Reusable produce bags

I was just this week telling my sister that there needed to be an alternative to the plastic baggies that you get on the spool to put your lettuce and tomatoes into at the grocery store.

Then the Gardeners.com catalog arrives in my mailbox.  And they have reusable mesh produce bags that let the veggies breathe in the fridge. 

Source: gardeners.com via Lynellen on Pinterest

Gas and flowers

We sent roses to Mike's mom.  The path they took is scary:
Clovis, CA
Fresno, CA
Oakland, CA
Memphis, TN
Tucson, AZ

The amount of gas involved in delivering these is terrible!  They traveled at least 3,660 miles!  Ugh!

PGM 24

My paternal grandfather, C.H. Perry, was a cook (Ships Cook First Class - SC1) on Navy ships during World War 2.  According to my father, one of these ships was PGM 24.  NavSource says PGM 24 was a Motor Gunboat / Patrol Gunboat.
Click the image to go to the larger version on the NavSource website.

Rambling thoughts

When I'm a "benevolent" dictator, here's a few changes I'll make:

1. Reorg the military. If it flies, its Air Force (no more army helicopters or navy c130s). If it's in/under the water, it's Navy. Everything else is Army (Marines become Army). Except, ALL special forces groups will become Marines. Navy SEALS will now be Marine SEALs. Delta Team = Marines. The Marines will consist exclusively of special forces teams. If they need a helicopter for a mission, they'll have to cooperate with the Air Force to get a ride.
2. All highway entrances/exits will be on the right hand side.
3. Every road that crosses a bridge over a highway will also have an entrance/exit at that bridge.
4. No more importing of perishables. This is wasteful. Get to know what's grown in-season in your own country. No more south american strawberries in north american winter. Ditto with roses. It's wasteful to fly them thousands of miles. Learn to appreciate the seasons and delay gratification.

Gypsy Bohemian Peasant Top

Call me nuts, but I LOVE this shirt. It's vampy and victorian, and I just love it.

Words I learned today

Here's stuff I learned today in order to understand a pathology report:

1. "Skybalon" is a greek word that is used in the New Testament. It means refuse/dung/garbage. In the pathology/medical world, it means a chunk of tissue that is not part of an organ. For example, a finger-like fatty projection of tissue attached to the colon.
2. "Adnexal mass" means "lump of tissue near uterus". In this case, the ovary and fallopian tube were the "lump".
3. "Sigmoid colon" is a s-shaped section of the colon that attaches to the rectum.
4. "Posterior cul-de-sac" (did you know that your body has walls, gutters, and a cul-de-sac??) is the area behind the uterus but above the rectum.
5. "Obturator lymph node" is a lymph node near or attached to the obturator artery which comes down your spine and then branches like a tree in the pelvic area, with branches headed towards the legs.
6. "Cecal" is where the small intestine attaches to the large intestine.
7. "Cribriform" means pierced with holes, like a sieve.
8. "Metastatic" means cancer that has spread from somewhere else.
9. "Carcinoma" means an invasive, malignant tumor from epithelial tissue (the inner lining of an organ) that tends to metastasize to other areas of the body.
10. "Psammoma bodies" means round nuggets of calcium or calcified tissue.
11. "Infarcted" means tissue death due to a blocked blood supply
12. "Papillary" means mushroom-shaped tumor with the stem attached to the epithelial layer of an organ.
13. "Adenocarcinoma" means cancer tumors that secrete a fluid like a gland does.
14. "Serous" means body fluid that lubricates organs in your abdomen to reduce friction from movement.

That's it for today's vocabulary lesson. There will be a pop-quiz on this tomorrow, so study up!

September: Cry For You

I just added this album to my playlist. Love the dance beat. Would make an interesting song for use in a New Moon video.

I never had to say goodbye

You must have known I wouldn't stay

While you were talking about our life

You killed the beauty of today

Forever and ever

Life is now or never

Forever never comes around

(People love and let go)

Forever and ever

Life is now or never

Forever's gonna slow you down

You'll never see me again

So now who's gonna cry for you

You'll never see me again

No matter what you do

You never heard me break your heart

You didn't wake up when we died

Since I was lonely from the start

I think the end is mine to write

Chorus

Catchup

A bit of this and that:

• Saw "Inkheart" today. Not bad. My mom and sister hated it. I wouldn't necessarily watch it again, but I wouldn't say it was horrible. We like Brendan Frasier around here, so if you set your expectations to "Brendan Frasier" level, you'll not be disappointed.
• Saw "Knowing" today. Not bad. I like Nicolas Cage. This is a typical movie for him too. Could have been something that M.Night Shyamalon wrote (but it wasnt).
• Finished reading "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4)" today. Not bad. The movie did a good job of leaving out the Winky/Dobby House-Elf story line that didn't contribute much to the action nor was it wrapped up in the book.
• Finished reading "The Host: A Novel" the other day. Not bad. The jacket says that the book explores what it means to be human. Seems too lofty a goal for what I saw in it. Nice sci-fi story. I would say it was like Stephanie Meyers watched Stargate SG-1 and asked herself what it would be like if the Goa'uld parasite wasn't inherently evil and did manage to invade Earth, then wrote this.
• Finished reading " The X and Y of Buy: Sell More and Market Better by Knowing How the Sexes Shop (NelsonFree)" recently. Some fascinating trivia, but poor on the application thereof.

Welcome to your brain

The Today Show had a really neat exerpt of brain factoids from the book "Welcome to Your Brain": why you can't tickle yourself, why cramming for an exam isn't helpful, and how exercise can help people avoid old-age brain decay.

They have a neat quiz about brain facts. I only got 50% of the questions right...how many did you get right?

This was my day, how was yours?

This morning was a bit crazy...had orders to package up for the mail, and process some invoice payments that arrived, then rush to get ready for work and run out the door. Plus I had to answer the helpline all morning, but it didn't ring even once...in the past the helpline has rung only once but that one call was while I was in the shower, of course!

Long debrief at work since it was the first day since vacation, then process the donations, finish the newsletter and email it to the printer. Downloaded 214 email messages, at least 3/4 of which were junkmail. But I did discover that 6 people had made donations via the website in the last week, which was great. Answered emails. Took the mail to the post office and the deposits to the bank. The post office was jammed, with the line for the counter reaching to the door. Luckily everything I needed to do could be done on the APC, so instead of waiting for 30 people I only waited for 2. We checked the "expiration" dates on all the donated car seats we had in stock, and 4 of the 9 had "expired" so we'll pass those along to the Salvation Army. One of the "expired" car seats had never been used, which sucks that we had to give it away.

Got some sweet tea at Wendy's, which was better than I expected. Ride home was only 40 minutes to travel 25 miles, which is great for the time of day. The dogs crossed their legs and held it in until I got home, which makes me happy. I popped a Bertolli Oven Bake Meal (Chicken Parmigiana) into a skillet (instead of the 45 minutes in the oven) and added a little leftover steak b/c the chicken chunks were very small. I didn't like the sauce on this one...so I won't buy that one again. Ick.

Vacation's almost over

I've had a nice relaxing Christmas vacation. Work starts again on Monday and I'm not feeling enthusiastic. Isn't it funny how you get tired and lazy on vacation sometimes instead of getting recharged?

We watched the next-to-last episode of Stargate Atlantis today...it was pretty good. It was a creative plot, the filming techniques were fun. Too bad this bit of creativity wasn't included earlier.

We watched the episode "200" of Stargate SG-1 the other night. I'm just hoping that the scene where they have the "younger, edgier" version isn't what Stargate Universe turns out to be!

Some Pithy Title

As Hurricane Gustav heads for Louisiana, the National Guard are out "patrolling" Bourbon Street... here you see them "patrolling" at Larry Flynn's Hustler Club. Yeah, right.

In local news, the sunset tonight was beautiful...from the horizon upward: gold, peach, pink, lavendar, blue. Gorgeous.

Floorplan envy

I like this house's elevation, and most of the floor plan...just needs a few modifications to be pretty darn perfect. Plus, who doesn't need 6,963 square feet of living space? Anyone have spare change in their pocket to pay for me to build this lovely?

What would the floorplan of your dream mansion look like?

Quick baking

Last night I actually planned dinner far enough in advance that I could bake loaves of bread and yellow cupcakes for dessert. The bread is a really nice boxed mix that you add seltzer water (or beer) to, stir, and bake for 50 minutes. Done! Which is just enough time to bake two sheets of cupcakes too (24).
Given that most (all?) cupcake pans are multiples of 6, why on EARTH, I ask you, would the Reynolds company decide that baking cups should come in a package of 50? Am I supposed to only mess up two? Am I supposed to bake a sheet of 2? Or am I supposed to rotate them until (after 6 packages of papers) I have a full pan of 12 leftovers?

Enquiring minds want to know.

I have it good

As much as I may feel like whining right now, I won't.... because I have it good, compared to the bloggers I frequent:

1. I don't have marijuna smoke invading my apartment (1.5 - I don't live in an apartment). Nor do I have to get my kids immunized at the health department (or anywhere else) b/c I have no insurance.
2. I'm not feeling blue from empty nest syndrome because my youngest just went off to college.
3. I'm not coping with a new wake-up time and a kid who cries everyday on her way into kindergarten.
4. I don't have an energetic kid making himself bleed by being rambunctious.
5. I'm not feeling blue b/c kids grow up so fast.
6. I didn't get a sunburn even when wearing sunscreen.
7. I'm not pregnant with hyperemesis that is interfering with all of life.
8. I'm not coping with a brand-new untrained lovely energetic puppy (because the previous dog was tragically killed by a car just a week ago).
9. I'm not helping my teen daughter raise her premature baby.
10. I don't have to deal with a visiting mother who wants to wash and iron everything in sight.

Nope, I have it good: Mike has a good job that he likes a little bit, I can stay home and finish this phd, and I have a beautiful dog to sleep at my feet all day. So even though I only have 2 months and 2 weeks and 1 day to get the phd done, AND the SciFi channel is cancelling Stargate Atlantis and starting Stargate Universe ("keep those elements that have made the franchise a success, such as adventure and humor, while breaking new ground in the relationships between mostly young and desperate explorers, thrust together and far from home"..ummm..yeah...Star Trek Voyager with teens perhaps? a space opera, perhaps?), it may not GET any better than that. So, I guess I'll just have a happy [non]birthday or else!

Musical Flashback

Don't know exactly how this came to mind today, but perhaps triggered by a post from The Llama Butchers. I loved this song "I Don't Want To Fall In Love" by Jane Child when it was on the radio back in the college days of the early 1990s.

I also liked her hair and her jewelry.

You can see more of her hair in this video:

When a friend of mine saw the album cover, with Jane's nose ring connected to her ear, my friend asked "How does she turn her head?" This was the source of many belly laughs for years.

What were you listening to in the early 1990s?

Western Kansas is off the list

Today I was thinking that maybe western Kansas would be an interesting place to move to. Alas, no. There are no cities there. The biggest town is "Garden City". If you go to Monster.com to see what jobs there are in Kansas, they are mostly in Wichita. Or they are strange jobs like "Beef Fabrication Supervisor" (I did not want to know that beef can be fabricated) or "Refinery Operator Trainees" (El Dorado, KS) where the degrees they are looking for include "AS degree preferred in Process Plant Technology, Power Plant Technology, Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry, Business Administration" yet the functional capacity says "Must be able to work in high noise environments, tolerate exposure to extreme weather conditions, work safely around rotating equipment, climb towers of 100 ft. or greater, climb, stoop, bend, crawl, grasp, hold objects and stand or sit for extended periods of time, lift and carry fifty pounds." Not sure why I need an Associates in CS to do all that labor ... especially the part about climbing towers of 100 feet orgreater.... especially if climbing is done in extreme weather conditions.... especially if climbing is done while carrying 50 pounds of rotating equipment.

Cleaning out the camera

My car recently hit a palindrome mile marker:
I was doing the speed limit, and this convoy of idiot dumptrucks passed me one at a time. The first three have painted on the back "Do Not Push". I hate that. THEY tailgate and drive horribly, but we're supposed to be nice to them. Uh-huh.
"Obey Speed Limits" ... I was thinking this would be a cute image for sexual integrity - remind people not to go too fast.
You may recall that my parent's basement had a flood (discovered by having a bat in the house). Here's the tile that my sister installed for them to replace the carpet. It was a LOT of work and she did a great job.

God's beauty in nature

The full moon last night was beautiful. I discovered that my camera has a setting for night time pictures. I still had to enhance the photo with software, but I think its beautiful.

I recently saw this cloud. Tell me what you see. I see a seahorse, or a an ascended Ancient. Leave me a comment.
Same photo with "One Step Photo Fix". Brings out some nice details. Do you see something different in this format as opposed to the natural view above?

This and that

Frances Allen, the first woman to receive the ACM Turing Award, was interviewed in the recent newsletter of the ACM-W (PDF). I've blogged about Fran before here and here and here.

Yesterday I ran some errands: returned stuff to IKEA, bought different stuff at IKEA, went to the post office, delivered a Mary Kay order, went to the bank, returned Terabyte's x-rays to the vet along with the report from the specialist, and picked up Cassie to dog-sit for a while. It was much cooler yesterday, thank goodness. Today I need to fold and staple 100 booklets that were ordered yesterday so that I can get them in the mail. And I need to decide what data set I'm going to use for my phd research...I had been working on one direction, now i'm contemplating a direction change.