At last!

I know who I'm voting for! I was on the fence, I really was. I was planning to do some research and decide in an informed way, since I haven't really investigated either candidate at all. But now I don't have to get informed! Not since I read THIS!!!!!!!!

Yup. Senator Clinton is supporting John McCain's Unbelievably Stupid Idea of a gas tax vacation. (I hate John McCain. That man is dumber than a box of rocks, and mean with it, too.)

So I am suddenly an Obama supporter. (Unless he decides to support the Unbelievably Stupid Idea, too, in which case I will have to throw my hat into the ring and run on a platform of Immediately Raise the Gas Tax to $4/Gallon!*)

Hip hip hooray! Yes we can! Etc!

* With rebates for poor people, of course! Do you think I'm heartless?

Doing the time warp again

Those kids are here. The ones from downstairs. The ones who are freakishly nice to Dutch. They're in my home, and they're being nice to Dutch and entertaining her while I fill out employment application forms online for the ENORMOUS corporation to which I am applying for a summer internship. I LOVE the 1950s! Parents have so much TIME in the 1950s!

Highlight of my day

I have gotten really fond of my spam folder. I love the titles of the emails - I don't know if they have to get more creative in an attempt to avoid filters or what, but I think they've gotten really innovative. For some reason, my google spam is way better than my yahoo spam. For example, here are some of my recent yahoo spam titles:

"Christian Singles"
"Product Ideas and Inventions Needed"

And HERE are some of my recent google spam titles:

"Enlarge your cucumber" (gardening spam!)
"Your invitation to World Blowjob Day" (Umm... thanks!)

Reply hazy, try again

Today Dutch went to a playdate for 3.5 hours, which meant that Cook and I spent that much time transporting her there and back (it's not that far away, but it's a two-bus trip, which makes for a lengthy ordeal on the leisurely Sunday bus schedules). Cook dropped her off; he jogged the 6-mile round-trip. (Dutch loves being pushed in the jog stroller. She acts like a queen in a sedan chair - I always half-expect to see her waving a fan and noshing on bonbons.) I picked her up; I walked the three miles there and then we bussed home.

My brisk walk there, unencumbered with bags or offspring, was the most exercise I've gotten in weeks. (I was swimming pretty often in the fall, but that takes WAY too much time.) I have never enjoyed anything like the alleged runners high that people are supposed to get when they exercise, but I do appreciate the weird mental jittery rut I get into. I can't follow any thoughts through, they just stutter along, and that's kind of nice. These are the questions I pondered on my walk, which took me along some busy streets and through some industrial neighborhoods:
1) Who will I vote for in the presidential primary?
2) When did Martha Stewart start selling wine?
3) What does the inside of this warehouse (labeled "Love Silks") look like?
4) Who will I vote for in the mayoral election?
5) Does my butt look as massive and jiggly as it feels?

The answers to these questions, at which I arrived after some research, can be found below, in no particular order. Match the correct answer to the question, and you'll win a gold star! (Figuratively. I have no gold stars.)

a) It is decidedly so (answer arrived at thanks to a large and reflective plateglass window).
b) Sam Adams.
c) Early this year.
d) No way of knowing.
e) Cannot predict now.

Also, I just want to point out that taking 30 extra pounds for a walk makes walking much less fun. Those of you who've never ranged out of a healthy weight for your height should know that being fat is not only corrosive to one's self-esteem and overall health; it is also very hard work. And then I retrieved Dutch, who acted limp and whiny all the way home, so I think I can make a strong argument that I had to carry 70 extra pounds for that leg of the trip. Phew.

The Lollipop Guild requests another story.

Yesterday I made a profound discovery that I'm sure many people have made before me. (Since maybe a hundred billion people have ever been born, probably 999,999,999,000 people have preceded me.) When your kid asks you to tell her a story, you DO NOT HAVE TO MAKE ONE UP. (And if, like me, you have no imagination whatsoever, and always tell stories about nice kids who brush their teeth very thoroughly and say please and thankyou in the course of their incredibly boring days, this is a very good discovery to make.) You can retell a story you remember dimly from your childhood, and your kid will listen raptly to your every word, and beg to hear the whole fumbling thing again.

If you happen to pick a story that at one point involved Judy Garland and the entire midget population of California, you may have difficulty recalling the plot, which is weird. This doesn't matter. Your kid thinks this is the most mindbogglingly fantastic story ever, even though you keep backtracking ("oh, and there were these shoes!") and the plot has some serious holes in it. Your kid doesn't care, because at least nobody brushes their teeth, and when the witch gets squished, nobody apologizes. Also, it's SCARY. This is thrilling.
You will never have to make up another boring story again. Congratulations!

(photo of amazing pumpkin from http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalburn/283576582/)

Fat frogs

I just got back from a presentation by a developmental biologist at UCLA. He was talking about environmental "obesogens" - he accidentally discovered, while researching endocrine disruption, that organotins had an effect they hadn't been anticipating. Organotins are a group of toxicants used (among other things) as fungicides, marine pesticides, and as ingredients in PVC. PVC is ubiquitous - it makes up the pipes through which our water travels, the plastic wrap in which we wrap our food, and all kinds of other great stuff.

Anyway, here's an article about it. And here's an abstract of some of their research. A lot of his research went way over my head, but the gist is that these pollutants seem to turn stem cells into fat cells. They discovered it when they exposed some frogs to tributyl tin, and found that the intersex weirdness they were anticipating didn't happen. The frogs' testes didn't get really big or really small - they were just replaced with fat.

So then they got busy with some more experiments to try to figure out what was going on, and found that when mice are exposed to organotins while they are pregnant, the newborn mice have crazy amounts of fat in their bodies. The baby mice, allowed free access to exercise and food and whatever other thrills can be found in the life of a laboratory mouse, stay small for a while, and then they get super-fat. All it takes is prenatal exposure, and not very much of it.

And it turns out that human stem cells exposed to the stuff turn into fat cells. All of these experiments showed effects at levels that are well within the range of levels of organotins found in the average person.

Anyway, this all made me feel like lying down under the table and weeping. I know a lot more than your average organotin-riddled person about environmental toxics, and I thought I had kind of reached maximum depression levels on the topic. But I hadn't - I am exploring previously virgin fields of depression!

So much of the way we deal with societal problems is to blame the individual. Quit smoking, stop eating so much junk food, go out of your way to recycle, buy a more environmentally responsible car. But so much of our lives involve such a limited range of choices. We have crappy choices. If we could just look up from the individual responsibility paradigm and say "Yes, you do have a responsibility to make good choices. But it is the job of government, and of the whole society, to ensure that we actually have good choices to make." I'd like to be able to choose between a range of attractive AND responsible options, not between lots of crappy choices and a few difficult and less attractive responsible options.

But for now, while I'm waiting without much hope for government to address the issues of toxicants in the environment, I'd just like somebody to tell me how I can procure water (in the city) for my daughter that's not contaminated with stuff that screws with her hormones. I'd really like that.

I came home after all this and found Dutch in the bathtub (Cook was in character as Pierre, who has an atrocious French accent and runs the spa). She said "Mama, I'm a whale!"

Other things that keep me awake at night

So... got any pesticides in your garage? You might want to go check if they include any of the products listed in this article. The EPA is ordering a recall because they are illegal and unregistered. In fact, they "still are working to determine what's in the herbicides, how long they've been on the market, how widely they were distributed and how many brand names they were sold under."

Oops.

Our chemical policy paradigm is so topsy-turvy. I guess I should write something thoughtful about that. Later. In the meantime, you can read all about it yourself in this Harpers article! Enjoy!

life in the old girl yet?

I just read an article by Lynne Cox in the New Yorker about her swims in Greenland. She's what - fiftysomething? Late forties?

I also achieved a (relatively) spectacular feat of athleticism today - I did a cartwheel. I signed Dutch up for a tumbling class this summer, and I was trying to explain to her what she might do at the class. We cleared a BIG space in the living room, and I executed a perfectly serviceable cartwheel, for the first time in probably two decades. I'm proud of myself. But also pretty horrified by how daunting it was to contemplate, and how very very atrophied I am. I'm not THAT old, but Lynne Cox could kick my ass from here to Greenland.

Bulletins from the front

Dutch had a playdate today with her best friend from daycare. This involved a lot of squabbling (mostly on the part of Dutch, who has some painful and classic only-child aversion to sharing Her Stuff), interspersed with lots of hugging. We're excited because next weekend we get to send Dutch to Best Friend's house!
Dutch also wore dancing clothes a lot this weekend, and spent time marveling over How the Camera Works, which appears to have come close to blowing her tiny mind.

This is what spring looks like around here this year.

I lied.

I take it back. I'm not too busy to read and chortle over the blog of one of my many fantastic cousins. (I did do my GIS labs first, though, and bathe one cranky and stinky preschooler, so sheesh, give me a break, people.)