has a blade, a small file, a pair of scissors, 1GB of memory, an LCD screen and a built-in USB connector. But such details are secondary. You can listen to Goldfrapp while attending to a hangnail if you wish, but it's the audio book potential that excites me. Imagine having the S.Beat in a bar fight: its edge flashes, while it simultaneously feeds your ears with Marc MacYoung's seminal Knives, Knife Fighting, And Related Hassles (ISBN: 0873645448). And how improved an experience the Duchess of Windsor's autobiography, Heart Has Its Reasons, would have been if, during it, I'd had the soothing distraction of being able to stab myself periodically in the thigh. The S.Beat is obese with potential.

The Mathmos lamp
Mil Millington|Saturday July 1, 2006

If doing this column had left me with any self-respect, I'd tell you that the Mathmos lamp is an amusing toy for children. Sensible amounts of shame would compel me to leave it there and let you imagine that I possess the mature intellect and sturdy psychological balance that is the sine qua non of everyone who works for the Guardian. I'd comment that it produces a soft, variable light from what resembles an apothecary's bottle. How it does this is diverting, in its small way, I'd say with a superior smirk. To turn it on, or off, you merely wave across the top of it. You don't touch it at all - your hand simply sweeps through the air in a vaguely papal fashion.

In a similar way, increasing or diminishing the brightness of the bulb is achieved by lifting or lowering a palm above the lamp. The feeling is not that you're in your living room putting on a light, but that you're at Hogwarts and have double Potions. "The kids will love it!" I'd add, identifying my irony with a silly exclamation mark.

But a friend was here the day it arrived. "That's pointless," she said with a shake of her head and a grown-up smile. She then spent the next 20 minutes waving her fingers about, becoming more Witches Of Eastwick by the second. The Mathmos lamp feeds your inner Saruman. All too soon, you're daydreaming that you have the power to smite nations with a lazy movement of your thumb. If this thing sells, it'll be like the Age of Reason never happened.

Good Wine in Strange Containers
Topic: Opinion

A Loaf of Bread, a Box of Wine?

By Mike Steinberger
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2006, at 6:59 AM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2146720 

 

A Letter from Iraq
Topic: Opinion

This piece of writing makes the most sense, about something that makes no sense to me.

From TIME Magazine: Posted Friday, Oct. 06, 2006

A Marine's letter home, with its frank description of life in "Dante's inferno," has been circulating through generals' in-boxes. We publish it here with the author's approval.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1543658-1,00.html

Have a mobile staff meeting...
Topic: Fun
On the Conference Bike!

A tricycle pedalled by 7 people all facing each other, with one person steering.

Wait, what?

An alarm clock that run away and hides when it goes off
Topic: Fun

I thought I can really use this, but I'm afraid that my husband will take a 9-iron to it after a couple of days of playing hide-n-seek with a freakin' alarm clock.

---

From the 2005 Ig Nobels:

Clocky® (patent pending) is an alarm clock that runs away and hides if you don't get out of bed on time. The alarm sounds, you press the snooze, and Clocky will roll off of the bedside table, jump to the floor, and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects until he finds a spot to rest. When the alarm sounds again, you must awaken to search for him.

Story:

It is just too easy to hit the snooze. Conventional alarm clocks work alright for people who don't have trouble getting out of bed. But for Gauri Nanda, a lifelong oversleeper who was routinely late for morning classes as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, waking up would take some ingenuity.  

Clocky® began as one of Nanda's class projects, but a flood of media attention made the clock a star. Gauri has since started Nanda Nanda, a company devoted to making all sorts of products, including technologies that are fun to use and a better fit for human beings.

www.nandananda.com

It Hurts!
Topic: Personal

OW OW OW OW OW OW OW

Just home from the hospital. I had my surgery on Monday morning, and it turned out that I had 21 - yes, twenty-one - tumors in my uterus that had to come out. The smallest of the bastards was the size of a marble, and the largest like a computer mouse.  I also found out later that I bled so severely that my surgeons were moving towards a transfusion.  Having 21 tumors cut from my body through a 5 inch gash is really, really, really painful. I woke up in the recovery room in more pain that I'd ever imagined possible being in while still alive. I thought my body would just kill itself by that point. I was attached to a PCA of hydromorphone for a day and half, and now I'm home with vicodin.

So the moral of this story is, try never to grow any tumors in your uterus.

The incision is HUGE and RED with a big row of staples. It's so long that it practically reaches from leg to leg across my lower abdomen. It hurts abominably - and abdominally too.  I can only have 1 Vicodin 5/500 every 4 hours, and I can't sleep through the night yet - I woke up last night after about 6 hours, the painkiller had wore off but the pain hasn't.  Stupid tumors.

It's nice to be home, to be able to wash my hair, and get some peace and quiet too. The hospital has got to be the worst place for people who needs rest - people coming and going, machines beeping and wheezing, squalling children visiting next door, etc. Why do people bring toddlers along to hospital visits for 3 hours? Surely even grandma's had enough of him by the end of the visit.

I'm paranoiacally checking the incision every few hours for sign of infection, which scares me more than anything. 

It hurts - had I mentioned that already?