Everyone in the family has been sick for two weeks. First we had the flu, then Adrian's morphed into an ear infection, Julian's morphed into bronchitis and a possible sinus infection, and I am fighting a sinus infection right now.

Adrian was getting better from his flu, and then all of a sudden he took a big turn for the worse, with goopy green eyes and nose. That was right about the time that he stopped sleeping. Two nights in a row of sleeplessness, where he only slept for half an hour at a time, and then not at all after 3:00am. A 15 minute nap on both days. Crying all the time.

Julian was waking up every few hours screaming and crying and coughing, usually just when I had managed to get Adrian back to sleep.

This is the very definition of misery, when your kids stop sleeping, cry endlessly, and you don't feel so hot yourself.

On the second night of Adrian's not sleeping, he was crying "MOMMMEEEE!!!!" and I asked him "Baby, what's wrong, can you tell me?" This time he pointed to his ear and made the sign for "hurt". Aha! An ear infection!

Next morning I had the kids in to the pediatrician first thing. Unfortunately by the time I got them out of there, got the prescription picked up, and ran all the other errands I had to do, I was feeling pretty damn sick myself and it was too late to see anyone.

It was late Friday afternoon (of course...I ONLY get sick on Fridays after the doctor's office closes). Super sore throat and one completely blocked nostril, accompanied by a burning fire in my left sinus. Since my last sinus infection was so bad I thought I was going to die, I was a little panicky about the prospect of developing a sinus infection late on a Friday afternoon, and so far it hasn't been fun.

Yesterday I got out my Neti Pot and gave my sinuses a good cleansing. I normally do it just once on either side, but my left sinus was still blocked after I poured a whole pot through it, so I just kept going.

Green goo kept coming out, little by little, and then after the third pot I blew my nose hard into the sink and this....this....THING shot out of my left nostril. It was at least an inch long, and about half an inch wide, and the very first thing I thought when I saw it was that I had just had a miscarriage out my nose. It was a total meat purse. I am absolutely kicking myself for not taking a picture of it, because it was so utterly weird and unbelievable, but I was a little too freaked out at the time to think clearly.

I grabbed it and started dissecting it with my fingers. It had this meaty sort of tough core, and flecks of blood in it. I'm pretty sure it was just layers of dried up mucus that had piled up to form a stalagtite of sorts in my sinus, but Jesus Christ, it was odd. Odd and HUGE and more than a little bit creepy.

I could instantly breathe clearly on that side after it came out. No shit, huh? I can't believe that was inside my head. No wonder I felt crappy. The other side was still kind of blocked, so I kept washing and washing it out with a few more Neti pots full of saline, but nothing else came out except a little more green goo.

I still felt sick last night, but my throat was not as sore today, and I *think* my sinuses might be improving. I don't feel worse, and that's a good thing.

So what I'm wondering is...if you have a giant freaky Snot Clot up in your sinuses like that, and you take antibiotics, that might kill the bacteria, but what happens to that creepy creature? Does it just break up and come out on its own? It just seems odd that a doctor wouldn't try to wash things out somehow and get the blockage out of your sinuses in the first place, if the blockage is what's causing the infection. Or is that what ENTs do?

Maybe I never did get the Snot Clot cleared out after prior infections, and that's why, after NEVER having had a sinus infection in my life despite hayfever, colds, flu and even about of double pneumonia, I have suddenly started getting them in the past two years after every little cold and flu, even mild ones. In that case, I'm freaking THRILLED to have gotten that monster out of my sinuses. I'm thrilled anyway, but even more so if it has possibly been the root of all the sinus evil I have had over the past two years. From the looks of it, this thing had been up there a long time. It practically had hair and teeth.

We'll see how things go...my fingers are crossed for improved health and LOTS more sleep for everyone.

Posted by msLaura at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I think we've all recovered from our West Nile Virus now.

I realized recently that I had it too. I had nearly crippling joint pain for about 5-6 days, and I just assumed that it was tendonitis from Adrian being heavy. But I had really bad neck and shoulder aches, headache, and my knees...my knees felt like they were burning.

Like I said, I thought this was from carrying Adrian around, but all of a sudden it just went away. I didn't carry Adrian any less, but all my miserable joint pains went away. And then I realized how bad they had been. I finally looked up the symptoms of West Nile and saw that joint pains and headache are common. So we've all had it now. That confers some immunity, so let's hope we're all done with this West Nile business.

But wait, there's more! Julian just came down with a bad cold that is kicking his butt, poor thing. He cried half of last night, and woke up crying tonight. He's not really very good about soldiering through illness. He just bawls out loud. "I'M SiCKKKKKK!"

Having kids is just amazing as far as how many more germs you are exposed to. It's a nonstop parade of infection by one thing after another. I can't blame kidney stones or West Nile Virus on the kids, but wow.....they are cold and flu magnets, that's for sure. I guess I would be too if I were either tackling or hugging and kissing most of my peers, and half of us had runny noses and everyone's hands were sticky.

I should get the results of my pee sample tomorrow. Hopefully THAT business is all over with too. I have been trying to be extra-sweet to my kidneys. Awful to think of a sharp stone just ripping through internal organs. Yikes. I don't like to mess with kidneys, or my liver. Anything that cleans up is most definitely a critical organ that I want to keep in good working order.

On that note, off to drink a few more glasses of water and go to bed.

Posted by msLaura at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went in to see a urologist about my kidney thang. They did a CT scan on my abdomen and nothing turned up. A *possible* 2mm stone in the ureter just outside my bladder, but it was really just a shadowy thing that could have been an artifact of the scan.

They did find a partial hernia near my belly button, which explains my poochiness there. "There is central protrusion of the interabdominal contents in the region of the umbilicus consistent with a small partial hernia in this region." That's a fancy way of saying that my muscles are pulled apart and letting my guts poke through. Lovely. Not sure what I'm supposed to do about that. Maybe my mummy tummy exercises could repair it. If I ever did them, that is.

Ah, motherhood...it does a body good. NOT. Good thing these kids are cute.

Last night I took my last Levaquin (super-antibiotic). Next step is taking another urine sample to see if all the bacteria are gone, and if not, culturing them to see what they are.

Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my pee? Begone, ye nasty beasties!

In other disease-ridden news, we have West Nile Virus in our neighborhood. Dead birds all over. Well, not all over, but we had three little dead birds in our yard, and our neighbor found a dead crow in his driveway. I think Dan has it, he has fever, chills, body aches. No runny nose or anything.

Julian had a high fever last week that just went away all of a sudden, plus an intermittent rash.

I've had headaches and joint pain, but I think that's just a result of too much computer time in an ergonomically horrible seating situation, plus wearing, lifting, and holding a giant sandbag of a baby all day long. I desperately need a massage and a chiropractic adjustment.

Anyway, things could be much worse. If we have to have an epidemic of something then West Nile is the way to go. Sixty percent of people will have zero symptoms at all. I'll take that over even the common cold or flu, although that's going around as well. The garlic oil capsules are being consumed fast and furious around here lately.

Posted by msLaura at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My new Solar Fly Trap KICKS ASS, originally uploaded by mslaura.

There must be a hundred flies in there. Jesus Christ, I didn't even know we had that many flies in the neighborhood! Totally gross.

I put in the nasty-smelling yeast bait that's been fermenting in a plastic gallon milk jug for the past week and they went NUTS this morning. They must have called up every relative for miles around to come and check out the new vile smelling brew in the Baker/Hamilton backyard.

I can't even find any flies in the chicken run now. I think they are *all* in the trap.

DIE SUCKERS! YES!

I am fighting this battle on another front too...I put the maggot-hunting gnat larvae in the soil around the run the other night (after Henrietta went to bed, so she wouldn't immediately dig them up and eat them).

So not only am I trapping every adult fly in a mile radius, I am going after their kids too.

Victory is mine, I can smell it.

Posted by msLaura at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last week I went to the dentist for my semi-annual checkup and cleaning.

My dentist's name is Dan, as is the guy who cuts my hair. And of course, the guy I married is also Dan. I like to joke around that if I need someone to do an important job, it had better be a Dan.

Dentist Dan used to be the sort of sidekick dentist for Dentist Susan, who owned the practice. He helped her out part-time, and then he spent the rest of the year in Peru, traveling around and providing free dental care for poor people in some Dental Peace Corps type project.

Then Dentist Susan was killed in a horribly tragic private plane crash with her father *and* her young son. No joke. It was awful and shocking. After a suitable mourning period, Dentist Dan bought the practice and took it over.

Anyway, I had a few crown replacements and a cracked tooth and a root canal a few years ago, so I was seeing a lot of Dentist Dan. But once I got all that taken care of, it has been smooth sailing ever since. Now I mostly just see the dental hygenist, and Dentist Dan comes in at the end, pokes my teeth, gives me a clean bill of dental health, and sends me off.

SInce I only see him every six months, there's some major event each time I see him. First it was me having a baby, then it was him getting married, then it was Julian's first birthday, then it was his anniversary, now he's having a baby with his wife. Needless to say, he no longer lives in Peru half the year with poor people. He lives here with his wife. But he's still a nice guy. The office is closed on Friday, and they all take a week off every now and then, so they can have vacations and private lives.

Anyway, like I said it's mostly me seeing the hygenist now. He has two hygenists, and one of them is out to get me.

His old hygenist, Amy, was wonderful. She was very chatty (in a nice way) and very gentle, and my teeth shone like pearls when she was done. But she had a second child and had to move to Arizona to be closer to her parents. I was sad.

Then there were a series of temps. They all sucked. Once practically just brushed my teeth a little and then kicked me out the door. She was in a huge hurry for an appointment or something. Not impressive at all.

Finally he got two permanent hygenists to replace Amy. The first one was Vicky. Very nice woman. I liked her fine until she began scraping my teeth with the metal probe. On almost every single tooth she caught the gum with the sharp pointed tip of the probe. Paaaaaaaainful. I felt like my gums were being shredded. THEN she got to the left side of my mouth and started scraping near my gumline.

All of a sudden a bolt of lighting struck me in the chair and sent a jolt of 10,000,000,000,000 volts through my body. I screamed, levitated out of my chair and almost bit off her finger.

"WHOA! Hey, don't ever do that again! I could have really hurt you!", she chastised me.

Could have....really....hurt...me? I was still fuzzy from the lightning strike, and dizzy from leftover pain. I didn't even know what had just happened, except that it was the most instantaneous wallop of intense pain I had ever experienced. It was like having a wire stuck in my brain, directly zapping my pain center.

I just lay in the chair, sweating and shaking, while she chastised me for almost biting her finger off. She phrased it as a concern for *my* well-being, she wouldn't want to poke me with the probe or anything by accident.

What the...? What in the HELL had she just done to me? Whatever it was, I had absolutely no control over it at all, so telling me to cut it out was pointless. Tell a headless chicken to stop flopping on the floor, why don't you? I explained to her that whatever she did, it HURT REALLY BAD, and I couldn't help jumping and screaming like that.

I was still dazed, but she started in again. About a minute later, same thing! A freaking ZILLION volts of electricity blasted through my head, right through the nerve of my tooth. I leapt up again and screamed spontaneously, and again she chastised me.

This time I was really freaked out. OK, this had now happened twice, and it had better not fucking happen again. What the HELL! She said she was done scraping. The gritty stuff went on my teeth, and she polished them, and that was fine, but I was definitely giving her the fish-eye.

I noted Vicky's name and the days she worked, and asked for the other hygenist the next time. I forget her name, but she was great. Very gentle. I told her about my sensitive spots at the gumline, and she stayed completely away from them. She just polished the teeth, but that was it on that side.

"No use risking pain with those sensitive teeth. They're in fine shape, there's really nothing to scrape off anyways. We'll just polish and floss over there."

What a novel idea! I loved this hygenist.

Six months went by. I had arranged my next appointment with the Gentle Hygenist, but then I had to reschedule over the phone when Julian came down with a cold.

I forgot to say that I didn't want Vicky.

In I walk, and there's Vicky. She starts making small talk, but she hasn't seen me in a year, so she doesn't remember me. I remember her though. I'm sweating bullets. The memory of the pain comes flooding back. I try to chat with her, but I'm freaking out a little. I try to reassure myself. It can't happen again. I'll warn her this time.

"My teeth are *really* sensitive at the gumline right here, and right here too," I point out to her. "Be really careful when you are scraping."

She starts in scraping with the sharp metal tool and shredding my gums. I know I'm fucking in for it, but I hope against hope that she's going to be careful this time. As she creeps closer and closer to the danger spot I start pouring sweat. She's there. She's doing OK. She's.....AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHMOTHERFUCKERFUCKWHAT THEFUCKOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I levitate screaming out of the chair and almost bite her finger off. NOW does she remember me? I am LIVID. "I TOLD YOU MY TEETH ARE SENSITIVE RIGHT THERE! DON'T SCRAPE THEM AT THE GUMLINE ON THAT SIDE!"

And then I burst into tears and begin sobbing uncontrollably. The blast of unbearable dental pain has unhinged me. I lay back in the chair with tears running out of the corners of my eyes, sweaty and shaking. She is floored. She apologizes, but yet, unbelievably, she starts to go in AGAIN with the fucking metal probe!

"No, NO! Stay away from my teeth with that thing! I can't take it anymore. I don't even want it near me! Let's just polish them and be done with this,OK?"

"I won't touch you, I just want to inspect that side"

"Fine, but just look and don't TOUCH."

She *does* touch. Luckily it's on the biting surface, which doesn't hurt. But still, she broke her word. I don't trust her at all anymore. What the hell is she trying to prove? Get that goddamn metal probe away from me! I fight the urge to slap it out of her hand and run as fast as I can.

"It's all OK, your teeth are in really good shape. You take great care of them. No tartar or anything like that."

Well why in hell was she scraping them in the first place then? Just for the pleasure of tormenting me?

She polishes my teeth now. A jet of air hits the spot and makes me wince. It's enough to make me start silently weeping again. She hands me a Kleenex. I feel totally traumatized. I'm embarassed for being such a baby, but that flash of searing, electrifying pain was so awful that I can't even stand to think about it, and I'm in a blind panic that it might happen again. She distracts me by telling me that Dentist Dan's wife is expecting a baby.

Dentist Dan comes in while I am still snuffling. I say "Congratulations on your impending baby" and wipe tears away. He looks pissed that the news has been broken to me. Vicky the Dental Terrorist tells him that she had to distract me with some good news. "Yes," I sniffle, "We just had a Very Bad Experience. I'm still trying to pull myself together."

Dentist Dan looks puzzled. "It's Number 54," she tells him, or something like that. "She's very sensitive right there."

He comes over to examine me and he has a METAL PROBE in his hand.

"Noooooooo! NOOOOOO! Don't touch me with that! Please, I'm all freaked out. I'm having an anxiety attack. That pain was so bad. Please don't touch me with the probe." I'm a mess now.

"OK, I won't," he says. "I promise."

He takes his index finger and runs it around my teeth one by one. As he gets to the spot when I was just blasted by Vicky, I feel a little tremor of pain and I start to freak again.

"Ahh! Don't touch there!!!!! Just LOOK. OK?" I'm a total basket case. I know they think I'm insane. I swear, I'm not. I'm really good at dealing with pain. I am a CHAMP at the dentist. I always have been. I never complain, I do what they tell me, I hold my mouth open wide even when my jaw is breaking and my tongue is dry as the desert and the corners of my mouth are cracking.

But I've had it now. NO MORE OF THAT BULLSHIT.

My departure is totally awkward. Vicky feels bad that I cried and that she hurt me, but I can tell she thinks I'm a nut, and she would start picking at my teeth with the metal probe again in an instant if I would just let her. She hands me my new toothbrush (which I won't use, I have a Sonicare) and suggests toothpaste for sensitive teeth.

"I've tried at least five different brands. They don't help, they irritate my gums, and they leave a weird scummy residue on my teeth."

"OK." That was her only suggestion. We're done.

On the way out I make my next appointment for six months later, but I know I won't be back. Sorry Dentist Dan. Vicky has just given me a major dentist complex.

I need someone with lots of nitrous oxide, a metal-probe-free office, and headphones playing my chosen musical selections. This being the Bay Area in 2006, I can have that. I know a dentist who can accomodate me. Well, maybe not a metal-probe-free office, but she doesn't use metal drills, she uses lasers instead. I don't think nitrous will be a problem. She's supposedly very gentle, and was recommended as a wonderful dentist for kids who have major anxiety about dental pain.

I need to make an appointment.

Bye Dentist Dan. I'll miss you, but I can't take it anymore.

Posted by msLaura at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I finished reading Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls:True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors by Sterling Seagrave. A truly fascinating book for those of you who like harrowing stories of survival against impossible odds and mind-bogglingly gruesome conditions.

If you liked Endurance, or Alive or even Robinson Crusoe, this is the book for you. Except that it's not just one incredible true story, it's a compilation of them, so just when you've picked up your jaw off the floor after reading one account of a Desperate Journey, then there comes an even *more *incredible tale of an Abandoned Soul that blows your mind completely. And so on. I could not put it down, and it's a thick book.

Anyway, I've been on an island theme in my reading material for some time now. I'd link to the Jack London post I wrote some time back, except I just realized while looking for it that it's one of the *many* posts that I haven't yet transferred over into the new blog. SIgh, I only have about a quarter of my entries available here, the rest need to be copied and pasted by hand, one by one, into the Moveable Type blog interface. Yeah....a real project. Argh.

Suffice it to say that I've been reading island-themed books for several months now, and I've got quite a list going. The above is just one in the series:

• An Island to Oneself: Six Years on a Desert Island
• Castaway in Paradise: The Incredible Adventures of True-Life Robinson Crusoes
• Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls : True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors
• Life of Pi
• Rain and Other South Sea Stories
• Robinson Crusoe
• Searching for Paradise : A Grand Tour of the World's Unspoiled Islands...
• Shoal of Time a History of the Hawaiian Islands
• South Sea Tales
• Tales of the South Seas: Island Landfalls, the Ebb-Tide, the Wrecker
• The Cruise of the Snark: Jack London's South Sea Adventure
• The Devil's Teeth : A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks
• The Log of the Snark
• The Sex Lives of Cannibals : Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

and that's just some of them.

In my reading of numerous shipwreck survivor accounts, I've noticed something curious. In the "Desperate Journeys" book, for example, there's a story of a guy whose ship goes down, and after nearly dying of thirst and hunger at sea, he washes up on a tiny scrap of reef with barely any dry land, no vegetation, and no respite from the burning equatorial sun. He somehow barely survives for over 2 years on crabs and algae and occasional fish before being rescued, always on the verge of death from starvation and thirst. I forget how he managed to get any water.

One of the biggest problems is no shade. He is burnt to a crisp without any shade all day long, day after day.

When he is finally picked up and rescued, he has grown a thick layer of hair over his skin that helps protect him from the sun's burning rays, and the cold at night as well. The rescuers describe him as looking like a wild animal, his hair is almost like fur.

This same phenomenon is described in several other castaway stories as well. The castaways are usually very *hairy* when found, not just bearded, but actually posessing a coat of hair over their bodies that is thicker than normal. This only seems to happen for those castaways that were shipwrecked without clothing, or whose clothes have rotted off and haven't found anything else to protect them from the sun.

So my question is: is there something in intense UV exposure that triggers protective hair growth? I know that anorexic girls often grow an unusually thick coat of hair on their bodies under starvation conditions. It replaces the insulating body fat that normally protects them from variations in temperature. So under conditions of starvation AND intense UV exposure, it does make sense that some pathway for protective body hair growth would be switched on.

And if we could find that pathway trigger, we might be able to switch body hair growth on or off. Without starving or being burnt to a crisp by the sun, of course.

Considering that hair removal is a zillion-dollar industry, and hair *growth* (for men) is booming as well, this could be very lucrative research. Rather than shaving and lasering and moving hair around from one part of your head to another, wouldn't it be great to just be able to turn your hair growth on or off?

Well, if I ever win the lottery and become a venture capitalist, that will be something to look into. After I solve world hunger and establish peace on earth, of course.

Posted by msLaura at 08:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, after hearing for years that aspartame is fine and doesn't cause health problems and breaks down into simple amino acids...it turns out that it's a potential carcinogen after all.

New York Times: The Lowdown on Sweet?

I operate under the theory that you should eat food that is as simple and unprocessed as possible. People have been eating eggs and dairy and coconut oil and so on so on for tens of thousands of years. There's no mystery there about those foods. Hydrogenated fats and oils are chemically new, as are most other food additives. Artificial sweeteners too. Modern additives just haven't been around long enough to know what effect they will have, and what we DO know about them isn't *ever* good news. Even the supposedly safe products usually turn out to have some dangerous effect later down the road. Like Teflon, for example. And margarine, and now Nutrasweet.

So I stick with organic eggs and milk and meat and veggies, and try to fuss with them as little as possible when cooking them. I do prefer Sweet-n-Low in my iced tea when I'm a restaurant, because sugar doesn't dissolve fast enough. But yeah, I should really skip it and deal with stirring a minute longer. Oh, the effort! ;-)

Anyway, if you stick to unprocessed foods as much as possible, you can't go wrong. Rther than worry about keeping up on the latest research on this and that product, just try to eat foods that humans have already been eating for a long, long time. You can't really go wrong. It's the easiest and safest way to go.

Posted by msLaura at 09:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I've been doing the wheat-free thing for several days now.

I haven't really noticed any major changes in the wheat vs. non-wheat by *itself*, but I have lost some accumulated holiday poundage and tumnmy bloat from not automatically reaching for morning toast, midday crackers, evening cookies, etc.

The attention I've been paying to my diet has definitely paid off though. After a meal of pork with a sauce of figs and carmelized onions I had a sudden resurgence of Angry Bunghole aka "Burning Ring of Fire". My head itched like CRAZY too. I could not stop scratching it, it was like I had
poison oak all over my scalp. Intolerable. But thinking back, when I had chicken pox at age 30, that appeared on my scalp first too. So it's not too crazy an idea.

No more onions after that. My bum's been slowly recovering, and my head doesn't itch any more. Overall, rashiness is subsiding.

I think, rather than any wheat or dairy or whatever allergy, that I just have sensitive skin *all over* my body, inside and out, and anything that tends to generally be an irritant to my outside, sets my insides aflame too.

The list so far includes citrus and other acidic fruits, coffee, hot peppers, and now onions and garlic. It makes sense. I wouldn't rub any of those foods on my face without expecting stinging or watering eyes or rashiness, why should I expect to ingest them without effect?

I'm not certain about any of this yet, but that's my hunch so far. I'll test it out more thoroughly in the weeks to come. In the meantime, I gave away all my onions and garlic on Freecycle. Leeks, I forgot the leeks. Dang. I LOVE leeks.

The other big factor that makes me suspect onion-ish things is Massive Onion Odor. If a normal person eats some onions or garlic, they stink for a few hours. If I eat onions or garlic, every pore of my being and every drop of bodily fluid reeks *profusely* for at least 2-3 days afterwards. Dan teases me about it frequently. That just doesn't seem normal, at lest it clues me in that I might not be too far off-case in thinking that I have a sensitivity of some sort. Not that I WANT one, let's just get that clear right now.

A random link I followed online clued me in that extra-virgin olive oil might be a problem for me too. Someone was talking about how both onions and EV olive oil cause them to rash out. Well, I always get EV olive oil, the greener and more pungent the better, because of the supposed health benefits, right? Although sometimes it can be definitely "spicy".

An olive oil expert says:
--------------------------------------------------
Spiciness "...comes from the polyphenols in the oil, present at higher levels when the oil is fresh. They're the healthful antioxidants in olive oil, and they also keep the oil form oxidizing and becoming rancid.

In offical olive oil tasting parlance, this 'flavor' is called pungency. I say 'flavor' because it is actually a chemical irritant, similar to the capsascin burn of chiles. While pungency is desirable, it must be balanced with fruitiness and bitterness, the other two of the big three in olive oil
organoleptics.

Since neither 'pungent' nor 'chemical irritant' resonate as marketing concepts, we often resort the euphemism 'peppery.'"
----------------------------------------------------
Interesting! So I think I've basically been irritating the hell out of my system for many years now, thinking that I'm eating healthy. I mean, it IS healthy food, just maybe too irritating for me.

Huh. More research is needed, as all good research articles say at the close.

I'm digging wheat-free primarily because it's totally gotten me out of my food rut and back into Cooking as Adventure again.

Quinoa Sour Cream Fudge Cupcakes...my project with Julian last night after he resolutely refused to sleep.

They taste a *leetle* bit weird, but still chocolatey and tasty.

And tomorrow I'm making Injera, those Ethiopian pancakes made of teff, the World's Smallest Grain. Pretty easy, you just toss it in a bowl with warm water and let it ferment for a day or two, then pour it on a griddle and cook it. Yum. I love injera. I hope it turns out.

Posted by msLaura at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 1, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor - New York Times
Why I'm Happy I Evolved
By OLIVIA JUDSON

London

IF chimpanzees observed New Year's Day, they would have much to reflect on. In 2005, they joined humans, chickens and mosquitoes, as well as less famous occupants of the planet, on an exclusive but growing list: organisms whose complete genomes have been sequenced.

What would they make of this news, I wonder? Perhaps they would resent the genetic evidence that they are related to us. Or perhaps they would, as I do, revel in being part of the immensity of nature and a product of evolution, the same process that gave rise to dinosaurs, bread molds and myriad organisms too wacky to invent.

Organisms like the sea slug Elysia chlorotica. This animal not only looks like a leaf, but it also acts like one, making energy from the sun. Its secret? When it eats algae, it extracts the chloroplasts, the tiny entities that plants and algae use to manufacture energy from sunlight, and shunts them into special cells beneath its skin. The chloroplasts continue to function; the slug thus becomes able to live on a diet composed only of sunbeams.

Still more fabulous is the bacterium Brocadia anammoxidans. It blithely makes a substance that to most organisms is a lethal poison - namely, hydrazine. That's rocket fuel.

And then there's the wasp Coesia congregata. She injects her eggs into the bodies of caterpillars. As she does so, she also injects a virus that disables the caterpillar's immune system and prevents it from attacking the eggs. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the caterpillar alive.

It's hard not to have an insatiable interest in organisms like these, to be enthralled by the strangeness, the complexity, the breathtaking variety of nature.

Just think: the Indus River dolphin doesn't sleep as you or I do, or indeed as most mammals, for several hours at once. Instead, it takes microsleeps, naps that last for a few seconds, like a driver dozing at the wheel.

Or consider this: a few days after its conception, a pig embryo has become a filament that is about a yard long.

Or: the single-celled parasite that causes malaria is descended from algae. We know this because it carries within itself the remnants of a chloroplast.

It's not that I have a fetish for obscure facts. It's that small facts add up to big pictures. For although Mother Nature's infinite variety seems incomprehensible at first, it is not. The forces of nature are not random; often, they are strongly predictable.

For example, if you were to discover a new species and you told me that the male is much bigger than the female, I would tell you what the mating system is likely to be: males fight each other for access to females. Or if you discover that the male's testicles make up a large part of his weight, I can tell you that the females in his species consort with several males at a time.

Suppose you find that a particular bacterium lives exclusively in the gullets of leeches and helps them digest blood. Then I can tell you how that bacterium's genome is likely to differ from those of its free-living cousins; among other changes, the genome will be smaller, and it will have lost sets of genes that are helpful for living free but useless for living inside another being.

Because a cell is a kind of factory that produces proteins, and because proteins can have a variety of components, some of which are cheaper to synthesize than others, you might expect that proteins that are mass produced are made from cheaper components than proteins that are constructed only occasionally. And you'd be right.

The patterns are everywhere. Mammals that feed on ants and termites have typically evolved long, thin noses and long, sticky tongues. A virus that is generally passed from mother to child will tend to make its host less sick than one that readily jumps from one host to another via a cough or a sneeze.

When I was in school, I learned none of this. Biology was a subject that seemed as exciting as a clump of cotton wool. It was a dreary exercise in the memorization and regurgitation of apparently unconnected facts. Only later did I learn about evolution and how it transforms biology from that mass of cotton wool into a magnificent tapestry, a tapestry we can contemplate and begin to understand.

Some people want to think of humans as the product of a special creation, separate from other living things. I am not among them; I am glad it is not so. I am proud to be part of the riot of nature, to know that the same forces that produced me also produced bees, giant ferns and microbes that live at the bottom of the sea.

For me, the knowledge that we evolved is a source of solace and hope. I find it a relief that plagues and cancers and wasp larvae that eat caterpillars alive are the result of the impartial - and comprehensible - forces of evolution rather than the caprices of a deity.

More than that, I find that in viewing ourselves as one species out of hundreds of millions, we become more remarkable, not less so. No other animal that I have heard of can live so peaceably in such close quarters with so many individuals that are unrelated. No other animal routinely bothers to help the sick and the dying, or tries to save those hurt in an earthquake or flood.

Which is not to say that we are all we might wish to be. But in putting ourselves into our place in nature, in comparing ourselves with other species, we have a real hope of reaching a better understanding, and appreciation, of ourselves.

Olivia Judson is an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College in London.

Posted by msLaura at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Blogger is really pissing me off lately. I can't publish any posts without erroring out halfway through, which is why you may have seen this page with a weird lost bit of code up at the top of the page, or perhaps missing the right-hand column.

I've already written to them several times, but since I'm just a schmo using their free service, I apparently don't merit a response. Aaargh! I'd gladly move over to another blogging editor (and even pay for the privilege) if it weren't such a huge pain in the ass to do so. I have something like 180 posts to transfer over, and that's no chickenscratch. So please Blogger, get your freakin' act together, would you?

But I digress. I'm here today to talk about my bra collection.

When I was in my late teens/early 20s, I was a 34B. My B-cup runneth over, in fact. Ah, the glory days.

Then the girls started shrinking, slowly but surely. By the end of my 20s, I found that the B-cup was just too darned big. So I started buying 34A bras, and they fit me much better. Fast forward to my early 30s, and I was LESS than an A-cup. Not exactly flat as a board, but pretty close. Still, there was something to be said for being able to go braless anytime without repercussions. But it got old altering fancy dresses to fill out the saggy spot in the chest.

Then I got pregnant, and I went from 34A to 34C almost overnight. I bought a few bras at 34C, thinking that I couldn't possibly get much bigger than that. I even bought a few nursing bras in 34 C, thinking that 34C would be my nursing size once the baby was born. A cup size of D wasn't even in my mental frame of reference.

And yet, my boobs just kept on going! Past C to D (where I bought several more bras at Target), and finally...DOUBLE D.

Double D marked a line that I did not want to cross. There were still a few cute and sexy bras at Target in a D-cup, but once you got to DD it was Industrial-Strength-Over-the-Shoulder-Boulder-Holder Time.

Could I not just squeeze into a D-cup still? The extra boob that squeezed out by my armpit when I tried spelled it out for me loud and clear....NO. And not only that, but I was also a 36DD. No more 34. Suddenly my entire ribcage had added a size as well.

My bra collection at this point:
34A
34C
34C Nursing
36D
36DD

I worked those 36DD bras the best I could, then I had me a baby.
Oh Lordy.

E-n-g-o-r-g-e-m-e-n-t.

My boobs exploded 3 days after I had Julian. I had BOWLING BALLS on my chest. Gigantic, hard bowling balls.

Desperate, at 5 days post-partum I put my newborn baby into his fleece pouch and dragged my sweaty, crazy, shell-shocked, traumatized self down to Parenting and Breastfeeding Services at Good Sam.

"Help me! I need help with my boobs!"

The kind consultant followed me into a dressing room and held Julian while I tore off my sweaty shirt to expose my shiny-hard bowling balls.

"Hmmmm yes...those DEFINITELY look engorged," she said.

"Aaaarghhh, heeeeelp meeeeee!" I replied.

So she set me up with the Medela Light Support Bra in X-Large, which is like a stretchy Lycra boob glove, no hooks or clasps or underwire. Then she recommended that I go buy a head of green cabbage and stuff the cabbage leaves into my new bra, using their natural cupped oval shape as a bra liner shell.

You can't mess around with engorged boobs. All those milk glands boost into hyper-super-overdrive production and there's no baby that can possibly keep up with it. You do eventually reabsorb the milk and adjust your production levels to what is actually removed each day. But not before all that milk backs up and inflates your boobs into bowling balls. One false move, a pinching underwire, too much compression...you're looking at mastitis.

When I see bad fake boobs, they remind me of engorgement. My boobs were so full that I had milk backed up into my armpits. My *armpits* were hard and swollen. Ugh.

Once the engorgement went down (several LONG days and nights later), the super stretchy bra wasn't supporting my EEs. I bought the Medium size (my regular size when not engorged), but it wasn't enough support during the day.

I graduated to the Medela Softcup Seamless nursing bra in 36D. It was a little too small, but they didn't make a DD size.

My bra collection at this point:
34A
34C
34C Nursing
36D
36D Nursing
36DD
36DD Nursing
Medela Light Support X-Large
Medela Light Support Medium

I stablized there for a long while, actually until today.

Over time my boobs have slowly gotten smaller. I haven't been a 36 size band since I lost my baby weight. I've been wearing ill-fitting bras that are too big for me for months now. Thre is nothing to make you feel skankier than wearing bad, saggy bras for months on end. Oh, and my panty collection is not exactly brand new either.

So today, I took the advice of my friend Angela. I went to JC Penney to buy some Maidenform bras. I did not buy a $45 bra from Victoria's Secret. I did not buy an $11 bra at Target (which I'm boycotting anyway, sad to say becaue I LOVE that place). I did the right thing and bought a good, reasonably priced bra. Actually I bought six, because right now I have NONE that fit me properly.

I'm almost a B cup now, but not quite. That would complete my collection nicely, but I'm not there yet. It's only a matter of time. And believe me, I'm hanging on to those A cup bras as well.

Posted by msLaura at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had two sections of lawn in front of our house when we moved in. A large lawn to the left of our driveway, and a small lawn to the right of the driveway.

The small lawn was the most useless thing ever. It was hard to mow, too small to play games on...really just a ridiculous waste of space and resources. So last May I had the lawn removed and replaced it with a vegetable garden.

I paid someone to do the hard part, which was to strip out the top layer of grass/roots and rototill in lots of lovely dark, rich compost. Still, they did it in less than a day, and it was pretty cheap. Included in the price I got a simple little drip irrigation system, so I wouldn't have to do any watering. Picking out the veggies was fun, and the planting was super-easy.

What a payoff! All summer long we have been eating an ultra-fresh, incredibly delicious bounty of strawberries, melons, heirloom tomatoes, green beans, fragrant basils, sweet peppers, hot peppers, Japanese eggplant, cucumbers, lots of different salad greens, corn, and Swiss chard. We're still waiting for the artichokes and Meyer lemons to produce, they are winter crops.

Now ask me what work I did after I planted the veggies. Um, almost none. I went out and harvested every few days, pulled a weed or two here and there, sometimes turned the hose on and watered when it was really hot outside. Other than that, my plot was almost maintenance-free.

Now I'm wondering why *anyone* would want a big lawn when you can reap such an incredible bounty from putting even a tiny section of the land to a different use. I put much less effort into my veggie garden than I do our lawn (which needs to be mown, trimmed and edged weekly, and re-seeded fairly often in the bare patches). I'm sure we used less water for the veggie garden too. And we had all kinds of butterflies and big fuzzy bumblebees visiting the garden, whereas the lawn is just kind of blah.

We have a Neuton rechargeable lawnmower that kicks ass. It's so quiet you can talk on the phone while you mow your lawn. No fumes or gas to buy, just push a button to start it. And I don't use any chemical fertilizers or herbicides, just a top-dressing of compost in the wintertime. Our lawn looks pretty great without any of that poisonous stuff on it, and I don't have to worry about Julian and Bugs playing on it, or, in the case of Bugs, eating it.

Edible Estates is an ongoing series of projects to replace the American lawn with edible garden landscapes responsive to local culture, climate and landscape. The website has some scary facts on it:

• Homeowners use up to 10 times more chemical pesticides per acre on their lawns than farmers use on crops.


• Lawn chemicals drift and are tracked indoors where they may remain in carpets and on surfaces for up to a year when not exposed to direct sunlight.


• Of 30 commonly used lawn pesticides, 13 are probable carcinogens, 14 are linked with birth defects, 18 with reproductive effects, 20 with liver or kidney damage, 18 with neurotoxicity and 28 are irritants.


• Of 30 commonly used lawn pesticides, 17 are detected in groundwater, 23 have the ability to leach into drinking water sources, 24 are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms vital to our ecosystem, 11 are toxic to bees, and 16 are toxic to birds.


• 2,4-D, the pesticide in most Weed and Feed products, is a neurotoxicant and contains half the ingredients in Agent Orange.


• Studies have found that dogs whose owners use 2,4-D lawn products are twice as likely to develop canine malignant lymphoma.


• Those are just a few...

Posted by msLaura at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Through the magic of the Internet, Julian and I sat at the edge of a pond in Botswana at sunset this morning. We watched zebras, warthogs, gazelles and lots of interesting birds come down to the water to drink and hang out -- live!

It's National Geographic Magazine's WildCam AFRICA and it rocks. Cool background sounds too.

Posted by msLaura at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)