Pyramid of Egregiousness | Name It. Change It.

Pyramid of Egregiousness | Name It. Change It.

Apropos of nothing

Image via WikipediaWhich must be something like east of the sun.
My son came home from camp with a duffel full of mysteries.
Like where were his fins?
How did his soap return unscathed for the second year running?
And what happened to the other 19 socks?
This kid went to camp with ten pairs and came home with a single sock
"I have issues with socks," he explained.
There was some childhood trauma I was unaware of?
The sock industry gave money to Tom Emmer's campaign?
Who knows?  Who cares?
He came home tall, happy, handsome, 16 pounds lighter, he learned to water ski, and I've got a bar of soap he can use for the third year in a row. 

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Back in the MacSaddle again

Ze cast? She is off.
Seventeen days ago, I tripped and fell, hard; skinning lip, nose, knees, and breaking nose and wrist.
Fourteen days ago, I had surgery on the wrist, which I gather was really broken.

I didn't track the details; not day of fall, day or surgery, or at today's post-op appointment, as I've gotten "vagelly", as one nurse described it.  (Which makes me feel weak, stupid, and worried about an old-lady-falling-down future.)  (I think about how much one injury affected me and marvel at people who recover from multiple insults.)
The good news is the big cast is off and I am typing with two hands.  For someone as attached as I am to keyboarding, my inability to type was harder than my inability to tie, zip, slice, or drive.
So onward, to tai chi and other balance/coordination enhancements.

Noticed - The New Power of Petite Women - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Noticed - The New Power of Petite Women - NYTimes.com

Petite -

Pronunciation: \pə-ˈtēt\

Function: adjective

Etymology: French, feminine of petit

Date: 1784: having a small trim figure —usually used of a woman

Por quoi? We never hear of a petite man. Mai, non.

Only petite women. Because for a woman, the most important attribute is appearance.

Her definition, her value, the content of her character; all secondary.

reBlog from Susan Berkson: Teen Clean Your Room

Image by Adam UXB Smith via Flickr

I found this fascinating quote today:

In a house with a teenager. In other words, at wit's ends. The stepping-on-legos years were tolerable But this is ridiculous. You're not going in there anymore so the kid is going to have to take care of it. June 11.  That's the day we rise up and force those kids to clean their rooms.Susan Berkson, Teen Clean Your Room, Jun 2010

You should read the whole article.

Reduce. Reuse. Rethink.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Tuesday is recycling day in my neck of the woods.
Every household puts out a blue bin for recycling and therein lie a million stories.
If my neighbors knew what can be gleaned from their recycling bins:
Where they shop. What they eat. How they spend.
They'd stop. Dead men tell no tales but recycling bins speak volumes.
Here's the family that drinks non-BgH milk from plastic bottles.
The couple who eat organic beans from cans lined with BPA.
The beer drinkers.
The drinker who stopped.
The self-proclaimed sustainable eater whose bin overflows with packaging from processed foods.
The health-minded young family whose bin sits next to their "Warning. Chemically treated" yard sign.
Who still gets a newspaper. Or two.
Who contributes to the Jewish home for the elderly.
Who clips "Boxtops for education". Who doesn't.
Most remarkable, how the new Trader Joe's has colonized our neighborhood.
From now on, my junk mail is going into a brown paper bag before it hits the bin. The rest of my recyclables -- frankly, I feel smug, although to someone else, no doubt, its a whole different story.

Now they tell us

Image via Wikipedia

In 1998, I wrote:
Kids & Pesticides = 700% more leukemia

We can't print this," said my editor at the Star Tribune, "There are jobs at stake in the lawn care industry."

There were lives at stake.
How many have been hurt in the last 12 years? How many lost? The article ran in CityPages. And the pesticides went on.
Pesticides are just one of tens of thousands of toxic chemicals doing us harm. Poisoning us.
Tomorrow the President's Cancer Panel ("The Mount Everest of medical mainstream" releases a report singing that same tune.
Who will listen? Will anything change?
Of course, industry and their mouthpieces like the American Council on Science and Health will throw everything they've got at this.
But the evidence is in.
Babies are polluted in the womb.