Aimee Valle

Love Scale

2006-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

For my Adult Development homework I had to write on a favorite theory from my text. I chose Sternberg's Triangular Theory. I managed to find this scale and I find it particularly interesting. I agree with Sternberg's theory and find it simple yet fascinatingly accurate.

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Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale

What are the components of your love relationship? Intimacy? Passion? Decision/commitment? All three components? Two of them?

To complete the following scale, fill in the blank spaces with the name of one person you love or care about deeply. Then rate your agreement with each of the items by using a nine-point scale in which 1 = "not at all," 5 = "moderately," and 9 = "extremely." Use points in between to indicate these values. Then consult the scoring key at the end of the scale.

Intimacy Component

____1.I am actively supportive of _________'s wellbeing.

____2.I have a warm relationship with _________.

____3.I am able to count on __________ in times of need.

____4._________ is able to count on me in times of need.

____5.I am willing to share myself and my possessions with ___________.

____6.I receive considerable emotional support from ___________.

____7.I give considerable emotional support to _______.

____8.I communicate well with ___________.

____9.I value _________ greatly in my life.

____10.I feel close to ______.

____11.I have a comfortable relationship with ______.

____12.I feel that I really understand ___________.

____13.I feel that _________ really understands me.

____14.I feel that I can really trust ___________.

____15.I share deeply personal information about myself with __________.

Passion Component

____16.Just seeing ________ excites me.

____17.I find myself thinking about __________ frequently during the day.

____18.My relationship with ___________ is very romantic.

____19.I find ________ to be very personally attractive.

____20.I idealize _________.

____21.I cannot imagine another person making me as happy as _______ does.

____22.I would rather be with _________ than with anyone else.

____23.There is nothing more important to me than my relationship with ______.

____24.I especially like physical contact with ______.

____25.There is something almost "magical" about my relationship with ______.

____26.I adore _________.

____27.I cannot imagine life without _________.

____28.My relationship with _________ is passionate.

____29.When I see romantic movies and read romantic books I think of _______.

____30.I fantasize about _______.

Decision/Commitment Component

____31.I know that I care about _________.

____32.I am committed to maintaining my relationship with _________.

____33.Because of my commitment to ________, I would not let other people come between us.

____34.I have confidence in the stability of my relationship with ________.

____35.I could not let anything get in the way of my commitment to ________.

____36.I expect my love for ________ to last for the rest of my life.

____37.I will always feel a strong responsibility for ______.

____38.I view my commitment to ________ as a solid one.

____39.I cannot imagine ending my relationship with _________.

____40.I am certain of my love for ________.

____41.I view my relationship with _________ as permanent.

____42.I view my relationship with ________ as a good decision.

____43.I feel a sense of responsibility toward ________.

____44.I plan to continue my relationship with ______.

____45.Even when ________ is hard to deal with, I remain committed to our relationship.

Scoring Key

Add your ratings for each of the three sections intimacy, passion, and commitment and write the totals in the blanks below. Divide each subscore by 15 to get an average subscale score.

________ intimacy subscore	÷ 15 =	________ intimacy average rating
________ passion subscore	÷ 15 =	________ passion average rating
________ decision/ commitment subscore	÷ 15 =	________ decision/ commitment average rating

An average rating of 5 on a particular subscale indicates a moderate level of the component represented by the subscale; for example, an average rating of 5 on the intimacy subscale indicates a moderate amount of intimacy in the relationship you chose to measure. Following this example further, a higher average rating would indicate a higher level of intimacy, and a lower average rating would indicate a lesser amount of intimacy. Examining your ratings for each of the three subscales will give you an idea of how you perceive your love relationship to be composed of various amounts of intimacy, passion, and commitment.

__________________________

I had to record this

2006-09-22T12:32:00.000-04:00

I'm stunned at the way that Australians stick together and have such a pride for their country, and they should. I envy their authentic pride in such a large, peaceful nation. I hope that someday I can visit the Australia Zoo.

From People:

"Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin was remembered at his public memorial Wednesday for the love he demonstrated "for the two things that ought to matter more to all of us than anything else – his love of his family and his love of his country," said Australia's Prime Minister John Howard.

Howard was among those in attendance in the 5,500-seat capacity "Crocoseum" at Queensland's Australia Zoo for the one-hour ceremony. Irwin, 44, died Sept. 4 from the barb of a stingray while he was filming on the Great Barrier Reef.

Also paying tribute were Russell Crowe, Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz, Hugh Jackman, Kevin Costner, Kelly Ripa and Larry King and Australian country singer John Williamson, who sang one of Irwin's favorite songs, "True Blue."

But it was the composed 8-year-old Bindi Irwin who best represented the spirit of the event. With her mother Terri holding Bindi's toddler brother Bob, Bindi read her words to the crowd, running her tiny finger across the paper as she went along.

"My daddy was my hero," she said. "He was always there for me when I needed him. He listened to me and taught me so many things, but most of all, he was fun. I know that Daddy had an important job. He was working to change the world so everyone would love wildlife like he did.

"I don't want Daddy's passion to ever end. I want to help endangered wildlife just like he did. I have the best daddy in the whole world, and I will miss him every day. When I see a crocodile I will always think of him, and I know that Daddy made this zoo so everyone could come and learn to love all the animals. Daddy made this place his whole life, and now it's our turn to help Daddy."

When Bindi finished, she wrapped her right arm around her mother's neck as a visibly upset Terri held tightly onto Bob. Bindi finished by taking center stage and feeding elephants that were parading around the croc pool.

Crowe, in a videotaped message from New York, said, "We've all lost a friend. We've all lost a champion, and we're going to take some time to adjust to that." Addressing the late Irwin, he said, "As humble as you always were, you will still be pleased to know that the world sends its love and that people all over this planet have been grieving."

Diaz, also in a video presentation, said that America was "just taken by him … in awe of his energy and how he actually went about putting himself forward. Every kid was in love with the idea of being able to be him."

In a separate video, Timberlake (who had visited the Australia Zoo with Diaz in 2004) said, "To Terri and Bindi and Bob and Steve's family and friends, I may have only really spent a day with you guys, but it was a day I'll never forget, and I'll never forget what I learned just by being around Steve."

Added Steve's father, Bob Irwin, 66, "Please do not grieve for Steve, he's at peace now. Grieve for the animals. They have lost the best friend they ever had, and so have I."

After the service, Bob Irwin told reporters, "I was coping fairly well until John sang that song, and then I fell apart. Steve really loved that song. He was a true blue Aussie and a really good bloke."

UK Mice are Getting Ready for Spring Break Early

2006-09-21T07:33:00.001-04:00

Scientists develop a sunless tan

Scientists have given mice a tan without exposing them to the sun.

They have developed a cream, which has not yet been tested on humans, that switches on the tanning machinery in skin cells.

The breakthrough also raises the prospect of a new way to protect fair-skinned people from skin cancer caused by exposure to sunlight.

The study, by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital Boston, is published in Nature.

It is important to point out that a tan-inducing cream alone is unlikely to be enough to protect those with fair skin from sunburn or to prevent skin cancer
Hazel Nunn

The cream contains a small molecule that essentially mimics the process that occurs when skin cells are struck by ultraviolet light from the sun.

It is thought people with fair skin and red hair cannot tan properly because of a defect in a pouch-like receptor called MC1R on the surface of the pigment-producing melanocyte skin cells.

This leads to reduced production of a chemical called cAMP, which stimulates the melanocytes to produce pigment.

As a result, fair-skinned people tend to burn, rather than tan in the sun, increasing the risk of DNA damage to skin cells which can lead to cancer.

The World Health Organization has estimated that as many as 60,000 people a year worldwide die from skin cancer as a result of too much exposure to the sun.

Fair Skinned Mice

The researchers genetically engineered fair-skinned, red-haired mice who did not tan when exposed to low levels of UV radiation, but did burn when the dose was cranked up.

They then treated the skin of the animals with a compound known to increase cAMP levels.

The compound, forskolin, is derived from the root of the forskohli plant found in India.

The mice turned dark, proving that melanocytes in redheads can make pigment if appropriately stimulated.

Further experiments showed that this sunless tanning process was virtually indistinguishable from that in dark-haired mice that tan naturally.

The researchers also found that the tans acquired through forskolin treatment protected the skin against cancer caused by exposure to UV light.

Lead researcher Dr David Fisher said it was not yet clear whether forskolin would penetrate deeply enough in human skin to activate melanocytes.

However, he said: "These studies suggest that a drug-induced 'rescue' of the tanning mechanism may correspondingly rescue at least some aspect of skin cancer protection.

"Such sunless tanning may also dissuade sun-seeking behaviours, which undoubtedly contribute significantly to high skin cancer incidence."

Hazel Nunn, cancer information officer at the charity Cancer Research UK, said the study gave new insights into why fair-skinned people rarely tan.

She said: "We welcome this advance in our understanding of the tanning process but it is important to point out that a tan-inducing cream alone is unlikely to be enough to protect those with fair skin from sunburn or to prevent skin cancer.

"A UV-induced tan only provides protection equivalent to that of sunscreen with SPF4."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/5359524.stm

Published: 2006/09/20 23:05:58 GMT

Movies Not to be Missed

2006-09-17T13:19:00.000-04:00

Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I love movies. I don't like going to the movies, but I love watching a good movie. While I can go for long dry spells without watching tv or films, every once in a while, without fail I get excited about movies again.

Usually it begins with a visit to IMDB where I check out the "Coming Soon" section. If a particular favorite actor is in a movie, or it has a theme that interests me I read more about it. Then I go to find trailers. Without a doubt, Apple's Quicktime trailers are the best.

Today I was looking ahead to see what's in store for this holiday season. When I look for movies, I usually look for one that has two actors that I favor in it. If it has just one, I have a good chance of liking it, but if it has two, then I am almost certain to really love it.

The first one that caught my eye, Little Children, stars Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly. The premise seems dull, but I'm certain the actors will make it good. Here's a trailer.

The Prestige gives me a chill after seeing the trailer. I'm still not totally sure what the trick is, but it'll be awesome. Starring Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine, and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla! I love David Bowie, I love Nikola Tesla- this movie could be perfect.

I really cannot stand Mel Gibson. I want to see Apocalypto despite the fact that he directed it and it stars nobody I've ever heard of. There are exceptions to the rules, and even though I hate MG, I respect the fact that he can direct. This film will be huge just like The Passion and Braveheart. The difference here is that I'm really interested in history of the Mayan empire. Just watch the trailer.

What can be said about The Holiday? It looks like a romantic comedy. Despite that, it has Jude Law, Kate Winslet, and Jack Black. Too many pro's for me not to add it to the list.

I'm gonna go on a hunch that Breaking and Entering will also be excellent although it has only one of my favorite actors, again Jude Law. We will see.

I don't want to go too much deeper into the future, because just when I begin to look forward to an upcoming movie, something happens and it gets canned. I'm certain this one is coming about for sure, so last on my list is Charlotte's Web. Watching the trailer, I instantly recalled reading the book as a child and crying at the end. This is going to be so much better than that cartoon from 1973.
Julia Roberts has the perfect voice of Charlotte, and Dakota Fanning is always great, even in crap movies like War of the Worlds. Every other voice is some amazing actor. Robert Redford, John Cleese, Kathy Bates...I love a good family film and this is one I look forward owning.

The Week in Review

2006-09-17T02:11:00.000-04:00

I had a difficult time this week starting my new course. It seemed a bit overwhelming. I got used to the easy format of my first class, and so this was a bit of a wake up call for me. I handled it, and I think I'm going to do fine. I put several hours into my posts as opposed to several minutes for the last course. I can already see that time management is going to be very important for me.

I've added several links to the right sidebar. Pawstar is a shop that sells handmade cosplay items such as fox or kitty-eared hats, arm & leg-warmers, and stand-alone ears on a headband. The results look excellent. NiceCupofTeaAndASitDown.com is a lovely English site about tea and biscuits and cakes. I know it sounds dry, but it's not. I Want One of Those is another shopping site that offers interesting tech toys and goodies.

I made my very first pixel art today, in the form of a little blinkie "Aimee ♥ Alfred".

I think it's a darling first attempt, and I have used it in my template as you can see on the right. Obviously I'll need more practice when I can find the time.

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I stumbled upon a site on neuroscience and neurotheology while looking for something quite different. I never did find what I was looking for, but I'd like to reproduce a part of this interesting site instead.

Just for the record, I was searching for something that's been happening to me lately. I can describe it as a micro-blackout of only about one second per episode. I compare it to a battery terminal that gets jostled and loses its direct connection for a second, almost a "shorting out" sensation. Along with it, I have no other symptoms except perhaps extreme tiredness. I'm not sure if the two things are related because I've had bouts of extreme tiredness before this shorting out began.

Now on to the articles. Please link directly to the source for references, and enjoy.

From Innerworlds:

SEX AND STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

We're not really going to be talking about sex here. We're going to look at the states of consciousness (or states for short) in which people want sex. In a culture where people are expected to ignore the possibility of sex with most potential partners, we have to expect that sexual behavior won't give us much insight into sexual states. We have to focus on sexual feelings, not behavior.

In academic studies, this view has explored by Swartz (1993) with reference to the difference in the states of consciousness experienced by men and women, and by Davidson (1980), more generally.

Although it's hard for some people to believe, different individuals experience sexual desire with very different intensities. Its not that some people have better controls, its that some have more to control. Nobody can choose how horny they are. While its possible to suppress sexual interest when it appears, nobody can choose how often it happens. There are people who try to suppress all of their sexuality, for example. Some monks and nuns, to name only one such group. They can often stop their sexual thoughts and feelings before they have really formed. But even they cannot choose how often they will have to do it. Mohandas Gandhi, who choose the path of total celibacy, felt he needed to put himself to the test even after decades of practice.

One contemporary spiritual teacher, Paul Lowe, often tells of how he was so horny that sex was simply never out of his mind, but so shy with women that he did not have the courage to ask them to make love with him. The dilemma was so bad that he resolved to kill himself (Lowe, 1988). Eventually, he broke through without a suicide attempt, and began to have the relationships he needed.

Was he just being self-indulgent in feeling his need to be so great? No. He was simply at the extreme ends of two spectrums at once. One was low-self esteem. He thought women would never want him. The other was the spectrum of sexual interest. Sexuality, as its called in clinical parlance. He was experiencing his sexuality almost constantly.

The spectrum runs from a total disinterest in sex, called hyposexuality, to the burning, unrelenting, desire that never lets up, called hypersexuality. Most people, of course, fall somewhere in the middle. And again, I want to emphasize, its not a matter of choice.

Hyposexual individuals often don't have an easy time in life. They are still fully capable of feeling romantic love, often quite deeply. They are liable to think that sex is a crude thing, and that ‘real love' should not depend on sex. After all, they can live without it, and still be deeply romantic, so to them, it can look like sex isn't really an important part of a relationship. When they do begin a romance, they find that they are either having more sex than they want to, or imposing a degree of celibacy on their sexually normal partners. This doesn't make for fulfilling relationships.

Hypersexual people also find life challenging, too. Their unrelenting needs can disturb a relationship when they have a relationship, and make them unattractively needy when they don't.

In Woody Allen's film, Manhattan, there is a scene where he is talking to his therapist saying "we almost never have sex. It only happens two or three times a week." Then the film cuts to his partner talking to her therapist saying "we're always having sex. Its two or three times per week!" When two people with differing levels of interest in sex have a relationship, they may end up with each thinking that the other really should change. Each might think that the other is wrong, and believe themselves to be normal. ‘Something is wrong with her, she never really wants to have sex.' "Doesn't he find me attractive anymore?' The hyposexual one, already having sex more often than they would choose freely, doesn't do anything to make it happen more often. Their partner begins to wonder why they are always the one to initiate sex.

The hypersexual person is not being self-indulgent. The hyposexual person is not just ‘repressed.' Actually, there is no such thing as a right level of interest. Its different for different people, and nobody can change their obsession or indifference about sex just by wanting it to be different. It can change, as we will see, but not by working on sexuality itself. No amount of ‘sensuality training seminars' will make sex exciting for a hyposexual person. And no amount of talk therapy will put sex ‘into proper perspective' for those who are hypersexual.

Sexual arousal is an altered state of consciousness, but it's a normal, healthy altered state. The degree of interest in sex is directly related to how much time a person spends in non-ordinary states of consciousness.

One study (Waxman, 1975) found that temporal lobe epileptics (who go into altered states of consciousness, often very intense ones, during their seizures) were much more likely to be hyposexual than others. The normal states of consciousness for these people are different from those of others. They often have lower self-esteem. They tend to be irritable. They have a burning desire to express themselves that comes out through writing diaries and journals or in doing art, sometimes obsessively. They usually have a preoccupation with spirituality, philosophy, and religion.

I believe that what's happening with these people is that they are spending so much of their time in altered states that their consciousness isn't available to the sexual ones. Its already engaged with states that rule it out. Probably there are many states of consciousness that inhibit sexual interest. Others seem to invoke it.

One researcher (Miller, 1986) has even gone so far as to suggest that changes in sexual behavior should be seen as a possible sign of brain injury.

Why should altered states of consciousness rule out feeling sexual so often?

Altered states are almost always either positive or negative. The positive ones range from a mild mania to total bliss. Fear is the most common emotion in the negative ones, and can include anything from mild anxiety to stark terror. When a person is filled with a sense of well-being, a lack of sex won't won't make them feel that anything is wrong. If a person is carrying that foreboding feeling that something is wrong and/or the sense that they're in some kind of danger, sex isn't going to make them feel better. For both types of people, there won't be any sense that sex is a real need.

Others who are prone to altered states have a different pattern for both sexuality and their experiences of non-normal states. For these people, altered states are not an ongoing thing.

They experience altered states once in a while. While they are having an experience, they, like the group that's having them all the time, are not likely to feel sexual. However, when they are not having an experience, they will still have a sensitive trigger for changes in state.

This group will notice the experience, whatever it is, more pointedly than the first. So like the hyposexual ones, hypersexual people often find spirituality compelling.

These people will have exercise the parts of the brain that change their state, giving them more sensitive triggers. They will be more likely to alter their state towards another normal one in their ordinary range, instead of going into non-ordinary states,

For a physically healthy and normal person, one of the most likely directions for consciousness to shift is towards sex. If the trigger is sensitive enough, the person might be very horny anytime they are not having an experience of an altered state. They might labeled as a nymphomaniac, or as having satyriasis (the male equivalent), as though they were being influenced by sex rather than their consciousness.

The evidence that sexuality relates to our states of consciousness is overwhelming.

The temporal lobes are the portions of the brain that manage our states of consciousness. Rhesus monkeys which have had their temporal lobes removed often demonstrated hypersexuality, including homosexual and solitary sexual behavior (Kluver, 1958).

Hypersexuality has been seen in people with lesions in their frontal and temporal lobes (Huws, 1991), and has been observed in association with limbic seizures (Andy, 1991 & Persinger, 1994).

Most TLE seizures begin in the amygdala, an emotional control area (Gloor, 1992), which explains why they have such intense emotions accompanying them. The amygdala has a large number of sexual phenomena associated with it. One of the more interesting is the observation that gay men have more connections between the amygdala on each side of the brain than straight men.

Just as importantly, the amygdala manages our emotions and helps to manage our states of consciousness.

To state a rough rule of thumb, those who spend all their time in altered states tend to be the hyposexual ones, while those who go back and forth tend to be the hypersexual ones.

One behavior worth looking at is voluntary celibacy. The ordained priest, monk, or nun who has chosen not to have sex at all. Ever. Why would someone make such a choice? Because they have positive altered state experiences, and they give them a religious interpretation. Their joy, they believe, is a gift from God.

While they are actually experiencing life as a gift from God, the idea of looking for pleasure or fulfillment in sex or romance seems just stupid. The trouble with this type of celibacy is that it usually depends on regular, positive, religious experiences. When these are absent, or stop happening for whatever reason, the vow that was easily kept at ordination becomes a burdensome travail later on (Slawson, 1973). When these experiences are kindled through prayer, meditation, or contemplative exercises, they are likely to stop if the practice stops. At that point, the change from regular altered states to occasional ones begins, and the person is likely to change from hypo-to-hyper in their sexuality. They might think that God was testing them, or that Satan was trying to bring about their downfall through temptations to ‘the pleasures of the flesh.'

If their altered states are appearing as a result of a brain difference, like a tumor, birth defect, head injury, or a sclerosis, then these states are much more likely to endure, and celibacy might be quite natural for such people. Some of the brain differences in these people could be quite minute, and might not create any other traits worth mentioning.

The brain comes in two varieties: male and female. They differ in many small ways, but there is a pattern to these differences. The male brain is specialized for doing one thing at a time, and the female brain is more truly a ‘multitasking environment.' Take an average man (if you can find one) and an average woman (if you can find one). Give them both a PET scan. Have them each do something, the same thing, during their PET session, and then look at the brain activity. The woman's brain will almost always show more active regions than the man's brain will. Women ‘cross-reference' things through more parts of their brain than men do, most importantly the emotional control centers in the limbic system (Moir, 1991). Women can often see the subtler implications of things more readily than men can. Because the process involves the whole brain, and isn't localized or stronger in its language centers, women can often find it more difficult than men to put their perceptions into words. Women are more likely/able to make associations than men. While many of these associations might be irrelevant to anything practical, there will usually be something meaningful that an ‘average' man might miss. The sexual regions of the brain are more likely to be recruited into the seizure in women than men. The point is that the involvement of sexuality in enhanced TL sensitivity is different for men and women.

In fact, the range of epileptic phenomena in wider for women than men. For example, women may have orgasms during TLE seizures, while men do not.

Some readers might object to the way we are using the terms normal, average, typical, and so forth. Many object to what are called ‘sweeping generalizations'. The intention here is to state ‘rules of thumb'. Rules with so many exceptions that they really can't be called rules at all. These are not rules for obedience, either. They are more like descriptive rules of grammar, which describes how people are probably going to speak, not how they actually speak. I'll bet that there are as few people who ‘typify' their genders as there are who speak with perfect grammar. We have to make generalizations if we want to see the patterns in human behavior and consciousness. After that, it is much easier to see what's really happening when a specific person is different from those around them. For many of those who experience themselves as different, their differences can be the source of alienation, low-self extreme, and can hinder the growth of ordinary relating skills. To forbid generalizations is to cut off a potential source of healing for these people. Problems only come up when we forget that our general statements, something like working hypotheses, aren't complete.

Finally, we should look at how hypersexual and hyposexual people can respond to their dilemmas.

The hyposexual person who wants to change should look at the chance that their condition might have to do with epilepsy, and that it might respond to an antiepileptic medication. Many psychiatrists miss the proper diagnoses for the types of epilepsy that can create hyposexuality. An epileptologist is a good place to look for a second opinion.

I know of one case where a woman never experienced sexual desire until she became a massage therapist, and began spending several hours a day doing massage. She had been in an ongoing state of fear for almost 25 years. After doing massage for just a few months, she found that her anxiety had dropped to the point where she found herself feeling horny for the first time. At age 41.

The hypersexual person has fewer options. They, also might respond to antiepileptic medications, but stopping the altered state experience that lie behind their intense sexual interest usually has little appeal. Many people who have contacted me about this issue have said that they feel a stronger need to allow the other states than to lower their sexual energy.

I know of a couple of cases where women have taken up Yoga practice only to find that they became overwhelmed by sexual desire for the first few months of their practice. Other women, with more experience in Yoga, found that their desire had become so low that they almost didn't care if they had sex or not.

This may sound good to some readers, but one such case includes a woman yogi hearing her husband tell her that he wanted her permission to sleep with other women, and that if she didn't give it, she was about to become a single mother. He also bluntly refused to leave his kids and settle for 15 years of paying child support and weekend visits.

Some months earlier, she had told me that one of her goals was to "sublimate" her sexuality through yoga. I asked her how her husband felt about this, and she said that was his problem.

But when he faced his problem, it turned out to be hers as well.

Because hypersexuality seems to rely on going in and out of altered states. One simple measure for these states is to look at how often the person has simple, comon altered state experiences. These include deja vu, and the feeling that there is someone standing behind you, but when you turn to look, you find nobody is there ("The Sensed Presence"). There is also "Jamis vu", the sensation that everything is strange, unfamiliar, or a bit alien. There are 'parasthesias'; like the 'pins and needles' or electrical sensations that run through the body, or the chills that run up one's spine when listening to music or that might fill one's body during orgasm. Then there are vestibular sensations, like vertigo, or the sensation that the bed is moving while you are falling asleep. There is also the experience of sudden bursts of intense emotion.

If a person is hypersexual, they may also be prone to these things, or were prone once in their lives.

This suggests a simple and easy response. When they enter a sexual state in moments when their culture or life circumstance doesn't allow, they should change their state. While a 'shot of whiskey' may have the desired effect for some, a more universal approach seems to be cognitive and emotional training.

And the most popular approach to that, across the world and through human history has been spirituality. Spiritual practices such as yoga, meditation

Because sexual desire seems to associate with activation of the left caudate nucleus (deep) in conjunction with the left temporal lobe (surface), spiritual practices that 'task' the left hemisphere so as to activate other structures deep in the left hemisphere might easily provide cognitive alternatives. Choices that can be made right in the moment.

Language centers are on the left, and spiritual practices that rely on it offer one alternative. Many religions offer reciting prayers as an efecive way to avert 'temptations of the flesh'. Mantra practive- repeating short invocations over and over- is found all through the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

I once spoke to a "Hare Krisna" Devotee, who told me a story about how he had gone to a woman's home and how she had begun to seduce him, being quite forward with her hands and mouth. He began to become aroused, and remembered his vows. First, in his mind, he began to chant Hare Krishna. In spite of his long sexual deprivation and possibly hypersexual past (he had been a pornography addict), he not only 'dropped' his desire, but had an episode of bliss.

He started chanting aloud, and the woman, he said, threw him out.

He said he felt like he'd been chanting the whole day - "totally blissed out". The high levels of left-limbic activation brought on by sex were 'shunted over' to the language centers on the left surface, which long practice with Hindu chanting had connected to the left amygdala (associated with bliss, ecstacy, and other positive emotions).

It's more likely that (Murphy, 2001) his chanting resulted in a supression of other states that demand activation of large portions of the left temporal lobes and limbic system.

When he wanted to supress sexual desire, he had only to "Chant Hare Krisna and be happy". The same held true for him with anger or his desire for tobacco.

Other left-hemispheric practices include Yoga, Sufi dancing, and service to others. Positive socialization involves having other people around and having conversations, both left-hemispheric 'tasks'.

In principle, solitude, which seems to task the right hemisphere, might turn out to make bursts of sexual desire more likely. The appearance of a trigger, such as an attractive person, or even just a picture of one, could trigger a jolt of left hemishperic activity. It's relative quiet after a period of solitude leaves it open for the task. No need to clear one's mind at that time. The left hemisphere is so available that sexual desire can recruit is many pathways through several structures almost instantly, and supress competing tasks more readily.

Choosing activities that engage many people might easily serve to lessen the intensity and frequency of true hypersexual episodes, most importantly the kind that facilitate high-risk sexual behaviors. A day spent with other people, at work or socially, might easily lessen the chances for risky behavior in the evening. Of course, it warrants emperical study.

Prayer, talking to the god of one's belief, can also re-task the left hemisphere away from sexual desire, being both social (self-and-other) and linguistic.

These are all intervention techniques, but they would need practice before the states they create are available at will.

The most important technique will probably prove to be empowerment training that teaches people how to meet their need in a positive way, instead of fending them off.

The most popular and widespread approach to human psychology throughout it's history has been religion, however backward it's beliefs may often appear. It's not surprising that it's traditional practices, when seen as approaches to 'cognitive and emotional managment', emerge as worthwhile. Not to say that modern science can't do better - anticonvulsant medications can treat hypersexuality in many cases, but when these are not available or practical, a return to traditional religious approaches seems much more practical than surrender to high-risk behavior.

Studies among those who engange in high-risk sexual behavior are in order to test the various hypotheses offered here. Nevertheless, if validated, they might also find that patterns of limbic experiences (as evidenced through questionairres) might indicate specific spiritual techniques for specific individuals.

Both hyper- and hypo- sexuality offer severe challenges, and in spite of the cultural biases that continue to surround them. Insights that take their neural bases into account are bound to offer more effective choices when put into practice than the techniques that appear when they are regarded as either addictions or psychiatric cases. If they are instances of human consciousness at it's extremes, then they can be classified as spiritual dilemmas as much as behavioral problems.

THE SENSED PRESENCE AND ROMANTIC LOVE

Love is an example of the self/other relationship. Even though it's really about ourselves, we experience it as being to do with another person. To see more deeply into it, we need to look at the experience of 'the other' more deeply.

There hasn't been a lot of research on the subject. There are many studies that have yielded interesting statistics about how being in love affects academic performance, how it affects the immune system, how it influences the perceived quality of life, and a range of other findings. But the experience itself remains elusive, especially in terms of neurology.

There is one line of research that suggests something about the nature of love, and it seems that love is only instance of a larger group of experiences: relating to the 'other'. After looking at the evidence, it seems to me that the 'other' is one's self.

I'm thinking of some research into an experience called "The Sensed Presence." Its that feeling people get, usually at night, where they feel that there is someone or something in the room with them, an 'energy' or a 'presence' perhaps. They might feel simply that they are 'not alone' or that they're 'being watched.' There is an indefinable feeling that there is an 'other' of some kind in the room with them.

To understand this, we need to look at the self, and not the other.

To start, we need to see that the self is more than our ordinary experience shows us. Even in our most quiet moments, when we are still, it can be very hard to see our 'self'. Buddhism teaches that there is no such thing. If they're right, then we're on a wild goose chase in looking for it. Other religions say that the self is God. If these teachings are right, then our self is so elevated that we may have no hope of ever understanding it.

Fortunately, brain science is a bit more down-to-earth than religion. There, we have a chance of understanding what the self is, even though the information won't tell us the whole story.

The latest 'teachings' from neuroscience tell us that we actually have two selves, one on each side of the brain. And they're specialized. Like anything else in the brain, they each have specific jobs to do. One of them, on the left, is the one that experiences things through language. It's very socialized. Language is mostly a tool for relating to other people, so the 'linguistic' self is very conscious of where it stands with others. Its very sensitive to its social rank, as its reflected in the words of others. A simple string of words from another, like: 'you're fired' or 'I love you', can have an amazing impact on the person hearing them. They'll feel that 'they' are affected by these words. And they, as social beings, have been. When we lose a job, our social rank is reduced. When we start a new relationship, or we can feel that we are secure in a present one, our social rank is raised a bit.

The other side of the brain, on the right, also has a self. It experiences the world in non-verbal ways. Its more introspective. Its silent. Its affected by music, art, pictures, and our perceptions of how others feel, rather than what others say. Its more likely to manifest in situations where we aren't able to take the need of others into account. Its usually subordinate; operating underneath the left hemispheric one. It takes this role because the linguistic self is actively interpreting the world and our experiences with words all the time. For most people, this keeps the silent self hidden, so that it operates without out knowing about it consciously. In many ways, the 'conscious' self is the one on the left, with only intermittent input from the one on the right.

The Sensed Presence experience occurs when our two senses of self fall out of phase with one another. The subordinate sense of self is experienced directly by the dominant, linguistic one. Because we can't have two senses of self, the intruding silent sense of self is experienced as an external presence, and 'felt' to be happening outside one's self.

I believe that the sensed presence also happens when we relate to other people. Some presences mean threats, while others can mean support, comfort or safety. We use our experiences of past states as a repertoire from which we select the state best suited to arising situations, and presences known from the past are projected onto presences encountered in the present.

I want to suggest that we are projecting a part of ourselves onto real people whenever we're relating to them. The presences we experience in other people are the creations of our own minds, externalized and projected onto others. Each separate presence will call up a separate state of consciousness, although the differences between many of these states might be slight. From infancy onwards, we have acquaintances; people who are too socially distant to be called friends, but close enough that we must pay some attention to them. The default settings for relating to acquaintances are derived from our own sense of self while we are with such people in the past. Other people are absolutely unique. Some people catch our attention very sharply. We fall in love with them, or we come to hate their guts. These people are not mere aquaintances. Their presence cuts closer to home. Their words, for whatever reason, affects our self-esteem.

Because we are such an intensely social species, our self esteem is largely a function of what we think our value is in the eyes of others. Most of the time, people speak to each other in ways that reflect their respect, or lack of it. Respect has a lot to do with social standing and rank. For the most part, we respect ourselves when we feel respected by those around us, even though it doesn't necessarily have to be that way.

Our self-esteem changes almost constantly. Most of these changes are experienced through our emotions, although it also has a serious impact on the way a person thinks. Our moods can be elevated and depressed through the words of others. Words like ‘you're hired' and ‘you're fired.' Or, ‘I love you' and ‘leave me alone.' Our moods are directly connected to our level of self-esteem in each moment. In normal conditions, our experience of our selves is sensitive to how we are treated and spoken to by others.

Each and every state of consciousness carries its own level of self-esteem. Whether or not one is in a subordinate position in any given situation initiates an appropriate state. The state enables a set of responses that minimize the situation's stress level by fulfilling the expectations of the dominant person in the situation. Each state has its own ways of thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting. Even for the most aware people, its hard to see all these thing happening at once. We live on autopilot, so to speak. If we were to try to make a conscious decision about each way we 'act out' our state of consciousness, we'd crash the system. We have to be on automatic, for the most part, because there are so many controls to adjust for each state.

We want positive states to repeat, and to avoid the negative, unpleasant ones. This creates a tendency to bond with people that feel good to be around. Simple, eh?

Not really. We 'decide' who feels good according to what we choose to project. And we make these choices largely out of habit. It begins in infancy, when we first begin to experience ourselves as individuals.

There has been some research in pre natal psychology that suggests that the fetus experiences its mother's states of consciousness as though they are it's own. Sometime around birth, the newborn begins to experience its own states for the first time. Before birth, the mother gets angry, the fetus experiences the same state, although certainly it will now have very different phenomenological correlates. After birth, when the mother gets angry, the infant no longer experiences it with the same intimacy. The boundaries of the infants new self must be found.

In the womb, the fetus probably didn't distinguish between itself and its mother. She must now be experienced as an external presence. For the first time, the ambient chemical environment in the womb is experienced as its mother's smell. Its mother, now experienced as separate from itself, becomes the source from which all its physical and emotional needs are met, almost without exception.

Many commentators on the experience of romantic love have argued that the experience of early childhood comfort and nurturing provides a template from which later expectations about relationships are drawn. We begin to feel that our lover ought to treat us much as our mothers did. Women, of course, have the additional process of mapping their senses of comforting, loving presences onto men.

In looking for romantic fulfillment, we are looking to find an experience that will change our experience of ourselves. Not by looking for love within ourselves, as so many spiritual teachers suggest, but by allowing a part of our 'self' to manifest through another. When I stop and remember that we're a social species, I cannot help but see it differently.

For some people, or at some times in a person's life, 'true happiness' might be found only outside one's self. Our brains and minds are configured for relating to others in so many ways. Humans have a long childhood compared to other primate species, and most of it is spent relying on others to meet their most basic needs. Children are so engaged with the presence of others that they can usually play with anything and imagine it's alive.

Children imagine their toys have a presence to them, so that a crayon becomes ‘Mr. Crayon'. The Buddhist faithful imagine that a Buddha statue has the presence of the Enlightened One. The disciple sees God in his Guru. And these are projections. In the same way, lovers project their own loving presence onto their romantic partners.

I want to suggest that falling in love is the process of projecting one's right-sided sense of self onto one's beloved.

Because the same pathways that are involved in the maintenance of the right-sided, silent sense of self are also specialized for negative feelings, the maintenance of the romantic illusion is delicate at best. It's easily broken, and rarely lasts for more than a few weeks in most cases and a few years in cases where people feel strongly enough to marry.

People often want to feel really passionate love before starting a relationship. But that kind usually doesn't last. When it fades, very few people escape disappointment of one kind or another. People are angered when their lover turns out to be who they are instead of who they were supposed to be. Sustaining relationships past this point calls for either denial or relationship and communication skills.

I can use a fancy neuro scientific phrase to describe the nature of love (a sustained interhemispheric intrusion), but even I don't enjoy seeing my romantic side reduced to so sterile a set of words.

Like the sensed presence experience, being in love happens when the silent sense of self comes out where linguistic sense of self can see it, except that instead of being sensed as a feeling that one is being watched, its projected directly onto the beloved. In the process, the normal division of other and self is blurred. Lovers speak of losing themselves in the other, or that they can't tell where they end and their lover begins.

So long as one is able to sustain the illusion that one's partner will be the source of fulfillment, the projection continues undisturbed. It's been said that, when it comes to relationships, everybody is looking for a tailor-made fit, even though its an off-the-rack world. Inevitably, something happens to disturb the illusion. The 'interhemispheric intrusion' ends. The honeymoon is over. 'Hemispheric intrusions' are often very brief events. A vision of an angel might last just a few seconds. The first flush of ‘true love' might continue for only weeks or months.

There was a study of the relationship between hemisphericity and self-esteem, and it found that the higher a person's level of right hemispheric 'dominance', the lower their self-esteem. Right hemisphericity means that a person's experience of their self is dominated by their right side. This is the side of the brain that is specialized for both negative feelings and non-verbal ways of processing our experiences. All other conditions being equal, the more intuitive and spontaneous a person is, the lower their self esteem will be. Of course, people compensate in various ways, so that 'all other conditions' usually aren't equal.

When a person is in love, their right hemispheric ‘self' has access to the positive emotions on the left. Love feels good. However, after the experience is over, the person finds themselves more vulnerable to fear and sadness in response to things that threaten their sense of self. Such threats occur almost every moment in our lives. Those whose sense of self is mostly derived from the left side are much less vulnerable. They are better able to feel good about themselves even in the face of verbal assaults, but they are also less likely to fall so deeply in love in the first place.

The typical aftermath of a mystical experience finds the person feeling somewhat shaky. They will avoid those whose ‘energy' tends to ‘bring them down.' In other words, they won't be able to cope well in many social interactions. They may even retreat into solitude, and avoid relating to others as much as they can. They tend to reject the mind-set that supports the opinions of those whose company they don't enjoy. At the same time, there can be an almost obsessive desire to ‘share' their experience with anyone willing to listen. They seek out validation in the eyes of those around them; 'shouting it from the rooftops', making up for the fragmentation their sense of self sustained in their epiphany. They may cling to those whose company they find supportive. Left hemispheric personalities are judged and labeled using such phrases as ‘there are none so blind as those who will not see.' Ideas about karma are invoked to explain how some just ‘aren't ready to hear the truth.'

Someone who is in unrequited love, or is losing a lover they still want to be with, finds themselves in much the same position. They, too, are vulnerable. They also feel that others ‘just don't understand.' Their self esteem falls. They may cling to those who are willing to support them, just like those ‘processing' in the wake of spiritual experiences and awakenings. They may also feel that they are not the same person they were before they experienced their romantic disappointment, just as the religious experient is also a ‘changed' man or woman.

In the Sufi tradition, God is referred to as the beloved, and it preserves many metaphors that convey the idea that separation from God is as painful as separation from whoever one is in love with. Union with God is seen as similar to romantic fulfillment.

I suggest that romantic love is underpinned by the same brain mechanisms that are involved in the experience of God. While a mystic experience is often short and intense, romantic episodes may last a long time. Both of them involve the silent, right-sided self coming out where the left-sided self can see it, along with intense positive feelings.

The after-effects are based on similar neural and psychological mechanisms. The dark night of the soul and the despair of unrequited love are made of the same ‘stuff'.

There is some truth in the sayings that the beloved is God, and that when we love God we are loving ourselves. I and thou are one. The other is the self.

It's a good thing I already forgot all that I learned in Physics...

2006-09-09T11:22:00.000-04:00

NASA Finds Direct Proof of Dark Matter

NASA RELEASE 06-297

For Release: August 21, 2006

Erica Hupp/Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
(Phone: 202/358-1237/1726)

Steve Roy
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
(Phone: 256/544-6535)

Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass.
(Phone: 617/496-7998)

Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The discovery, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, gives direct evidence for the existence of dark matter.

"This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

These observations provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it is stronger on intergalactic scales than predicted by Newton and Einstein, removing the need for dark matter. However, such theories cannot explain the observed effects of this collision.

"A universe that's dominated by dark stuff seems preposterous, so we wanted to test whether there were any basic flaws in our thinking," said Doug Clowe of the University of Arizona at Tucson, and leader of the study. "These results are direct proof that dark matter exists."

In galaxy clusters, the normal matter, like the atoms that make up the stars, planets, and everything on Earth, is primarily in the form of hot gas and stars. The mass of the hot gas between the galaxies is far greater than the mass of the stars in all of the galaxies. This normal matter is bound in the cluster by the gravity of an even greater mass of dark matter. Without dark matter, which is invisible and can only be detected through its gravity, the fast-moving galaxies and the hot gas would quickly fly apart.

The team was granted more than 100 hours on the Chandra telescope to observe the galaxy cluster 1E0657-56. The cluster is also known as the bullet cluster, because it contains a spectacular bullet-shaped cloud of hundred-million-degree gas. The X-ray image shows the bullet shape is due to a wind produced by the high-speed collision of a smaller cluster with a larger one.

In addition to the Chandra observation, the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Magellan optical telescopes were used to determine the location of the mass in the clusters. This was done by measuring the effect of gravitational lensing, where gravity from the clusters distorts light from background galaxies as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.

The hot gas in this collision was slowed by a drag force, similar to air resistance. In contrast, the dark matter was not slowed by the impact, because it does not interact directly with itself or the gas except through gravity. This produced the separation of the dark and normal matter seen in the data. If hot gas was the most massive component in the clusters, as proposed by alternative gravity theories, such a separation would not have been seen. Instead, dark matter is required.

"This is the type of result that future theories will have to take into account," said Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, who was not involved with the study. "As we move forward to understand the true nature of dark matter, this new result will be impossible to ignore."

This result also gives scientists more confidence that the Newtonian gravity familiar on Earth and in the solar system also works on the huge scales of galaxy clusters.

"We've closed this loophole about gravity, and we've come closer than ever to seeing this invisible matter," Clowe said.

These results are being published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass.

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I've been very depressed this past week. I couldn't get out of bed because I was so sad on Friday, so I took the day off work.
I was thinking that the medication for depression would help my seasonal affective disorder too, but it doesn't seem like it is going to.
Hopefully I can pull out of it this week because I am starting a new class and I have work piling up at my job. I really wish I was normal and didn't have to suffer with my mind.

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From How Stuff Works:

Smoking: Not Smart According to research findings released in 2004, smokers and former smokers did not perform as well on tests as nonsmokers. Four hundred sixty-five subjects had taken a test that measured cognitive ability in 1947 at age 11. They took the test again between 2000 and 2004. Based on the results, smoking appeared to cause a one percent drop in cognitive function. A possible explanation for this correlation is that smoking-related lung damage caused less oxygen to reach people's brains.

Intelligence and Adjustment One of the stereotypes surrounding gifted children is that they have trouble fitting in at school. Several scientific studies suggest that the stereotype has a foundation in reality. A Purdue University study of 423 gifted students suggested that they were susceptible to bullying. A 20-year study of gifted children ending in 1940 suggested that the trend of not fitting in continues into adulthood. The study used a test that measured both verbal intelligence and personal adjustment. People who scored above 140 in verbal intelligence generally had lower personal adjustment scores.

Are We All Getting Smarter? For several years, scientists have noticed a general upward trend in the general population's IQ scores. It has seemed that each generation is a little smarter than the one before it. Researchers aren't sure whether improvements in education, nutrition, medical care or society in general are responsible for this trend, which is known as the Flynn effect.

Savant Syndrome People with savant syndrome are often described as geniuses. Savant syndrome is a rare condition that typically affects people who are autistic or have developmental disabilities. People with savant syndrome excel spectacularly at some particular task or skill. The 1988 film "Rain Man" depicted a man with the syndrome. You can learn more about it at the Wisconsin Medical Society's Savant Syndrome Web site.

Brainy Babies?

After studies showed that listening to Mozart could raise IQ scores, parents started playing Mozart for babies, hoping to take advantage of the "Mozart effect." One explanation for the effect is that music makes people more awake and alert. Another is that listening to Mozart and mathematical or spatial reasoning tasks rely on the same neurons within the brain. However, none of the studies involving Mozart's music have used babies as test subjects, and the Mozart effect in adults is usually temporary.

This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world

2006-09-03T12:52:00.000-04:00

Exploding numbers of overweight children could make today's generation the first to die before its parents, say health experts...

(AP) The world is in the grip of a fat pandemic that threatens to overwhelm every country's health system with diseases such as diabetes and heart disease and shorten the life span of future generations, experts at an international conference warned on Sunday.

"Obesity is an international scourge," Prof. Paul Zimmet, the chairman of the meeting of more than 2,500 experts and health officials, told delegates in a speech opening the International Congress on Obesity. "This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world."

"It's as big a threat as global warming and bird flu," said Zimmet, an Australian expert on diabetes.

Other experts at the conference said the cost of treating health problems related to being overweight was immeasurable on a global scale, but was estimated at billions of dollars a year in countries such as Australia, Britain and the United States.

"We are not dealing with a scientific or medical problem, we're dealing with an enormous economic problem that, it is already accepted, is going to overwhelm every medical system in the world," said Prof. Philip James, the chairman of a global task force set up by medical organizations that deal with weight-related problems.

He said governments had been forced to confront rising obesity rates because of the expense of treating related health issues.

Among the most worrying problems is skyrocketing rates of obesity among children, which made them much more prone to chronic diseases as they grow older and could shave years of their lives, experts said.

The children in this generation may be the first in history to die before their parents because of health problems related to weight, Prof. Kate Steinbeck, an expert in children's health at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, said in a statement.

The World Health Organization says more than 1 billion adults around the world are overweight and 300 million of them are obese, putting them at much higher risk of diseases such as diabetes, heart problems, high blood pressure, stroke and some forms of cancer.

There are now more overweight people in the world than people who are undernourished, who number about 600 million, Zimmet said.

People in wealthy countries were leading the world in overeating and not doing enough physical activity, but those in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America were fast learning the bad habits, delegates said.

But the traditional way of dealing with the issue — focusing on getting individuals to adjust their diet and exercise — had failed, and a more multifaceted response involving governments, business and community groups is needed, they said.

Experts also said governments should impose bans on junk food advertising aimed directly at children, although they acknowledged such restrictions were unlikely to come about soon because the food industry would lobby hard against them.

"There is going to be a political bun fight over this for some time, but of course we shouldn't advertise junk food to children that makes them fat," said Prof. Boyd Swinburn, a member of an international task force on combatting obesity.

Leaders of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, an umbrella group for medical organizations dealing with weight-related and children's health issues, on Sunday approved backing such advertising bans as official policy, its president, Prof. Claude Bouchard, announced.

One in four children in Australia is overweight or obese, said Steinbeck. Half of Australia's adult women are overweight, and two thirds of men, she said. The rates were among the highest in the world, with the United States worse, she said, without giving figures for the U.S.

Modern life has created an environment that is counterproductive to staying a healthy weight, experts said, including neighborhoods that were increasingly being built with not enough public space for residents to exercise, said Prof. Louise Baur, a child health expert at the University of Sydney.

The conference will hear research and papers from almost 400 experts before wrapping up on Friday.

2006-09-02T14:39:00.000-04:00

My blog is worth $564.54.
How much is your blog worth?

I Need Fall Clothes

2006-08-31T20:32:00.000-04:00

Thursday is almost over and soon the three day weekend will be upon us. I have plans to go to a coworker's house on Sunday for a backyard party. She might even make some lawn dice after I suggested the idea to her. I also invited myself to my dad's house for a cookout on Monday. I hope he didn't mind.
I just got caught up on my assignments for school. It's been another crazy busy week at work as well. I have so many projects I'm wrapped up in. I wish I could finish just one.
Yesterday, I decided that I like teacup Poodles. I never liked tiny little frou frou dogs, but I met one who was adorable. He came to my work and he ws just trotting down the hallway like he was the happiest guy in the world. He was content to nap in my cupped hands.

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What's it going to take to kill this iPod craze? Even months after the thing should have been old news, they are still coming out with more new iPod furniture, docking stations, etc. I just don't understand this fad. Maybe I don't like music enough or something. I just don't get it. I was just checking out Engadget, which is a great site to learn about the latest electronics. The crap part of it is that everything on there lately is either an iPod ripoff or a real iPod peripheral. Enough already!

Ok, Seriously...

2006-08-27T13:21:00.000-04:00

Today I really have to do my paper. I don't want to be a procrastinator. I'm drinking some delicious French vanilla almond coffee, so as soon as my magical superpowers kick in, I've got to work. No excuses this time.

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I found a few linkworthy sites today. I'm not getting paid to advertise these sites, I just find them particularly useful and/or fun. I hope someone else finds them as cool as I do.

10,000 Reasons is a great place to vent about the things that are causing the decline of civilization. I posted three last night and I wasn't even trying. Some people post stupid things, but the majority are funny and true.

I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it here, but I've been a LookSmart's Furl fan for a long time. I hate clutter, and that includes a cluttered Bookmarks (or Favorites) folder.
The trouble is, there are a lot of sites that I don't want to lose track of. If it's not important enough to have in my Bookmarks, I just Furl it. It's an ingenious thing that I couldn't imagine being without.

ThinkFree is something that I just discovered, and I can't say whether or not the beta is completely stable or not since I haven't had a chance to try it out.
In theory, it's a free, web-based, compatible alternative to MS Office. It includes a spreadsheet, word processor document, and even a presentation.
You can upload your current MS Office project and work on it in a location where you don't have the Office suite.

Maybe it's just me, but once in a while I'm completely amazed by something simple and completely non-technical. I discovered PocketMod last week and immediately put it to use. Sure, I still use my computer based appointment book, but this little thing is handy, clever, and free.

D*I*Y Planner isn't just a calendar. While it has some of the same features as PocketMod only larger, there is much more available here, plus you can make your own templates for others to use. There is a PDA version, which like PocketMod is a small easy to transport version. I'm particularly fond of the Classic GTD Reference and I intend to use it in an upcoming Scheduling and Time Management training.

A while ago I was into tracking everything I ate and drank. While I think it might have had an effect on my health, I got bored and quit. At the time, I swore by FitDay. I still believe it's a great way to monitor food intake and exercise. Today I found traineo, and naturally I signed up. It looks similar to FitDay, with food and exercise tracking, but there are "motivators" which are supposed to help support you with your goals. I'll update on my progress.

Peak Performance: Success in College and Beyond has a nice website that goes along with the book. There you can find useful reference links. One that I never knew existed until now is called Infoplease. It's an encyclopedia, dictionary, almanac atlas, and more. Unlike reference.com, all the material is free to everyone.

I Don't Think I Like Saturdays Anymore

2006-08-27T01:22:00.000-04:00

Saturdays don't have anything to offer me. Alfred works 24 hours on Saturdays. We are sharing a car right now, so even if I wanted to go somewhere I couldn't (lucky for me I don't want to). What has been happening is basically I sleep all day and watch a movie or two. Today I napped on the living room floor until 6pm, then I watched Rent, then I read, then I got a bath. Now I'm here doing basically nothing.

I have a paper due on Monday, but due to my Saturday drain I didn't feel like working on it. I just feel too tired to sit upright on Saturdays. I'm feeling better now, but technically it is Sunday.

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I just found my friend Jessie Kozel on MySpace. Trouble is, I don't have an account on that unholiest of places. So Jess, if you happen to Google yourself and find this, call me or e-mail or something.

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I think I've mentioned before that I have a strong interest in helping people by volunteering and so forth, and I've enjoyed the sense of giving where I can.

Well, completely by accident tonight I found a new place to help those less fortunate. It's called myfreeimplants.com . Just in case the title of the site didn't give it away, this is a place where hundreds, if not thousands of needy ladies beg and plead to philanthropists about their desperate need for breast implants.

Similar to Children International, they reel in donors with photos of themselves looking downright needy. Who can resist a poor, unfortunate lady posed on all fours eating a popsicle? Who I ask?

Forget AIDS in Africa and buy these sad ladies some breasts. A simple act of selflessness will make you feel warm inside, and what better way to be charitable than to help put synthetic parts on poor girls who can't afford to buy them?

< /end sarcasm >

I Can't Dance

2006-08-19T12:02:00.000-04:00

Last night was the fundraiser luau for Russell Nesbitt Services. I don't know how many funds were raised, but every little bit helps.

It was a fun time, but I wish more people would have come. It seemed like it was mostly employees of the company. I think the cash bar was a great idea since we seemed to make the most money on beer sales.

One thing is for certain. I need to learn to dance. Dancing isn't at all like learning to ride a bike. You can and will forget how to have rhythm. I took jazz and ballet classes when I was a kid. I used to dance at the under 21 club when I was in high school. Now I do a bad impression of the white guy shuffle. I can't even follow a beat.

It's unfair to have a hot sexy husband who loves to salsa dance and not be able to do it with him.
I dream of us dancing and people watching and thinking, "they look so nice together, and they dance as such a great pair."

I suppose this is going to be a problem until I get some lessons or something.

You know anybody who needs an "anti-stupid" pill?

2006-08-08T11:39:00.000-04:00

OOOh, I do! Pick me! I'm guessing that once this passes the FDA, there will be a mass shortage just like we had on Cipro, Tamiflu, etc.

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German scientist has been testing an "anti-stupidity" pill with encouraging results on mice and fruit flies, Bild newspaper reported Saturday.

It said Hans-Hilger Ropers, director at Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, has tested a pill thwarting hyperactivity in certain brain nerve cells, helping stabilize short-term memory and improve attentiveness.

"With mice and fruit flies we were able to eliminate the loss of short-term memory," Ropers, 62, is quoted saying in the German newspaper, which has dubbed it the "world's first anti-stupidity pill."

More Eggs...

2006-08-07T20:07:00.000-04:00

These eggs came from unholylabs.net
Adopt your own today!

I guess you could say that this months fad is adoptable eggs. I'm not sure how long these will amuse me, but I'm interested in seeing what they hatch into. Excuse me for being curious.

I got *almost* everything moved into my new office today. It's way too big for all my stuff, and it looks pretty bare. I wish I had a lot more plants and flowers, but I don't want to have to water them all. That reminds me that I need to buy two larger pots for my African violets. They're busting out of their pots.

I guess people will probably catch on that I am using the big office once they come in and see all my stuff moved tomorrow. I wish the transition could be a little bit smoother for those of us that are changing job titles but I'm sure it'll all work out in the end.

Adopted Eggs..Woot

2006-08-06T20:30:00.000-04:00

School starts on Tuesday officially, but I'm able to view my courses and begin the assignments now.

I guess it's natural to feel overwhelmed at first when taking on something so big after so long. That's what I'm reading in these other people's posts as well as in the books for the first class.

I hate to say it but I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed at work, too. Once I realized the complete redundancy of what exactly we do for billing, I feel literally sick.

My goal is to come up with something to eliminate the wasted time we spend copying figures from one paper to another just to be entered into the computer. I have too many other things to do for this to make sense.

If there was an award for "Least Efficient Billing System" I believe we would take the prize. Sadly, the software that most of the other agencies use is too expensive. I have to come up with something.

A New Day

2006-08-02T20:41:00.000-04:00

While digging around for something newsworthy, I ran across this test from an 8th grade class in 1895.

I wonder if today's kids know this much information.

I think the math of modern times is a much higher level, but the rest of the classes are probably not up to this standard.
Notice how Geography was a whole different subject back then. It appears to be a combination of Geography and Earth Science.

I'm not entirely sure what Orthography is either, but it appears to be something that would be included in a modern day English class.

An 8th Grade Education in 1895

This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS -1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts
of"lie,""play," and "run."
5. Define case; Illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you
understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many
bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at
50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary
levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104
for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20
per meter?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of
which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn,
and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800,
1849, 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour)

1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography,
etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph,
subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.'
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions
under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi,
dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name
the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell,
rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane,
fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation
by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba,
Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same
latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the
sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the
earth.

Frequently Used Keyboard Shortcuts

CTRL+C: Copy

CTRL+V: Paste

CTRL+Z: Undo

CTRL+B: Bold

CTRL+U: Underline

CTRL+I: Italic

CTRL+X: Cut

ALT+TAB: Switch between open items

Windows Logo+D: Minimizes all open windows

KOSHATNIK

2006-07-28T09:57:00.000-04:00

School starts August 8th. I'm not gonna have any free time after that. Hopefully I can still find time to update this.
Today I found this interesting story on my home page and I thought I should share it here.

Obesity hinders medical scans, attribute researchers
Posted on : 2006-07-27 Author : Anne Roberts
News Category : Health

An increasing number of patients are missing out on full medical treatment because of their being obese, a new study has revealed. These people are either unable to fit into the scanners, or the X-rays or ultrasound waves are not able to penetrate their body fat.

Dr. Raul N. Uppot, who led the study, is an assistant radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and also an instructor in radiology at Harvard Medical School, both in Boston. He, along with his colleagues reviewed all radiology records from tests performed at Massachusetts General Hospital between 1989 and 2003 to look for those which were hindered due to patient size. These reports included scans used to look for tumors, blood clots, broken limbs, injuries and diseased organs, such as standard X-rays, CT scans, MRI scans and PET scans.

When radiologists are unable to evaluate an image clearly, they mark it as “limited due to body habitus". Dr Raul Uppot and his team looked for the occurrence of this phrase in all the reports from year 1989 to year 2003.

"Obesity is affecting the ability to image these people. We're having trouble finding out what's wrong," Dr. Uppot elucidated. "When they come to the hospital, people are so concerned about the disease they have that they don't realize that being obese could hinder the ability to deliver health care". "We looked at people who were able to fit on the imaging equipment and get the scan". "When radiologists read the film, they had trouble interpreting the film because the quality of the image was not very good because of the patient's size."

Study results
The researchers found that in spite of advances in medical technology, the percentage of habitus limited reports had almost doubled. In 1989 the percent of inconclusive exams due to patient size was 0.10 percent, while in 2003 this figure had mounted to 0.19 percent.

Though the number itself was small what was more alarming was the increase in numbers said Uppot.
Many cases showed the patients too large to fit into scanners or so fat, that X-rays proved useless. This could be remedied by increasing the power on X-ray and CT machines in an effort to get a better image but would lead to an undesirable increase in radiation dose.

The different types of imaging also showed varying difficulties, with abdominal ultrasounds leading the list of the most difficult in giving proper diagnosis, with 1.9 percent followed by chest X-rays (0.18 percent), abdominal computed tomography (CT), abdominal X-rays, chest CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The ultrasounds were the most affected according to Uppot."In an obese person because the ultrasound beam does not get to the organs or get to them adequately enough we cannot get a picture. It looks like a snowstorm -- I don't know if you have seen those televisions where it is just whiteout? It looks like that;" he said.

Ultrasound waves which work by sending high-frequency sound waves through the patient, where they bounce off internal organs and come back, were less able to penetrate thick fat. The situation with X-rays was also similar said the researchers. The problem was different with CT scans and MRI where weight limitations of the table and size of opening on the imager created problems for overweight people.

Uppot said that many manufacturers had started to address the issue with the weight limit for CT scans in the US having been increased from 450 pounds (204 kilograms) to 550 pounds (250 kilograms), and for MRI from 350 (159 kilograms) to 550 pounds (250 kilograms).

Conclusions
"In the past 10 years or so, medicine has become so dependent on imaging," Uppot said. "Instead of doing very meticulous clinical examinations, a lot of doctors now rely on CT scans, ultrasounds, etcetera, to tell them what's happening inside the body. What happens when you're too big to fit on a table? Or you can fit on a table but the image is poor quality?"

Patients would have to settle for substandard care because radiologists would not be able to get the images needed to diagnose potentially serious problems particularly in surgery where without the necessary abdominal scans it would be hard to tell if a bypass operation was healing properly."Americans need to know that obesity can hinder their medical care when they enter a hospital," Uppot said in a news release.

Along with patients, the hospital staff who moved the obese patients on and off the imaging tables also suffered with roughly 83 percent of technologists having reported some pain while moving obese patients reported Uppot and colleagues.

An estimated 64 percent of the U.S. population is either overweight or obese which has its effect on the health care system, with obese people having more chances of developing illnesses like cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

The study appears in the August issue of the journal Radiology.

So how about that? America is too fat. Who'd have guessed?

The following issue also bothers me, but I don't know an easy solution.
Many health care providers have to risk their own safety moving and lifting morbidly obese people. Working around the health industry for much of my life, I've known more than a few healthly average weight health care providers who suffered life altering injuries due to the lifting of obese individuals.

I don't see how it's fair to put one person's safety in jeopardy in order to help someone else who allowed themself to become enormous.

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There will be no sheep in August. Perhaps I'll include some other item du jour though.

Sheep of the Day July 28, 2006

Camp Hyrule Signups Today!

2006-07-25T21:11:00.000-04:00

That's right, kiddies.
Anyone who never got a chance to attend summer camp as a young'n has a second chance thanks to Nintendo and the magic of the interweb.

Camp Hyrule registration is today through the 27th. Camp Hyrule is a week-long virtual camp for Nintendo fans of all ages. There are games, chats, contests, fun, and maybe even prizes.

This year, Camp Hyrule will take place the week of August 14 - 18. Registration for Camp Hyrule 2006 ends at 5:00 pm PST on July 27, so be sure to spread the word to all of your friends before then!

If you like to talk about video games, play practical jokes, and rub elbows with Nintendo's expert gamers, then pack your bags and get ready to meet new friends at Nintendo's Camp Hyrule 2006. Coming the week of August 14, 2006.

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Since today I'm celebrating all things Nintendo, our sheep of the day is a promotional item that came with preordering Harvest Moon Magical melody. Enjoy your sheep.

Sheep of the Day July 25, 2006

useratonkachi

2006-07-24T22:22:00.000-04:00

Some cereals are sealed in thick, foil lined opaque liner packages while others exist in mere wax covered polyethylene bags. One particular cereal comes packaged in mylar.

Why the discrepancy in packaging? Is there something radioactive about Kellogg's Corn POPS?

The reason for my sudden distrust of the breakfast industry stems from some knowledge I stumbled upon this evening.

Most people these days know that the food they are eating more than likely contains a few less than healthy and sometimes shocking ingredients, but some of this information is probably best kept a secret.

I present the following article courtesy of damninteresting.com. There's a new link button off to the right as well ;)

Mechanically Separated Chicken and Other Horrors

Posted by Alan Bellows on September 30th, 2005 at 12:14 am

The foods that lurk on grocery shelves have ingredient lists that often defy pronunciation. Those few words that can be pronounced are sometimes far too horrible to contemplate. I thought I'd peel back the greasy cellophane and get the skinny on what makes these processed "foods" tick. If you're prone to abandoning food items when you learn their dark secrets, I suggest you stop reading now.

Here are but a few, in no particular order:

Mechanically Separated Chicken:
A primary ingredient in Slim Jims and many other food-flavored solids, the name conjures images of plucked chicken carcasses being tossed into a giant machine that rips the flesh from its bones, and grinds the remains into mush. And coincidentally, that's EXACTLY what it is. It comes out the other end as a gooey paste. No doubt it will be the same consistency when the hospital's stomach pump mechanically separates the chicken from me.

Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable/Soybean/Cottonseed Oil:
Refers to oils that have had hydrogen added, in the presence of small amounts of catalyst metals such as nickel, palladium, platinum or cobalt. This causes the oil harden to a desired level, but it creates trans fatty acids, which are very unfriendly to the heart. Found in Crisco, Oreos, and many other tasty, death-hastening foods.

Brominated Vegetable Oil (BVO):
Vegetable oil mixed with bromine. According to webelements.com, bromine is "a heavy, volatile, mobile, dangerous reddish-brown liquid. The red vapour has a strong unpleasant odour and the vapour irritates the eyes and throat. […] When spilled on the skin it produces painful sores. It is a serious health hazard, and maximum safety precautions should be taken when handling it." It is used in to allow artificial citrus flavoring to mix with oil, often in citrus-flavored sodas such as Mountain Dew.

Trace amounts of BVO are stored permanently in body fat when it is consumed. BVO is one of only four food additives the FDA considers "interim," and it must be periodically re-approved for safety.

Xanthan Gum:
Named for the Xanthomonas campestris bacteria that create it, it is the powdery byproduct of the fermentation of glucose or sucrose. Used to add texture to foods like salad dressing, pudding, etc. Also can be used in place of gluten for baking. Extra credit for the cool X-pronounced-like-a-Z factor.

Carnauba Wax:
A wax derived from the leaves of a plant native to northeastern Brazil, the Carnauba Palm. It is used to make things shiny, such as M&Ms, Skittles, and Buicks.

Gum Arabic (aka Gum Acacia):
This substance, derived from tree scabs, is used as a food "stabilizer," meaning that it gives a food a certain consistency. It is produced by the the acacia tree to seal up any damage which occurs to its bark. It is used in foods that are gummy, such as soft drink syrups, marshmallows, and gumdrops.

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG):
MSG is a highly effective flavor enhancer that is considered by many to be, well, kind of a jerk. It is created by fermenting starch, sugar beets, sugar cane, or molasses. Its presence in food makes other flavors stand out more, but eating food that contains MSG causes many people to experience headaches, flushing, sweating, and a sensation of pressure in the mouth or face. Rare reports have indicated swelling of the throat, chest pain, heart palpitations, and shortness of breath.

Repeated studies have shown that pure MSG does not cause any of these symptoms, and the current suspicion is that the symptoms are caused by trace amounts of a mold that grows in the vats which produce MSG. Time will tell whether MSG is a misunderstood friend, or a sneaky, flavor-enhancing foe.

MSG is common in Chinese food, frozen dinners, and snack foods.

Sodium Pyrophosphate:
A slightly toxic compound used as a thickener/emulsifier for things like chicken nuggets, marshmallows, and soy-based pseudomeat. Also used in toothpaste and clothing detergents to prevent calcium and magnesium buildup.

Trisodium Phosphate (aka Sodium Phosphate):
An ionic salt used as a thickener/emulsifier for foods, as well as common uses as a degreaser, detergent, and laxative.

Sorbitol:
A low-calorie sugar alcohol used as a sugar substitute in sugar-free cake mixes, cookies, candies, etc. Known to cause abdominal pain and severe diarrhea if too much is ingested. But at least you're not fat.

Mannitol:
A sugar alcohol like Sorbitol, but used in breath mints because it causes a "cool" feeling. Also a primary ingredient in many childrens' laxatives.

Sodium Benzoate:
A salt that is used as a preservative because of its ability to kill yeasts, bacteria and fungi. The FDA restricts it to one tenth of a percent in foods, since it is poisonous in larger quantities. Can provoke asthma, gastrointestinal symptoms, and behavior problems in children. Often found in salad dressings, carbonated drinks, jams, and fruit juices.

High Fructose Corn Syrup:
Corn syrup which has had much of its natural glucose sugar converted to fructose sugar. It's the primary sweetener for mass-produced foods in the US, particularly soft drinks. It's often cited as the leading cause of obesity in the US, and is linked to diabetes.

Gelatin:
Used in making Jell-o, jams, and things of that nature, gelatin is created by boiling the bones, skins, and hides of cows and pigs. This releases collagen, which is boiled, filtered, and ground in to powder. Doesn't that make you want to run out and grab a big old bowl of raspberry-flavored jiggly-hides-and-bones?

Cochineal (aka Carmine or Carminic Acid):
A deep red food coloring used for fruit juices, gelatins, and candies. It is derived from ground-up Dactylopius coccus beetles.

Partially De-Fatted Cooked Pork/Beef Fatty Tissue:
Partially defatted beef or pork is derived from "trimmings" that have at least 12% visible lean, and generally have a protein content between 17% and 20% once some of the fat and tendons are cut out. Nightmare meat.

Sodium nitrite:
A color fixative and preservative in meats and fish, it effectively prevents the growth of botulism. Four grams are lethal to a human, yet it also can be used as an antidote for cyanide poisoning. It is used as a preservative in numerous meat products, such as cold cuts and sausage. Also, one of only six ingredients in The World's Most Horrifying Food: Armour brand Pork Brains in Milk Gravy (it exists, and somebody eats it. It also contains 1170% of the recommended daily allowance of cholesterol).

I could go on and on, but I'm not going to. I've turned over enough rocks for one night. I feel like I've lost a small part of myself in all of this food research: the lunch part.

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Todays sheep is ugly. Don't stare, it's rude to stare.

Sheep of the Day July 24, 2006

Stupid Isn't Cute

2006-07-21T13:42:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting in my cubicle listening to at least two different radios compete with each other. I'm trying to come up with a program description and eligibility criteria and my brain isn't working very well with all the distractions.

I am getting a job transfer here at Russell Nesbitt Services, but I'm not exactly sure what it is I'll be doing just yet. I'm excited to be changing scenery though. There have been a lot of changes this month. People quitting, new people coming in, and the corporate reorganization. I just hope people are satisfied and don't complain too much when it's all said and done.

Earlier, I spent a lot of time looking for scholarships and grants for adult students. I also looked for online degree programs through accredited schools. I want to be working toward something. I feel like a lot of my time is wasted and I could be doing more. The truth is I like to work. I like to see results and I like to learn. if I'm not learning I feel like I'm not doing anything. I've also been exploring volunteer work online. I'd love to do some volunteer graphic design projects so that I could add to my portfolio.

I still have to ask grandma and grandpa about some property to put toward our loan in Costa Rica. After the discussion about my car last week I'm not sure when would be a good time to do that.

I'm so glad that it's Friday. After this past hot and humid week I just feel drained. I can't wait to sleep in. I'm gonna get out of here and relax till Monday when I have waiver training all day long.

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Here's a truly blog worthy stupid item. I have to give credit to Gizmodo for making me aware of this magnificent product.

The claim is that it's “A whimsical potty that turns your toilet into a nautical wonderland”

Fish ‘n Flush™ is the safe, fish-friendly aquarium for your bathroom. Best of all, it's just $450.00!

I have to wonder a few things though. If all the water goes down after each flush, wouldn't you have to buy new fish every single time? Isn't that how the tank on a toilet works?

What about the health and well being of these fish? Tank water is notoriously cold. I just can't help but think this might not be the best environment for a living creature. I wonder if PETA knows about this...

Sheep of the Day July 21, 2006

It's Not Easy Being Green

2006-07-16T04:48:00.000-04:00

I added a new link button today to a place called "43 Things" It's a place where you can keep track of your goals and find out who else has the same ones.

People have known for years that making a list of goals is the best way to achieve them. Why is that? First, getting your goals in writing can help you clarify what you really want to do. You might find you have some important and some frivolous goals. That is OK. You’ve got space for 43 Things on your list. Not every one of them has to change the world (but save room for the ones that might).

What do you want to do with your life? It is not an easy question to answer – and you shouldn’t have to answer alone. Browse 43 Things to find out what others want to do. You might find some goals you share. Click the “I want to do this” button to add a goal to your list. Got an idea for a new goal? Just type it in the text box on the homepage or at the bottom of any page on the site. Bam. Now, it’s your thing.

We all have stories about what we care about. Writing down your progress on a goal can help someone else learn about something you both want to do. When you see a goal you’ve achieved, click on the “I’ve done this” button and share a story about how you did it.

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I guess this would officially qualify as "old news" but I just found the actual press release and decided to post it.

GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY TO DIRECT
POWER OF THE DARK CRYSTAL

Orphanage Animation Studios Also Comes Aboard as Production Partners of Classic Fantasy Sequel

Odyssey Entertainment to target distributors at
European Film Market in Berlin

Hollywood, CA, February 1, 2006 – Award-winning animation director Genndy Tartakovsky, who created the hit series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Samurai Jack and Dexter’s Laboratory, will direct Power of the Dark Crystal, the much anticipated sequel to The Jim Henson Company’s 1982 classic fantasy film. The announcement was made today by Lisa Henson, co-CEO of The Jim Henson Company and a producer on the film.

Additionally, Tartakovsky’s newest venture, Orphanage Animation Studios, has been brought on board as a producing partner to head up the CG animation elements that will be incorporated with the film’s live-action animatronic characters. Legendary fantasy artist Brian Froud, designer of the original film, will return to design the new characters. Odyssey Entertainment is representing worldwide sales and distribution on the film.

Set hundreds of years after the events of the first movie when the world has once again fallen into darkness, Power of the Dark Crystal follows the adventures of a mysterious girl made of fire who, together with a Gelfling outcast, steals a shard of the legendary Crystal in an attempt to reignite the dying sun that exists at the center of the planet.

“As an auteur of such exciting and fantastical adventure projects, Genndy is the perfect director to bring to life Power of the Dark Crystal,” said Lisa Henson. “I am sure that his visualization of Brian Froud’s designs will thrill fans of the original film as well as audiences who are meeting these beloved characters for the first time.”

Genndy Tartakovsky said, "The original Dark Crystal was one of the most inspirational and imaginative pictures of its time, so it's a real honor for me to be able to bring the world of The Dark Crystal to a whole new generation."

The sequel is only one of several projects exploring the world of The Dark Crystal, a fan favorite that has remained consistently strong with worldwide home video and DVD sales. Other projects include an animated television series, a manga series from Tokyo Pop, and myriad licensed products such as books, apparel and collectible sculptures.

Power of the Dark Crystal is a production of The Jim Henson Company in association with Orphanage Animation Studios. With a screenplay by Annette Duffy and David Odell, the film will be produced by Lisa Henson and Orphanage Animation Studios Chairman Scott Stewart. Executive Producers will be Brian Henson with Ralph Kamp and Louise Goodsill of Odyssey Entertainment.

Ralph Kamp and Louise Goodsill commented, “The original film remains a classic and it’s an honor to add Power of the Dark Crystal to our strong family line up. With Genndy and Orphanage Animation Studios joining The Jim Henson Company, the final creative elements are in place, and we know Berlin will be busy for us as we start the process of bringing this long-awaited sequel to its many fans around the world.”

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Sheep of the Day July 16, 2006

You Can Only Get So Naked

2006-07-14T19:49:00.000-04:00

It's true. In the wintertime, you can put on a sweater, some gloves, a hat, scarf, parka, whatever. You can turn up the heat or climb under a cozy blanket and cuddle up with your favorite person and a cat or two on your lap.

I always said that I liked spring and summer best of all. For the most part, it's true. It's just that humidity and I have never been friends. We're not even acquaintances on good terms, I just despise it.

This past week has been like nothing I can remember. It's been more humid than Florida, and the air conditioner in the car is broken to make things ever worse. I'm not a girl who glows either, I sweat. I sweat till my clothes are soggy and then I sweat some more.

Next week is supposed to be the same but with hotter temperatures. but enough about the weather...weather is boring.

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Nintendo News: Nintendo DS America’s Top-Selling Video Game System

In a triumph for innovation, the dual-screen Nintendo DS(TM) portable became America’s top-selling video game system of any type in June, according to independent sales numbers just released by the NPD Group. The introduction of the new DS Lite version, featuring a smaller profile and more brilliant display, boosted total sales to nearly 600,000 units, almost double that for any other game device, and alone represented more than a third of total industry system purchases for the month.

Beyond the unique technical coupling of dual screens, a touch screen, a microphone and seamless Wi-Fi play, DS popularity also is being propelled by a unique mix of software that appeals equally to mainstream players and those new to the category. “New Super Mario Bros.(R)” was the industry’s top-selling game for the second month in a row, with purchases of more than 450,000 units, while groundbreaking titles “Brain Age(TM): Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day” and “Big Brain Academy(TM)” combined to sell nearly 350,000 units. In addition, the unique “Nintendogs(TM)” titles combined to sell more than 100,000 units, 10 months after their introduction.

Nintendo(R) Wi-Fi Connection, a wireless gaming network exclusive to Nintendo DS, also now has achieved participation by 1.7 million discreet users worldwide in just eight months, an adoption rate far higher than any other game-play network to date. There’s currently a variety of Wi-Fi games to choose from including “Metroid Prime Hunters,” “Tetris DS,” “Animal Crossing:
Wild World” and “Mario Kart DS,” with “Star Fox Command DS,” “Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis” and “Clubhouse Games” launching in the months ahead. At 1.7 million people strong, if the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection community were a city, it would be the fifth largest in the United States, larger even than Philadelphia, Phoenix or San Diego.

“Nintendo DS is the only game system available a year ago that showed growth over the same period, and it did so in overwhelming fashion, with a leap of 426 percent,” says George Harrison, Nintendo of America’s senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications. “What we’re seeing is realization of our promise that Nintendo will bring gaming to the masses — whatever your taste or level of experience, we’ve got a system and a game for you.”

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Sheep of the Day July 14, 2006

Screw You, Yahoo

2006-07-11T19:51:00.000-04:00

I was updating my Yahoo Instant Messenger today and I thought I was unchecking the box to download the Yahoo Toolbar and Yahoo Web Browser. I guess they changed the wording to mess with the people who don't bother to read, because I ended up with both.

I did a massive four part virus and spyware scan and I removed everything affiliated with Yahoo thus beginning my boycott.

In the end, it turned out to be a win-win situation. I discovered meebo.com. It's a website that allows you to log into your instant messenger accounts from anwhere without downloading anything. You can access Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Jabber, GTalk, and ICQ. You don't even have to join.

Take that, Yahoo.

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The sheep of the day is one of the pets you'll be able to own in the upcoming Nintendo DS game, Rune Factory. The game is similar to Harvest Moon because you have to raise animals and grow vegetables and make friends, but there are also mosters and RPG elements to it. It looks so cool, I can't wait to play.

Sheep of the Day July 11, 2006

Camp Hyrule

2006-07-08T17:40:00.000-04:00

As you know if you've read much of my posts, I'm a Nintendo fan. I spend a lot of my time visiting the Nintendo NSider Forum. Well, it's almost time for something called Camp Hyrule. From the official site:

What is Camp Hyrule?

It's Nintendo's biggest online event of the year! Camp Hyrule is a free virtual online summer camp where video game fanatics can become immersed in the world of Nintendo.

This year, registration for Camp Hyrule is scheduled to take place July 25 - July 27 right here at CampHyrule.com. Each and every registered camper is assigned to a virtual cabin, where he or she can meet other gamers and interact with Nintendo's gameplay experts in exclusive Camp Hyrule chat rooms and message boards. Daily events include live chat shows, games, art activities and surprises galore from Nintendo Power Magazine.

If you like to talk about video games, play practical jokes and rub elbows with Nintendo's expert gamers, then pull out the tanning lotion and get ready to meet new friends at Nintendo's Camp Hyrule 2006. Coming the week of August 14, 2006.

I'm looking forward to taking part in this annual event for the first time and hopefully being in the winning cabin so that I get a shirt!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest last night with Alfred and Megan and James. It was good but really long. We went to Applebee's and I got my precious maple butter blondie, mmm.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And now your daily sheep.

Sheep of the Day July 8, 2006

No Catchy Titles Here

2006-07-05T12:05:00.000-04:00

Independence Day recap...went to grandma's. Did not eat a delicious grilled dinner. Picked up Chinese. Enjoyed.

2006 will go down in history as the least eventful 4th of July I have ever had. It rained pretty much all day. While it wasn't too soggy for the neighbors' bottle rockets and m80's, it was too wet for the real fireworks to take place so they postponed them. Not that we were going anyway, because we decided to stay in and skip it.

On the medical front, we're noticing that I really need 300 mg of Effexor XR. I'm not the same on 225. I'm worried that it's causing weight gain but Alfred says that if I fix my head I'll feel like eating better and working out and then I'll lose weight.

Today's News I Couldn't Pass Up

Ok, I would be so embarassed if this happened to me. Just think about it. If you've ever had some food on your face or a visible booger in your nose, how did you feel? This guy must have felt like that times a thousand.

Piece of Man's Skull Falls Off, Draws Crowds

Wed Jul 5, 2006 8:33 AM ET
By Bappa Majumdar

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) - Hundreds of people are thronging a hospital in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata to see a patient holding a piece of his own skull that fell off.
Doctors say a large, dead section of 25-year-old electrician Sambhu Roy's skull came away Sunday after severe burns starved it of blood.

"When he came to us late last year, his scalp was completely burned and within months it came off exposing the skull," Ratan Lal Bandyopadhyay, the surgeon who treated Roy told Reuters Wednesday.

"Later, we noticed that the part of his skull was loosening due to lack of blood supply to the affected area, which can happen in such extensive burn cases."

The piece came off Sunday and hundreds of people and dozens of doctors now crowd around his bed, where he lies holding the bone.

Bandyopadhyay said the skull's inner covering and the membrane which helps produce bone was miraculously unaffected, allowing fresh bone to grow.

"When the skull came off, I thought he will die, but we noticed a new covering on his head forming and that might have pushed the 'dead skull' out," he said.

While possible, such cases are extremely rare.

Roy was injured and almost killed when he was electrocuted while repairing a high voltage wire last October.

"Doctors say a new skull covering has replaced the old one, but I am not letting go of this one," he told Reuters.

He intends to keep his prized possession for life and not hand it over to the hospital when he leaves: "My skull has made me famous," he says.

Yep, ewe better believe I have a sheep story to accompany the second sheep of the day picture! Sit tight, it's a long one.

Dolly outcome disappoints Wilmut

BBC News-Professor Ian Wilmut, a member of the team that created Dolly the cloned sheep, says he is "disappointed" that Britain is no longer cloning animals.

It is exactly 10 years since the Finn Dorset lamb was born at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh. She was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell - making her a genetic replica of a six-year-old ewe. The "copying" of farm animals in the UK has now ceased because of cut-backs in agricultural research.

Professor Wilmut says the UK has once again failed to capitalise on a technology it pioneered.
He told BBC News: "I think that it is very difficult for a small country like this to develop fully something which does have great international value, because once that's recognised the science will move elsewhere.

"And in a sense, that's a compliment to the science: the technology was very important and is now being exploited commercially in Japan and the United States, all sorts of different countries."

Dolly was produced through a technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer.
There are a number of variations, but essentially it requires the genetic material from a donor cell to be placed inside an egg that has been emptied of its own DNA. The new entity is coaxed in the lab to start developing as an embryo, which is then placed in a surrogate mother and brought to term.

It is an inefficient process which requires large numbers of experiments to produce one live, healthy birth. Nevertheless, the first sheep clone was rapidly followed by other mammals, including mice, rats, cattle, pigs, goats, horses, rabbits, and even cats and dogs.
The technology was originally intended to be used for making copies of farm animals that had been genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutically useful proteins in their milk. This practice, known as "pharming", is now being pursued vigorously overseas.

So, too, is the simple copying of livestock of known high yield.

Wilmut himself is using the technology to study the cell behaviour of humans with motor neurone disease. He hopes that by understanding what goes wrong in these patients, it may be possible to develop therapies in the future.

"If you produce an embryo which is, if you like, genetically identical to the person who has the disease, such as motor neurone disease, then that embryo and the cells you derive from it will have the characteristics of the person who has the illness," he explained.

"In that particular case, you could produce nerve cells that are equivalent to the person at the time when the symptoms first began to appear. You can't get those cells in any other way at the present time."

The application of cloning technology to human biology in the past 10 years has been hugely controversial - although neither the early fears of cloned babies nor the hopes of "miraculous" cures have been realised.

"We've certainly gained some knowledge because cloning is such an inefficient technique," reflected Dr Susan Meyer, of the research and campaign group GeneWatch UK.

"It goes wrong so often, we've gained a lot of knowledge about how cells differentiate and how organisms grow but we haven't reached these expectations which were generated - the hype and the promise about personalised treatments.

"I think it is time to reflect a bit about whether we aren't getting too carried away."
Dolly died in 2003. She was put down after contracting a common lung disease. Her stuffed remains are on show at Edinburgh's Royal Museum.

"When we do taxidermy, we like to capture the character of an animal, and we're also keen to show particular behaviours," Andrew Kitchener, from the National Museums of Scotland, told the Archive Hour on BBC Radio 4.

"Dolly is displayed standing on all fours on a plinth, which is covered in straw and a few sheep droppings. Her head is turned slightly to the left, and she's looking adoringly at her inquiring audience."

Sheep of the Day July 5, 2006

Sheep of the Day

2006-07-04T18:59:00.000-04:00

Since I don't have any recurring theme here, I've decided that every time I post, I'm going to include a picture of a sheep until I think of a different theme or I get bored of sheep. It could be something that I drew and scanned in, or something I find on the internet. It can be anything, as long as it's sheep. Enjoy.

Sheep of the Day July 4, 2006

News...Just the Good Stuff

2006-07-01T23:03:00.000-04:00

What is the world coming to? Now kids have to be tricked into lifting weights inside their toys to try to counter the effect of unhealthy, humongous portions of food that their parents won't stop feeding them. it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Weighted Toys May Help Kids Get Fit During Playtime

By Charnicia E. Huggins

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) -Adding weights to children's toys may help them improve their fitness during playtime, the results of a small study suggest.

"This study provides one intervention to the current trend of declining fitness in America's youth," Dr. John C. Ozmun, of Indiana State University and his co-authors write.

This will not be "the answer to childhood obesity, but it could be a small part of the puzzle, making a positive contribution," Ozmun told Reuters Health.

Various reports have pointed to the benefits of physical activity in helping children maintain healthy body composition and improve cardiovascular and skeletal systems, heart rate, blood pressure and levels of the "good" HDL cholesterol. Studies have also shown that physical activity declines as children grow older.

Ozmun and his colleagues investigated whether children's physical activity can be increased by subtly changing the task requirements of certain activities already common to them - i.e. by adding weights to toys used either during play or while learning.

Their study included five boys and five girls, who were an average of 7.5 years old, who were randomly assigned to carry either large, cardboard toy blocks that weighed less than a quarter of a pound (0.10 kilograms) or blocks that weighed about 3.4 pounds (1.55 kilograms).

The weighted toys had small steel blocks glued inside the larger blocks. The children picked up the blocks, one at a time, and carried them with two hands over approximately 26 feet. Days later, the children were assigned to the opposite type of toy block and repeated the activity.

Overall, after an average of 10 minutes of carrying weighted blocks, the children experienced significantly greater increases in heart rate, oxygen uptake and energy expenditure than they did after carrying the lighter blocks, study findings indicate.

"Handling heavier objects, either through play or instruction, may provide opportunities to increase workload intensity in a benign manner allowing for subsequent improvements in children's physical fitness," Ozmun's group concludes.

The toys may also be useful in a therapeutic setting, particularly among children with cerebral palsy or Down's syndrome who show deficits in strength, according to Ozmun.

Two issues that need to be explored are the design and safety of weighted toys and whether children would be interested in playing with them, the researcher noted.

At this point, Ozmun does not recommend that parents add weights to their children's toys, expressing his safety concerns. What they can do, he said, is think about their child's play environment and create a "mindset of play that's more physically active."

The findings were presented, in part, during the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's International Congress on Physical Activity and Public Health in April. Additional results were later presented at the Annual Meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine.

I'm looking forward to seeing photos of this once it's completed. It's the kind of thing that I thought could only actually exist in a dream. However, it could wind up being cheesy. We'll see as construction progresses.

"Chocolate Factory" Theme Park to Open in Amsterdam

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -Amsterdam will get a theme park dedicated to chocolate and inspired by Roald Dahl's children's book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," city officials and entrepreneurs said Thursday.

Just like Dahl's fictional "Chocolate Factory" owned by Willy Wonka, the main part of the "sweets park" will be located underground, in a disused railway tunnel which was handed over by the city of Amsterdam in a ceremony Thursday.

The attraction, which is expected to open to the public in two to three years, will feature a glass elevator and a chocolate fountain, similar to the book. It will also produce small amounts of chocolate.

"Ten years ago I made a radio play of the 'Chocolate Factory' and ever since I've been fascinated by it," said audio books publisher Maurits Rubinstein who started the project.

The city of Amsterdam and Dutch construction company BAM are supporting the plan, which will cost 20 million euros, partly raised with bonds that parents and grandparents can buy for their children and grandchildren.

Amsterdam is the world's biggest cocoa port, processing around 30 percent of the world's cocoa beans from countries like Ghana and Ecuador. It supplies the key ingredient, cocoa paste, to major chocolate manufacturers throughout Europe.

Amsterdam is also the place where Coenraad Johannes van Houten invented the hydraulic cocoa press in the 1820s, enabling the production of eating chocolate alongside the already available drinking and cooking varieties. He also came up with the process known as "dutching" to create a mildly flavored cocoa powder that mixes more easily with water.

An impression of how the Chocolate Factory will look can be found by clicking on Impressie on www.dechocoladefabriek.nl.

Wisdom

2006-06-28T20:06:00.000-04:00

wis·dom (wzdm) n.

1. The ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting; insight.

2. Common sense; good judgment: "It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things"Henry David Thoreau.

Confucius said,
"Advocate loyalty and trustworthiness. Have no friends who are not your equals. Do not hesitate to correct faults."

I love good quotes. The kind that one can really relate to. The quote I selected is one that really speaks volumes about the way that I have felt recently.

Recently my husband and I have had to question what makes a "good friend", who is a "good person", and other difficult questions about the character of human animals.

Obviously, the answer is subjective. The answer is going to be different based on each individual's values and beliefs. The answer is clearly up to everyone to decide for themselves. But, if we choose unwisely then we can't make excuses, because ultimately it was our choice.

What makes someone a bad friend for me does not make them a bad person or a bad friend for someone else. Don't feel bad if you have to cut a friend loose because they just don't mesh with your beliefs. We all deserve it.

~~~~~~~~~~Awkward Transition~~~~~~~~~~

Well now this is really something. A whole blog dedicated to cats that resemble Adolf Hitler. I wish I had this much creativity. And holy crap, this cat really is der führer reborn.

Führer des Grossdeutschen Reichs

Land of Enchantment

2006-06-25T16:35:00.001-04:00

That's the New Mexico state slogan. I always get a kick out of those things. Apparently West Virginia is "Almost Heaven". Not quite, but almost.

Today on what I'm calling "Alfred's World Tour 2006" I took him to the airport so that he could fly to Socorro, New Mexico.

The trouble is, there is absolutely nothing to see or do in New Mexico and he got there a whole day early for his training. I told him to get some pictures of the sky at night, because I've heard the stars and moon look bigger out there.

I have to remember to let him know that San Miguel Mission is right up the street from where he's staying so that he can photograph that. Unfortunately, it's not very imprssive if you've ever seen a Taco Bell.

He's really interested in seeing the Very Large Array or VLA. It comprises 27 radio telescopes in a “Y” pattern spread across the plains of San Agustin 50 miles west of Socorro. The VLA has been used by more astronomers and has been mentioned in more scientific papers than any other radio telescope in the world.

He was also thinking of driving up to Roswell just to photograph the sign.

Not too far from Socorro is the place where they detonated the first atomic bomb, codenamed "the gadget".

For the most part, it seems the desert is deserted. I'm not too sorry I had to miss this trip, of course I would have liked to have gone just to be with him.

He already called to tell me that the Rio Grande is actually more of a Rio Pequeño. That's pretty disappointing news.

He also told me that he already saw the remains of Jumbo. Who is Jumbo, you ask? Here is his story:

Jumbo was the code name for the 214-ton Thermos shaped steel and concrete container designed to hold the plutonium core of the Trinity device (or "gadget") in case of a nuclear misfire. Built by the Babcock and Wilcox Company of Barberton, Ohio, Jumbo was 28 feet long, 12 feet, 8 inches in diameter, and with steel walls up to 16 inches thick.

The idea of using some kind of container for the Trinity device was based on the fact that plutonium was extremely expensive and very difficult to produce. So, much thought went into a way of containing the 15 lb. plutonium core of the bomb, in case the 5,300 lbs. of conventional high explosives surrounding the core exploded without setting off a nuclear blast, and in the process scattering the costly plutonium (about 250 million dollars worth) across the dessert. After extensive research and testing of other potential containment ideas, the concept of Jumbo was decided on in the late summer of 1944.

However, by the spring of 1945, after Jumbo had already been built and transported (with great difficulty) to the Trinity Site by the Eichleay Corporation of Pittsburgh, it was decided not to explode the Trinity device inside of Jumbo after all. There were several reasons for this new decision: first, plutonium had become more readily (relatively) available; second, the Project scientists decided that the Trinity device would probably work as planned; and last, the scientists realized that if Jumbo were used it would adversely affect the test results, and add 214 tons of highly radioactive material to the atmosphere.

Not knowing what else to do with the massive 12 million dollar Jumbo, it was decided to suspend it from a steel tower 800 yards from Ground Zero to see how it would withstand the Trinity test. Jumbo survived the approximately 20 kiloton Trinity blast undamaged, but its supporting 70-foot tall steel tower was flattened.

Two years later, in an attempt to destroy the unused Jumbo before it and its 12 million dollar cost came to the attention of a congressional investigating committee, Manhattan Project Director General Groves ordered two junior officers from the Special Weapons Division at Sandia Army Base in Albuquerque to test Jumbo. The Army officers placed eight 500-pound conventional bombs in the bottom of Jumbo. Since the bombs were on the bottom of Jumbo, and not the center (the correct position), the resultant explosion blew both ends off Jumbo. Unable to totally destroy Jumbo, the Army then buried it in the desert near Trinity Site. It was not until the early 1970s that the impressive remains of Jumbo, still weighing over 180 tons, were moved to their present location.

So in this land of enchantment lies the remains of the destroyer of worlds. This seems fitting and ironically, utterly American.

A Little Slice of Hell

2006-06-20T18:12:00.000-04:00

That was my today. Let's rewind and I'll explain.

I have been seeing my ob/gyn to get my Effexor XR dosage regulated. I started on 75mg at the recommendation of my psychologist at the time. It wasn't working. I was increased to 150mg after asking my family doctor what to do, and that wasn't cutting it.

My gynecologist got involved after I decided I was sick of going to two different doctors for the same problem. I was seeing him for the PMDD anyway. He and suggested that I up the dose to 225mg. I had already purchased 3 months worth of 150mg and I had about 2 months worth left, so instead of filling the script I just decided on my own to take 300mg.

He told me that anything up to 300mg was safe and not unusual to be prescribed so I figured it was ok. A month later, I had another appointment to see how it was going on that dosage and I explained to him what I had done. I also told him that it had been the best month in a long time as far as my depression, social anxiety, crying spells, mood swings, and PMDD were concerned.

Nonetheless, he thought it would be a good idea if I drop back down to 225mg to see if I could function on that amount. I dropped off the script on Saturday when I was in posession of 3 remaining 150mg capsules.

I called on Sunday and asked if it was filled and the pharmacy told me that the Dr. hadn't specified the "XR" and he didn't write how to dispense the meds so they would have to call him on Monday. I took my single remaining 150mg capsule on Monday before work and I went. It went ok that day, I felt no major difference. I've been a little down since Alfred has been gone and we have been having some disagreements, so I couldn't tell if it was just me or the lowered strength making me sad.

Today came and I had no Effexor left. I called the pharmacy at around 11am and they said they had faxed over the script but got no response. I called the office and the answering service told me the Dr. was out all week. I began panicking. I called the nurse midwife who was covering for my doctor and her office girl said that she would see what she could do. Finally at 4pm she called and told me she had called it in.

Between 12 and 4pm I experienced the weirdest jitteriness, cold sweating, hot flashes and other terrible feelings. I couldn't even see straight. It was like looking through a wide tube. I felt like I was on a major caffeine high and I haven't had caffeine in a week. The worst part was I kept having jerky twitchy muscle spasmy flexions. My jaw was clenched, my arms were flexed and I kept flexing my neck uncontrollably. My breathing was odd, nothing felt right.

I decided to go get some applications at Oglebay at 4:30 and while I was there I took a walk for about 20 minutes around the park. I felt much more relaxed. When I was done, I went by the pharmacy to pick up the cursed medicine. The pharmacist told me that I would have to pay a copay of 50.00 for each bottle (one 150mg and one 75mg = 225mg) and I began to feel overwhelmed. I walked around Kroger's feeling like I would explode into a teary panic. I checked out and got into the car and cried all the way home.

When I got in the door I took off my shirt and lay on the floor crying and crying. I got up, began pacing, walked to the wall and sobbed into it. I cried for my husband, I cried for someone to help me, I cried for myself because I felt helpless and hopeless and out of control of everything in my life.

I pulled myself together after 45 minutes or so and took one of each of the pills. Soon, I felt better. Not "perfectly" better, but better. It only took about an hour.

I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't want to depend on something to make me feel right, but I'm afraid to see what would happen if I was without it for any length of time.
For now, I will take it and be the best that I can be. Hopefully soon, I will get my dosage regulated.

A Lesson Learned & Unfortunate Happenings

2006-06-18T13:48:00.000-04:00

Whenever a person tells you that they don't want anything for their birthday, or that gifts don't matter it's spending time together that's important, don't listen because they're lying to you.

Gifts do matter. Even if you're broke, sell a kidney or something and buy them a damn gift. They probably won't like it anyway, but they can't hold it against you and make you feel like the biggest piece of walking human waste the way that they can if you don't get them anything at all.

Take it from me, the biggest piece of walking human waste ever to walk the face of the Earth.

My poor Alfred...He is still not in Costa Rica yet. Yesterday his flight to Miami left on time at 1:49 and arrived as scheduled at 4:33.

The plane to San Jose was supposed to leave at 7:23, but the passengers were told that it would be delayed. They took off at somewhere around 11:00, and about two hours into the two and a half hour flight, they determined that there was an engine problem and they would be returning to Miami. It seems that the logical thing would be to get to San Jose, since they had traveled so far already, but I'm sure they had their reasons.

The passengers were given vouchers for hotel rooms, and they were told they would be taking off at 11:00 am. At 9:00am Alfred got to the airport early and they told him that they would be delayed until 1:00pm.

So far he hasn't called me, and his phone is turned off so I'm assuming he is in the air once again bound for San Jose. Hopefully he makes it all the way safely this time.

You Miss So Much When You're Plugged In

2006-06-17T20:01:00.000-04:00

It bothers me that so many people wear their iPods and tune out the surroundings, or when they are on their laptop while in the park or at the beach.

I'm guilty of spending too much time indoors and wasting it on the computer or watching tv, but when I go outside I want to hear the birds and the water.

Here's a picture that I found last night while I was browsing the surreal art forum

It's called Spring by Keith Thompson. There is alot of amazing surreal art there. I spent three hours looking.

Last Night I Had a Strange Dream

2006-06-16T13:22:00.000-04:00

Actually, I remember having several strange dreams, but this one was the last before I woke up, so I remember it best.
I was at grandmas house, and it was evening in the fall.
The sky was a strange shade of bluish orange. I looked outside through the glass door and all the cats and dogs that I know, mine, my moms, and grandmas were looking at the sky. They were watching what I thought was the Aurora Borealis. It was all shades of color, like a rainbow of lightning and it was lighting up the clouds around it. I opened the door up to go out but I was afraid, so I was half in, half out. I yelled to Alfred to come and look at it, he was the only one there. I never took my eyes off of the sky, and neither did the animals that were sitting up in the yard.
As I was watching, I began to see the outline of a saucer, all shades rainbow lights were on it, in symbols and words, and that was what was making the lights in the sky that I thought were Aurora Borealis. It got closer, the top was spinning independent of the bottom, and the lights were changing and pulsing and the words and symbols kept changing too. For some reason, I can't remember what any of the words were, but they were neither friendy nor threatening. then I woke up, because the alarm went off.

Here are some interpretations that I found online:
Cats
To see a cat in your dream, signifies much misfortune, treachery, and bad luck. However, for the cat lover, cats signifies an independent spirit, feminine sexuality, creativity, and power.
Dogs
To see a dog in your dream, indicate a skill that you have ignored or forgotten, but needs to be activated. Alternatively, dogs may symbolize intuition, loyalty, generosity, protection, and fidelity. Your own values and intentions will enable you to go forward in the world and succeed.
UFO
To see a UFO in your dream, signifies your desires to find your spiritual purpose in life. Alternatively, it indicates that you are feeling alienated from those around you. The dream may also be a metaphor suggesting that you are a little "spacey" or have "spaced out" attitude. You need to be more grounded and come back to reality.
Sky
To look up at the clear blue sky in your dream, denotes peace and freedom of expression. If the sky is cloudy and overcast, then it foretells of sadness and trouble.
Lightning
To see lightning in your dream, signifies sudden awareness, insight, and purification. Alternatively, lightning may imply a shocking turn of events. It suggests the many forces governing your life may be beyond your control.
Fear
To dream that you feel fear, signifies that you achievements will not be as successful as you had anticipated. You are having anxieties in certain circumstances of your life. However, your worries will be temporary and short-lived.

I'm not sure if I believe in the interpretation of dreams, but I have some really strange ones, and I always feel very immersed and emotional in them. They are very realistic even when the circumstances are far out.

I had another one about a place that reoccurs in many of my dreams.
It's a doctors office, or the waiting room, more specifically. The memorable part is the series of stairs and hallways leading to the office. There are walls of glass aquariums with all kinds of strange creatures in them in some of the halls. There are so many corridors and stairs that I'm not even sure how I manage to find the place. There are also many other rooms along the way. Sometimes I feel the urge to stop and enter some of them.
There are wonderous things inside each room. Some rooms are dark, and green and black. Jungle plants cover the walls, ceiling and floor. It's humid and rich smelling, like earth.
Some rooms are rainbow coloredand bright, with jars and bins of colorful candy inside.
It's an old building, I can tell because of the dark stained woodwork throughout the building and the stairways. it's an extravagant place, but it is forboding too. I am fascinated but frightened by all the things on the way to the office.
Once I finally reach the waiting room, it's very small, and very crowded. The people aren't sitting on chairs, but on church pews. When I get in to see the doctor, I realize that I'm there about my knees. The doctor is old and kind.
Sometimes I leave through the window, and there are beautiful gothic style rooftops on all the buildings that I can cross. I can see the whole city, and it's clear and seems infinite. The moon is huge and bright and round.

Costa Rica

2006-06-15T20:07:00.000-04:00

Alfred leaves for Costa Rica on Saturday. That's also the day of Megan's wedding reception, so I'll probably go after I return from the aeropuerto. I wish he could come too, but his plane leaves at 1:49.

I can't wait until Tuesday when he returns. I worry about him when he's away, and of course I miss him. He's been working so much this week to make up for taking off on Saturday. I was hoping to spend the evenings with him, but he's been getting home really late.

Blogthings

2006-06-03T20:38:00.000-04:00

You Are 80% Happy

You are a very happy person. Generally, you feel content and that all is right with the world.
Occasionally, you have a down day - but you have the ability to pick yourself right back up.

How Happy Are You?

Your Linguistic Profile::

50% General American English

20% Dixie

20% Yankee

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

You Have a Melancholic Temperament

Introspective and reflective, you think about everything and anything.
You are a soft-hearted daydreamer. You long for your ideal life.
You love silence and solitude. Everyday life is usually too chaotic for you.

Given enough time alone, it's easy for you to find inner peace.
You tend to be spiritual, having found your own meaning of life.
Wise and patient, you can help people through difficult times.

At your worst, you brood and sulk. Your negative thoughts can trap you.
You are reserved and withdrawn. This makes it hard to connect to others.
You tend to over think small things, making decisions difficult.

What Temperment Are You?

Your Personality Is

Rational (NT)

You are both logical and creative. You are full of ideas.
You are so rational that you analyze everything. This drives people a little crazy!

Intelligence is important to you. You always like to be around smart people.
In fact, you're often a little short with people who don't impress you mentally.

You seem distant to some - but it's usually because you're deep in thought.
Those who understand you best are fellow Rationals.

In love, you tend to approach things with logic. You seek a compatible mate - who is also very intelligent.

At work, you tend to gravitate toward idea building careers - like programming, medicine, or academia.

With others, you are very honest and direct. People often can't take your criticism well.

As far as your looks go, you're coasting on what you were born with. You think fashion is silly.

On weekends, you spend most of your time thinking, experimenting with new ideas, or learning new things.

The Three Question Personality Test

Your Hidden Talent

You are a great communicator. You have a real way with words.
You're never at a loss to explain what you mean or how you feel.
People find it easy to empathize with you, no matter what your situation.
When you're up, you make everyone happy. But when you're down, everyone suffers.

What's Your Hidden Talent?

You Are Teal Green

You are a one of a kind, original person. There's no one even close to being like you.
Expressive and creative, you have a knack for making the impossible possible.
While you are a bit offbeat, you don't scare people away with your quirks.
Your warm personality nicely counteracts and strange habits you may have.

What Color Green Are You?

You Have Low Self Esteem 40% of the Time

Generally, you feel pretty darn great about who you are, even when you mess up or fail.
Occasionally, a huge setback will make you question yourself, but you pick yourself up quickly.

How is Your Self Esteem?

You Are 50% Weird

Normal enough to know that you're weird...
But too damn weird to do anything about it!

How Weird Are You?

Ok, that's enough already. These things are great when you're too lazy to write anything.

Blooming Aimee and the Noxious Carpet

2006-06-01T20:42:00.000-04:00

I've been wondering about my former classmates at good ol' Buckeye Local High School. I don't keep in touch with any of them, but I check out the alumni section of the website from time to time.

I'm not wondering about anyone in particular, but whether or not we will have a reunion. It'll be interesting to see if anyone takes a notion to arranging one. As of yet there is no info.
I wouldn't be against attending. It would be interesting I think, to see everyone and their husbands and wives.

I was checking out the 2006-2007 Course Catalog. Wow! Things have really changed. I would love to be back in high school now. They are offering so many more electives. It seems that the classes are really college (and life) preparatory, unlike back when I was there. Everything was very generalized and broad.

I guess I've been thinking about high school a lot since my company recently formed a collaboration with Wheeling Park High School to transition the special education students into RNS, WATCH, or competitive employment.
I met with some people yesterday at the facility and it made me think about the almost ten years since I was in one.
High school was really a great time I suppose. I should have taken advantage of my intelligence a bit more, but overall I guess I'm satisfied with my experience.

*The title for today's post came from Band Name Maker, and I think it would be a terrific name for a band if I had any desire to create one.

Memorial Day Weekend Extravaganza!

2006-05-30T06:45:00.000-04:00

Here I am on the hottest day of the year so far.
It was 96 degrees. We went for a walk to the cemetery, that seemed rather fitting for the occasion.

People often say that I look upset in pictures.

I am not upset, in fact they are simply a bunch of twats. I just don't have a very good artificial smile, that's all.

I am quite happy in these photos in case there was any question.

I spent the past couple of days playing with my Photoshop skills, and while I didn't retouch any smiles onto my mug, I did add some nice effects to some older pictures of ours.

Here is an example from summer of 2005 where I'm actually standing shin-deep in the waste waters of the Ohio River but you wouldn't know it anymore since I added this lovely effect.
Ahhh, refreshing.

Here's one of my favorites from New York in 2004. I think it's splendid. The focal point doesn't even look real.

Our ultra posed for snowboard picture was taken on Valentine's Day, 2006 at Seven Springs. This picture graces my cubicle at work in it's original form.

This photo happens to include my best try at an artificial smile. It helped that we took this with the timer while balancing the camera on the door of the truck and it looked as though the camera might fall into the snow at any second.

This is one of my all time favorite photos. It's that hot guy from the Michelob Ultra advertisement.

His body is pretty sexy, I just wonder what his face looks like.

Quizzes Are For Losers

2006-05-28T10:53:00.000-04:00

I am 7% Hippie.

What? Am I a Republican? Why did I even bother taken this test?! I guess I’ll back to my George W. Bush fan club and tell them I just wasted 10 minutes of my life. At least I don’t stink, man.

Take the
Hippie Test
@ FualiDotCom

I am so proud of my very low hippie score. That's the only reason I took this test was to see how anti-hippie I actually am.

I am 53% Emo.

Well.. I've made the cut! Now I'll go buy some promise rings and knit myself a sweater.

Take the
Emo Test
@ FualiDotCom

I'm really not very emo. I mean I like emo music, but I don't think I dress emo at all. I have thick dark rimmed glasses, but I usually opt to wear my contacts instead.

I am 70% Video Game Addict.

Video games are a big portion of my life, maybe too big of a portion. They are not a means of social interaction, despite what I might think. I should just go outside.

Take the
Video Game Addict Test
@ FualiDotCom

I wouldn't say I have a video game problem. I know I play waaaay less than some people, and waaaay less than I used to. I guess it's just something that never dies.

I am 24% White Trash.

I, my friend, have class. I am so not white trash. . I am more than likely Democrat, and my place is neat, and there is a good chance I may never drink wine from a box.

Take the
White Trash Test
@ FualiDotCom

I am happy with these results, especially considering how the deck was stacked against me.

I am 46% Internet Addict.

I could go either way. Deep into the madness of nights filled with coding CGI-Scripts and online role playing games, or I could become a normal user. Good luck!

Take the
Internet Addict Test
@ FualiDotCom

I've come a long way since a couple of years ago. I actually have friends in real life and I can go almost a whole week without being online. Why would I want to though? There is so much to learn...

Another Prick

2006-05-26T12:47:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I gave blood again. I actually passed the hemoglobin and temperature test this time!

Megan went with me in the hopes that they would have free pizza and other delicious lunch fare. Unfortunately they only had Hydrox cookies and flat coke and Megan passed out. Not only that but we were an hour late returning from lunch and the free t-shirts were extra large.

I felt bad so I promised to buy her lunch for dragging her down there.

Blood Types and Personality
It used to be a common practice in Japan to ask a person what his or her blood type is. That's because some Japanese people believe that much like the zodiac sign one was born under supposedly determines traits and characteristics, so does blood type.

In America, a person generally doesn't know their blood type unless they have received a transfusion or they have donated blood to the American Red Cross. Since many young people aren't donors, this kind of fun horoscope-like prediction method would never be very popular here.

Here are the general ideas of each blood type. The Rh factor plays no role determining personality.

Type O:
Type O's are outgoing, and very social. They are initiators, although they don't always finish what they start. Creative and popular, they love to be the center of attention and appear very self confident.
Confident and Strong-Willed, Proud, Dedicated, Sociable, Energetic, Extroverted, Frank, Realist, Showy, Flighty, Generalist, Positive, Independent, Risk-Takers, Dislike taking orders, Insecure, Stubborn & Self-Centered.

Make friends easily and go with flow and grasp opportunity. Quick to start a project or chase an idea. Are good at organizing activities. May have short attention span, and expresses strong emotions. May quickly take opposite views that are deep but not always durable. Classic entrepreneurs and movers and shakers.
Express their emotions but can be swayed by other blood types. Have an intrinsic elegance. Sociable and showy. May be good at adapting to circumstances. Words come easily to them. Not self conscious and will frankly reveal inner feelings. Ambitious, but may have issues with detail.
Like to be touch and be touched by others.

Type A:
While outwardly calm, they have such high standards (perfectionists) that they tend to be balls of nerves on the inside. Type A's are the most artistic of the blood groups. They can be shy, are conscientious, trustworthy, and sensitive.
Obedient, Careful, Sympathetic, Self-Sacrificing, Polite, Honest, Loyal, Emotional, Introverted & Nervous.

Are reserved calm and even tempered. Sensitive to public opinion. May be Introverted, shy and nervous or ill at ease with others. May be Pessimistic. Value relationships and are loyal. Hesitant to change. Nature lovers and dislike crowds - need a private place or secret hideaway. Can be indecisive. Good at team work and obey rules.
Dislike to touch or be touched by others.

Type B:
Goal oriented and strong minded, type B's will start a task and continue it until completed, and completed well. Type B's are the individualists of the blood group categories and find their own way in life.
Cheerful, Optimistic, Active, Sensitive, Kind, Forgetful, unorganized, Noisy, Egocentric

Energetic and have the drive to reach towards goals. May be workaholics. Not the best team players and are individualistic. Do things at one's own pace. Strong personality adventurous. Likes to get one's own way. Are Sociable and enjoy entertaining.
Like to touch or be touched by others.

Type AB:
Type AB's are the split personalities of the blood groups. They can be both outgoing and shy, confident and timid. While responsible, too much responsibility will cause a problem. They are trustworthy and like to help others.
Social, Easy-going, Sympathetic, Diplomatic, Outgoing, Laid-back, Creative, Unpredictable, Artistic, Flexible, Moody and Brooding.

Blend of opposites. Shy with some and bold with some. Introvert and Extrovert. Unpredictable and may seem to have calm exterior. Strong creative strain. Good at spotting problems and skirting them. Like city environment. Get bored easily. Everything they do is compelling. Never take things for granted. Appear mysterious. Contribute harmoniously to society.
Dislike to touch or be touched by others.

Happy Birthday, Baby

2006-05-22T11:25:00.000-04:00

Every time Alfred comes back from being away it feels like the first time I saw him. I'm not sure that he's gonna like me. I feel like I don't deserve him. I don't know why I'm this way. Today is better though. It feels almost normal again, except I have an overwhelming feeling of wanting to spend every minute with him, even more than usual.

Today is Alfred's birthday, he never really ages though. he has more energy now than when we met. He is amazing. I wish I could do something special for him for his birthday. Maybe next year.

I can't wait to take pictures of Arenal volcano for myself. They probably won't be as awesome as this one since I don't know anything about high dynamic range, but they will be mine.

I think in Costa Rica you can see the whole rainbow. The full circle, not just the arc. I'll be happy to look until I find one like that...and then I'll take its picture.

Sunday

2006-05-21T17:35:00.000-04:00

I went to see The Da Vinci Code last night with Megan. It was pretty good, but I haven't read the book so I don't know how closely the movie followed it. She said the book was better, which is usually the case.
I stopped in her house for a few minutes after the movie. I thought her fish was dead but he was just sleeping.

Alfred finally called today from Nick's phone at 1:09 pm. He said that his phone was dead so that's why he hadn't called. He said he had not met someone. He drank too much and got sick and that's why they left Virginia so late.

Hot Pink Sucks

2006-05-20T12:08:00.000-04:00

It's cold, but not raining at the moment. I miss Alfred, but I'm still mad and jealous too. I just want him to come home, and I want to go away from here.

WARNINGExtensive Rant and Several Cheap, Overused 4-Letter Words Follow READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

2006-05-18T16:35:00.000-04:00

This week (and last week) have been incredibly busy at work. I've had trainings to go to, trainings to teach, and everything in between going on. On top of that, money has been tight since Alfred came back from his trip to Oregon. We've been about two checks behind on our bills.

Last week when I asked him if we were going to Tim's going away party on Saturday he said that we had a wedding to go to so we couldn't.
All this time I've been hoping he forgot about that stupid wedding, but apparently the sibling of the bride to be wouldn't let that happen.
First off, let me say that I hate these people. They have never given me so much as the time of day. Apparently I just don't fit in with their crowd. That's just fine with me, because if I fit in with them then I'd be worried about myself.

This wedding is in Virginia at the beach, which hopefully gets flooded by a typhoon this weekend. It is on Saturday, but Alfred had to leave today, which is Thursday. The reason for this I assume, is so that Nick, Drew, and any other friends can go out and do that "traditional stupid man shit" that goes on before all stupid "elaborate traditional weddings".

All of this makes me angry because a few weeks after Alfred and I got married we visited them, and their best reaction to our happiness was utter disbelief. They wanted us to go so far as to show them the marriage certificate because they really didn't believe us. I guess since we weren't important or rich or fake enough to have the "elaborate traditional wedding" then ours wasn't as much of an occasion as theirs, and certainly not important enough to even acknowledge.

So this whole bullshit festival has been in the works for around two years now, because that's the apparent minimum allowable timeframe for coordinating the "elaborate traditional wedding".

These people are the most artificial bunch of girls I've ever had the displeasure of meeting. It's not their bodies that are fake, but their personalities, which is the worst and most dangerous variety of fake in my opinion. I can't even begin to fathom what I would be forced to do if I was unlucky enough to be required to suffer through an evening alone with them. I was, however, conveniently invited to the "elaborate traditional wedding shower" which certainly was because they wanted the pleasure of spending an evening with me, and certainly was not because they were interested in the gift(s), which is why I was conveniently made aware of the locations of the lovely couple's registries.

Conveniently enough, I didn't go, nor did I bother to RSVP, whatever the hell that means anyway.

I'm getting off track though. the reason for my bitter attitude isn't entirely because of the fact that I hate and despise the entire wedding party.
The icing on the "elaborate traditional wedding cake" is that Nick, the sibling of the bride to be is notoriously late for any and every thing. Today it was told to Alfred that Nick would be picking him up to begin the nine hour journey at five o' clock in the evening. I get done with work at four o' clock in the afternoon. I assumed that I would have one hour at minimum to spend with my husband helping him to pack and telling him goodbye.

I was in a meeting from two till four and when I emerged, I found a message on my phone from Alfred saying that he was "on his way". I figured that could only mean that he was on his way to see me at work. I called him only to find out that they had gone on their merry way without so much as a kiss goodbye for the old wife.

Obviously this Nick fellow has no respect for our relationship (big surprise) and no concern for my feelings (Amiee who? Amy who?) which leads me to only hate him deeper still.

Provided that these people are not washed out to sea this very weekend and naturally even if they are, I should hope to never have to suffer through their company again.
My husband is too good to be associating with the likes of them, and if we never have to endure their presence again it will be too soon for me.

Naturally, my absence will further seal the idea into their little minds that "Amy is antisocial, Amie is weird, Amee is nothing at all like us (loud; obnoxious; mildly retarded; overweight; unattractive; pothead; fake; plastic; two-faced) etc." That's dandy with me because of course they will be correct.

Wow, Where Have I Been?

2006-05-04T20:35:00.000-04:00

I've been busy, obviously. No time to catch up now, but here's this:

Link
Let's see....you got 70%

You are the Hero of Time, Link. You are couragous, and strong. You often feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders, and in actuality it is. Now stop reading this and go kick Ganon's ass, rescue Zelda, and get that pesky Triforce of Power once and for all!

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 87% on mushrooms

Link: The what Nintendo character are u Test written by cottonmouth on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

One Day Closer

2006-04-09T13:41:00.002-04:00

I've been biding my time the best that I can. Sleeping, reading the Nsider forums, making graphics, watching tv, and tomorrow I'll be working. Hopefully this week will go by faster since I have a lot of meetings.

Alfred wasn't able to call since Friday because he is deep in the woods on the mountain and isn't returning to civilization until later today.

I can't even describe how happy I'll be to see him again. I have exactly one week to go. This Friday I don't have to work because of the Easter holiday. I was hoping it was Monday that we were off so I'd be able to spend time with my husband, but instead I'll get another day off to spend alone.

Someone on the Nsider forum posted a link to this site that supposedly tells you which celebrity you look like. It's called www.myheritage.com
I'm kinda skeptical though. When I submitted this photo:

I was told that I most resembled Judy Garland.

When I submitted this photo:

It said that I looked like Lucille Ball.

And finally, when I submitted this:

I found out that I look like Mariah Carey.

At least I'm getting some classy results and not men. Some people were getting results of the opposite gender. That can't make a person feel very good.

It's Hard Being Alone...

2006-04-06T21:40:00.000-04:00

...and I've been too sad to post. Thinking about this makes it worse, but I need to write about it.

The routine going to work and coming home part hasn't been bad. It might even be easier than usual.

It's the part when I'm lying in bed wondering what Alfred is doing and if he's ok. Worrying that he'll catch a cold, or get sick from exhaustion and pass out, or twist his ankle, or any number of things. The part when I have time to realize that I'm alone and my husband is 2,560 miles away from me, and if something happened and I had to go there in an emergency it would take me six hours to reach him.

He is in a place on the mountain where there is no mobile phone signal, so he's been able to call me just once a day and talk for five to ten minutes. He can't call before bed, or when he wakes up.

When he does call me I am happy to talk to him but by the end I can't help but cry. Each time I've talked to him I've ended it crying. I have never missed anyone so much. I wish he was coming back this weeked, but he still has ten days to go.

Today I was checking his e-mail since I'm expecting a letter back from the lawyer and there was one from the USCIS:

The following is the latest information on your case status

Receipt Number: MSC0604927200

Application Type: I485 , Application to Register Permanent Residence or
to Adjust Status

Current Status:

On April 5, 2006, a welcome notice was mailed for this case. If 30
days have passed and you have not received this notice. Please call the
National Customer Service Center at (800) 375-5283 during business
hours.

If you have questions or concerns about your application or the case
status results listed above, or if you have not received a decision or
advice from USCIS within the projected processing time frame*, please
contact the National Customer Service Center.

National Customer Service Center (800) 375-5283.

*The projected processing time frame can be found on the receipt notice
that you received from the USCIS.

I don't know what this means, but anything that says welcome seems promising to me. I'm not going to get my hopes up considering how badly the interview went.

Here's the letter I sent to our lawyer, it sums up the ordeal pretty well:

Dear Mr. Rich; Theresa; Bobbie:

Alfred and I reported to our immigration interview yesterday, and it went very poorly from what we observed.

The officer who spoke with us called Alfred in and talked with him for 20-25 minutes (during this time she received 2 calls from her significant other on her cell phone.) She then called me in and and asked me to verify my address, birthdate and SS, and proceeded to ask me roughly seven questions.
What color are our sheets? Which side of the bed does he sleep on? Is there a tv in the room? What brand is it?! Do we use a comforter, what color? What did we do for/receive as gifts for Valentine's day, Anniversary, and my upcoming birthday? Where/when did we meet and who initiated the first date?

She did not ask to see our updated paperwork, in fact when it was offered to her she said "I have other people to see, I don't need it."

After speaking with me, she asked to see Alfred again and when she saw him she said "Well, your answers are inconsistent." She said there was no way that I could forget receiving a new cell phone as a birthday gift only two weeks ago. She was in with him the second time for around 8 minutes, and she did not wish to see me again, or us together.

Each time we tried to elaborate on our answers to provide detail she acted uninterested. Again, we tried to give her the updated Affidavit and our tax information and other new info and she said she did not need it. Alfred asked her during the second trip in and she said she wanted the work letters. Not mine, but his. He gave them to her and that was all.
She didn't tell me anything, and she told him upon leaving that we would get a letter within 6-8 weeks.

Is this normal? I feel that I was treated very unfairly by this officer. Other interviewees had their attornies present, and when Alfred went in without one she seemed flabbergasted that we would appear without representation. I didn't even know it was an option, nor did I think we should need council present.

Perhaps this lady was just in a foul mood, but it seemed like a very rushed interview because each time we offered any information she responded with "It's ok, I don't need it" or, "I have other people to see". She didn't want to see pictures or anything.

This whole ordeal has made me sick to my stomach and now I'll have to wait for 6-8 weeks with severe anxiety over it. I hope you can tell me that this has happened before to clients who have been approved, but I seriously doubt it.

I have printed the appeal information on the USCIS website and I plan to be ready to send this in with our updated packet of information that she refused as soon as we hear something, since there are only 30 days in which to respond.

NONsense...Because Tomorrow is the Interview

2006-04-02T15:50:00.000-04:00

Looks Like I Missed a Few Days

2006-04-01T13:46:00.000-05:00

Aimee took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test!

"Needs a change in her circumstances or in her rela..."

Click here to read the rest of the results.

Alfred and I went Geocaching Thursday after work. It was actually kinda fun. I'm glad he has something new to enjoy with his friends. I have a list of a few other ones that we can do. I was planning on doing it today, but his car is acting up and it won't start. He's stranded at the gym at this very moment, but he says he doesn't want me to come get him, because he'll just call AAA if he can't figure something out.

I have a couple of interesting news stories that I found over the past couple of days. The first one has to do with prayer. What a great story! The second one is about meat. I don't know whether to be scared or excited about it. I think I'll be excited! Home grown meat, yum! And no harm done to animals. I wonder if PETA will be for or against this?

Oh no! (Snakes on a Plane!)

Prayer for the ill may do more harm than good

By Michael Conlon, Chicago
April 1, 2006

NEXT time you're sick consider asking your loved ones not to pray for you.

A study of more than 1800 patients who underwent heart bypass surgery has failed to show that prayers said for their recovery had any impact. In fact, some of the patients who knew they were being prayed for did worse than others who were only told they might be prayed for.

The patients in the study at six US hospitals included 604 who were actually prayed for after being told they might or might not be; another 597 who were not prayed for after being told they might or might not be; and a group of 601 who were prayed for and told they would be.

The praying was done by three Christian groups. It started on the eve of or day of surgery and lasted for two weeks.

Among the first group — who were prayed for but only told they might be — 52 per cent had post-surgical complications, compared with 51 per cent in the second group, who were not prayed for though told they might be.

In the third group, who knew they were being prayed for, 59 per cent had complications.

After 30 days, however, the death rates and incidence of major complications was about the same across all three groups, said a report published in the American Heart Journal.

"Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on whether complications occurred (and) patients who were certain that intercessors would pray for them had a higher rate of complications than patients who were uncertain but did receive intercessory prayer," it said.

The study was designed only to try to measure the impact of intercessory prayer on heart surgery patients, not to address the existence of God.

Most patients believed in spiritual healing and thought friends or relatives would be praying for them as well.

The authors warned it might be impossible to disentangle the effects of study prayer from background prayer, and said a possible limitation was that those doing the special praying had no connection with the subjects.

"Private or family prayer is widely believed to influence recovery from illness, and the results of this study do not challenge this belief," the report concluded.

Scientists forecast meat grown on kitchen counter

CBC News

Scientists are trying to develop an industrial process that grows meat tissue from a few cells in a lab – or even at home, in a device like a bread maker.

Instead of being cut from a farm animal, the beef, pork or chicken would be grown in incubators from a few starter cells, a growth medium and some hormones to get the cells to divide.

The first attempts by scientists who grow animal muscle tissue in the lab have been small in scale. But researchers are looking forward to the day when meat could be cultivated in industrial bioreactors or even in a device sitting on a kitchen counter.

"Right now, the scale that's being used in the research is about one-half of a litre for ... the incubator the muscle is grown in," said University of Maryland researcher Jason Matheny.

Lab-grown meat could have less fat, diseases

He said a device similar to a bread maker could one day be used to manufacture meat in the home.

Matheny said muscle produced in an incubator could have reduced fat content, and the process would do away with problems such as bacterial contamination and mad cow disease.

While he hasn't tasted engineered meat himself, Matheny said others have.

"It has the taste and texture resembling the ground meat products that are already available," such as hamburger or chicken nuggets, he said.

"Producing a steak or ... a whole chicken breast is a much more difficult task, technically," said Matheny.

Grown frog muscle tasted like jelly, scientists say

Researchers in the Netherlands have grown mouse meat and are now working on pork. Australian scientists served grown frog muscle tissue with apple brandy sauce at an exhibition in France in 2003. They said the meat tasted like jelly on cloth.

American researchers, funded by NASA, grew goldfish meat in 2001 as part of an experiment to see if fish could be grown to feed astronauts on long space missions.

While the idea of growing meat for space travel is fairly common in science fiction novels, NASA has since pulled funding for lab-grown meat.

Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina, said NASA's decision cut off an important source of funding for his work.

Mironov said producing cultivated meat could be difficult to achieve and expensive in the short term. People would have to pay more for cultured meat than for the genuine article.

Books, Books, Books

2006-03-26T21:08:00.000-05:00

I was going to update my profile page to include some of the books I like, but I realized that I can only put titles with commas, that's so blah. I like to write more than just titles, so I thought I'd make a post about books today.

Let me start by saying that I like anything by Neil Gaiman and everything by Richard Laymon. These two top my list for the time being and until I find someone better. It's gonna be hard to top those.

Richard Laymon is a horror writer that unfortunately passed away on February 14, 2001. His writing is shocking. Reading his stories makes you go to the place in your mind that you are ashamed to go, and then you realize that you are not alone .This man must have gone there too...and he was bold enough to write about it.
Richard Laymon's Official Site
Neil Gaiman is amazing in his ability to write a creative captivating fairytale for adults. I love his work, and I look up to him as my favorite author. Read American Gods, if nothing else. It's a great road story. If you can't possibly read an entire novel, then please pick up Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions at the library and read "Murder Mysteries." It's very short, only about four pages. That story should make anyone a fan.
Neil Gaiman's Official Site

My favorite book of all time is called Songs of Earth and Power, by Greg Bear. This is the only book of this size that I have read through thrice and enjoyed each time. It is actually a combination of two earlier books called The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage. Mr. Bear consistently references so many literary and musical works, this must have taken an amazing amount of time to research. It's a beautiful story that makes you believe in elves, and they aren't as nice as you might have thought! Greg Bear is a science fiction writer, this being a fantasy, is not his usual fare. I haven't read anything else by him, because I am not as interested as I once was in sci-fi novels.
Greg Bear's Official Site

I love the Sano Ichiro series by Laura Joh Rowland. In 1996 I heard an ad on the radio for a book called Shinju. It sounded good so I picked it up. I've been a fan ever since. She has her Japanese historical accuracy nailed down, but at the same time the characters are enjoyable enough to keep you reading book after book. Reading these novels will transport you to the Edo period in ancient Japan, a dangerous time when honor was literally everything.
Laura Joh Rowland's Official Site

I really enjoyed Lamb: The Gospel Acoording to Biff Christ's Childhood Pal.
This is a comedy by Christopher Moore about the adventures of Jesus, as told by his not so holy or popular best friend, Biff. I found this story so endearing, it made me think more highly of Jesus the man. Sadly I also really took a liking to Biff, too bad he was fictional. Although this book isn't meant to offend anyone, if you are easily offended and religious it might not be for you.
I've read The Stupidest Angel, which I also recommend, and I plan to read a few more of his books before it's all over with.
Christopher Moore's Official Site

Finally Saturday

2006-03-25T12:28:00.000-05:00

The dinner was great, my feet hurt though. The food was lasagna, and it was good. I brought some home from Alfred.

The Open House didn't have as big of a turnout as I expected, but the people that did come were important. We talked with the children's home and the school board about collaborating some efforts. All in all it was fun, but it seemed like a longer day than usual.

Today is our 1st anniversary. Alfred told me that people at work were saying the first year is the hardest. It hasn't been hard for us so I expect the years to come will be even better. I am so glad I went to Belmont Tech to be an EMT. I never figured out why I abruptly decided to do that. Maybe it was fate or something silly like that.

Tomorrow is the Dinner

2006-03-22T20:37:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is the Donor Dinner. It sounds like it's going to be nice. They put alot of work into making it classy. Megan and I went to the mall after work to find something to wear. She got some pants but I didn't find anything. I hope I fit into my dress pants. I'm not going to try them on tonight since we ate pizza. I'll wait until the last minute to try them on in the morning. I can't wait until this whole thing is over. I hate to sound like that but it's a big ordeal and I'm the kind of person who like's when everything is normal.

I Stayed Home From Work Today

2006-03-21T14:46:00.000-05:00

I didn't wake up until 1:00 pm. I'm not feeling too great. My eyes hurt.

You're a yellow pikmin!
You are the lightest of the 5 pikmin kinds which means
you can be thrown very far and very high! Also you are the only kind of pikmin that can hold the explosive bomb rocks!
They can blow up very hard walls!
Take this quiz!

This is a great article

2006-03-17T10:56:00.000-05:00

The Science Of Sexual Orientation
March 12, 2006

(CBS) Jared and Adam are nine years old. Their mother says she began to notice a difference in Adam when he was only 18 months old. Adam's behavior is an example of childhood gender nonconformity, say scientists. Research shows that most children with extreme tendencies toward gender nonconformity grow up to be gay.

There are few issues as hotly contested — and as poorly understood — as the question of what makes a person gay or straight. It's not only a political, social, and religious question but also a scientific question, one that might someday have an actual, provable answer. The handful of scientists who work in this under-funded and politically charged field will tell you: That answer is a long way off. But as Lesley Stahl reports, their efforts are already yielding tantalizing clues. One focus of their research is twins.

The bedrooms of 9-year-old twins Adam and Jared couldn't be more different. Jared's room is decked out with camouflage, airplanes, and military toys, while Adam's room sports a pastel canopy, stuffed animals, and white horses. When Stahl came for a visit, Jared was eager to show her his G.I. Joe collection.

"I have ones that say like Marine and SWAT. And then that's where I keep all the guns for 'em," he explained.

Adam was also proud to show off his toys. "This is one of my dolls. Bratz baby," he said.

Adam wears pinkish-purple nail polish, adorned with stars and diamonds.

Asked if he went to school like that, Adam says, "Uh-huh. I just showed them my nails, and they were like, 'Why did you do that?'"

Adam's behavior is called childhood gender nonconformity, meaning a child whose interests and behaviors are more typical of the opposite sex. Research shows that kids with extreme gender nonconformity usually grow up to be gay.

Danielle, Adam and Jared's mom, says she began to notice this difference in Adam when he was about 18 months old and began asking for a Barbie doll. Jared, meanwhile, was asking for fire trucks. Not that much has changed. Jared’s favorite game now is Battlefield 2, Special Forces. As for Adam, he says, "It's called Neopets: The Darkest Faerie."

Asked how he would describe himself to a stranger, Jared says, "I'm a kid who likes G.I. Joes and games and TV."

"I would say like a girl," Adam replied to the same question. When asked why he thinks that is, Adam shrugged.

"To me, cases like that really scream out, 'Hey, it's not out there. It's in here.' There's no indication that this mother is prone to raise very feminine boys because his twin is not that way," says Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University and a leading researcher in the field of sexual orientation.

Bailey says he doesn't think nurture is a plausible explanation.

Psychologists used to believe homosexuality was caused by nurture — namely overbearing mothers and distant fathers — but that theory has been disproved. Today, scientists are looking at genes, environment, brain structure and hormones. There is one area of consensus: that homosexuality involves more than just sexual behavior; it’s physiological.

Bailey and his colleagues set up a series of experiments in his lab at Northwestern University. In one study, researcher Gerulf Rieger videotaped gay and straight people sitting in a chair, talking. He then reduced them visually to silent black and white outlined figures and asked volunteers to see if they could tell gay from straight. The idea was to find out if certain stereotypes were real and observable.

Based on physical movement and gestures of the figures, more often than not, the volunteers in the study could tell a difference.

"So, is the conclusion that gay people do in fact move differently?" Stahl asked Rieger.

"Yeah, absolutely," he replied. It's not true 100 percent of the time; it is true on average. The researchers also studied the way gay and straight people talk, and they found differences on average there too.

This research is controversial. Some say it is reinforcing stereotypes. But to Bailey, the stereotypes suggest there's a feminizing of the brain in gay men, and masculinizing in lesbians. Ironically though, when it comes to their sex lives, he says gay and straight men actually have a lot in common.

"Straight men tend to be shallow in terms of focusing on looks. Gay men are shallow, too. Straight men are more interested than straight women in having casual, uncommitted sex. Gay men are like that, too," says Bailey.

"One has the impression that gay men are much more inclined toward casual sex than straight men," Stahl said.

"They're just more successful at it, because the people they're trying to have sex with are also interested in it," Bailey explained.

"But don't you find this interesting that the one big area where gay men are more like straight men is in sex? I mean, that is…both amusing and odd," Stahl said.

"It suggests that whatever causes a man to be gay doesn't make him feminine in every respect. There must be different parts of the brain that can be feminized independently from each other," Bailey replied.

But how and when does this feminizing occur? If the differences were already apparent in childhood, that would point to an early, perhaps even genetic origin — and that's what Bailey and Rieger are testing in a new study using childhood home movies.

In the study, volunteers were asked to rate each child's femininity or masculinity. Stahl took the test and rated two girls highly feminine.

When shown video of a toddler girl running a truck off of a table, Stahl observed, "She's really not girly. Isn't that interesting? She’s not girly."

She also observed differences in two boys, one of whom would grow up to be straight, while the other is now gay.

If you can spot a child's future sexual orientation before the child even knows he or she has one, doesn't that prove it's genetic? Studies have shown that homosexuality runs in families. So genes must be the answer. But then the researchers tell you identical twins can have different sexual orientations.

60 Minutes found identical twins Steve and Greg Lofts in New York. They had the same upbringing, have the same DNA — and yet Greg is gay and Steve is straight.

When people meet the twins and find out one of them is gay, Greg says people have asked if he's sure, and how it can be. "Everyone is curious about that," he says.

There were signs, even when they were little kids. Their mother told Stahl that Steve loved sports and the outdoors while Greg liked helping out in the kitchen. But it wasn't until high school that Steve became convinced Greg was gay.

Asked if he said anything to his brother, Steve says, "I did actually. And I think the way I worded it was something like, 'You know, Greg, if you're gay, it's OK with me. And I'll still love you the same.' And he gave a very philosophical answer. He said something like, 'Well, I love the soul of a person and not the physical being.' And in my mind, I was like, 'Yep, he's gay.'"

"I wasn't ready just yet," Greg added.

Does this prove that it's not genetic?

"What it proves is it's not completely genetic. They have the same genes," says Bailey.

Asked if that brings us back to the mother and the father, Bailey says no.

"But that's environment," Stahl said.

"That's environment. But that's not the only environment. There's also the environment that happens to us while we’re in the womb. And scientists are realizing that environment is much more important than we ever thought it was," Bailey explained.

A newborn rat pup in the lab of Dr. Marc Breedlove at Michigan State University, may, oddly enough, hold important clues to what happens in the womb.

Dr. Breedlove says he can take a male rat and make it behave like a female for the rest of its life, and vice versa for a female, just by altering the hormones it's exposed to at birth. Because rats are born underdeveloped, that's roughly the same as altering a third-trimester human fetus in the womb. But first, he said, Stahl would need a crash course in rat sex.

Dr. Breedlove explained that male rats, including one he showed Stahl called "Romeo," will mount any rat that comes their way. In the mating process, the female performs something called lordosis, where she lifts her head and rump.

If Romeo goes after a male, Dr. Breedlove says the male will seem profoundly indifferent. But Breedlove says he can change all that. He gave a female rat a single shot of the male sex hormone testosterone at birth. Now grown up, she will never perform lordosis.

But a male rat did. He was castrated at birth, depriving him of testosterone.

"So you created a gay rat?" Stahl asked.

"I wouldn't say that these are gay rats. But I will say that these are genetic male rats who are showing much more feminine behavior," he explained.

So the answer may be that it's not genes but hormones.

"That's exactly the question that we're all wondering. This business of testosterone having such a profound influence. Does that have some relevance to humans?" Breedlove said.

While biologists look at hormones for answers about human sexuality, other scientists are looking for patterns in statistics. And hard as this is to believe, they have found something they call "the older brother effect."

"The more older brothers a man has, the greater that man's chance of being gay," says Bailey.

Asked if that's true, Bailey says, "That is absolutely true."

If this comes as a shock to you, you’re not alone. But it turns out, it’s one of the most solid findings in this field, demonstrated in study after study.

And the numbers are significant: for every older brother a man has, his chances of being gay increase by one third. Older sisters make no difference, and there's no corresponding effect for lesbians. A first-born son has about a 2 percent chance of being gay, and the numbers rise from there. The theory is it happens in the womb.

"Somehow, the mother's body is remembering how many boys she's carried before," says Breedlove. "The favorite hypothesis is that the mother may be making antibodies when she sees a boy the first time, and then affect subsequent boys when she carries them in utero."

"You mean, like she's carrying a foreign substance?" Stahl asked.

"And if you think about it, a woman who's carrying a son for the first time, she is carrying a foreign substance," Breedlove replied. "There are some proteins encoded on his Y chromosome that her body has never seen before and that her immune system would be expected to regard as 'invaders,'" he added.

It’s still not a proven theory and it gets even stranger.

"One of the things we've only found out lately is that older brothers affect a boy only if the boy is right-handed," Breedlove said. "If the boy is left-handed, if his brain is organized in a left-handed fashion, it doesn't matter how many older brothers he has, his probability of being gay is just like the rest of the population."

You can give yourself a headache trying to apply all the theories to real people. Greg and Steve Lofts both are right-handed, and they do have an older brother, so maybe that's why Greg is gay. But they also have several gay relatives, which suggests it could be in the genes, except where does that leave Steve?

Adam and Jared, fraternal twins, have older brothers, but they're ambidextrous.

Then there's the question of how something in the womb could affect one twin but not the other. There are many more questions at this point than answers, but the scientists 60 Minutes spoke to are increasingly convinced that genes, hormones, or both — that something is happening to determine sexual orientation before birth. Adam has come up with his own theory.

"I was supposed to be a girl in my mom's stomach. But my mom wished for all boys. So, I turned into a boy," Adam explained.

Asked if he wished he was a girl, Adam nodded.

"Do you think there was anything that you could have done that would have changed Adam?" Stahl asked Adam and Jared's mom Danielle.

"I could have changed Adam on the outside to where he would have showed me the macho boy that I would want as a boy. But that would not change who he is inside. And I think that would have damaged him a lot more," she said.

Stahl asked both boys if they are proud of the way they are, and both boys gave her big nods.

"Yup," Adam replied.

I got a new phone!

2006-03-16T01:01:00.000-05:00

Which Fruits Basket Character are you?

I am Hattori...

Today we went to the mall after work and Alfred bought me a new phone for my birthday present. It's a really nice SLVR. I don't usually get all excited about cell phones, and I never liked mp3 players. This phone has an mp3 player in it and it's really cool! I put 30 songs in it and there is still plenty of space.

We also went to Applebee's and got my favorite things from there- a ginger chicken bowl, and a white chocolate blondie. I almost forgot how good they were.

I had such a good time. it seems like we haven't gone out to eat together in a long time. It was a great early birthday present. Now we won't have to do anything too big for the actual day. If he doesn't make it home in time I won't be that disappointed because we had a nice birthday outing already.

I've been posting a picture of Alfred each day to remind me of just how lucky I am, but he doesn't let me take enough pictures of him. I have to use a substitution today. It looks like a medieval warrior. I like it.

What a long weekend...

2006-03-14T20:12:00.000-05:00

I had a bad weekend. I was depressed for most of it. Alfred wasn't home, and when he was I wasn't even happy with him. I get so insecure sometimes. I don't know why. I haven't felt that way in a long time. This week is going better so far. Work has kept me busy. We're actually making some progress on my car situation I think. Lee is going to work on it Thursday.

I hate to admit it but I like these sparkly things those girls are using on Myspace. Just not in excess.

Soo...on Sunday Alfred went to work at 2pm and he worked all night until midnight on Monday! That was a looong couple of days. I was so proud of him. He brought another guy back to life. I guess this man was so dead he was blue and Alfred performed compressions on him and he came back. Usually when someone comes back with CPR they die again for good shortly after, but this one hung on and did well.

I got Mario Kart DS today finally! I wanted it for Christmas but everyone was sold out I guess. it's hard though. I should have know it would be since I was never very good at the other versions of Mario kart. I enjoy it, but I'm gonna get pwned if I play on wi-fi. Megan and I have a lunch date to play tomorrow. I'm so excited to find someone else in the "real world" with a DS! Yay.

Oh...I need a haircut. I don't want it short again, but the choppy shagness of it was nice. It's grown out to the point where it just looks a mess. I want it shaped up but I want to keep the length. I need to print that out or remember to say those exact words when I go because 10:1 it'll be wrong if I don't.

Alfred discovered Myspace

2006-03-12T15:35:00.000-05:00

Apparently his friends are all doing it. The strange thing is they aren't using the blog, just the profile. They make this really elaborate profile with music and pictures and they never even post a single blog. It seems kinda pointless to me, but then I don't know anyone who uses myspace. If I did maybe I would see a use for it.

So Friday night he decided he must have one of these. He went to work on it and grew bored quickly so he put me to work on it. I messed with it all day Saturday and I couldn't get music on it. I got it in the blog, just not on the profile. He got on there sometime during the night and he managed to get his music on there. I swear I don't know why he looks to me to fix his online stuff when it's obvious he can do a better job of it himself.

http://www.myspace.com/alfredvalle

He put that bad picture in after I went to bed. I had one on there of him looking hot as usual. He would rather look goofy I guess. I hope this fad wears off soon because I don't want him to meet girls that are nicer than me online.
It's not hard to meet girls that are nicer than me, but none of them could love him as much as I do. I know that for a fact.

Good News! If I were a video games character, I would be Mario!

I am Mario.

I like to jump around, and would lead a fairly serene and aimless existence if it weren't for my friends always getting into trouble. I love to help out, even when it puts me at risk. I seem to make friends with people who just can't stay out of trouble. What Video Game Character Are You?

I had TAPS retraining

2006-03-08T20:47:00.000-05:00

I got to see Jessica who I used to work with. She is working at RNS again. She's doing well, focusing on school. The three hours went fast.
We ate pizza tonight from Enzio's. Alfred picked it up on the way home. He likes to get it once a week, but I'd prefer every two weeks. Once a week is too often for fast food in my opinion.
He likes it though, so it makes me happy when we get it.

Alfred has to work till midnight

2006-03-06T20:48:00.000-05:00

I knew it was only a matter of time before he would have to work the full double shift. We got lucky for a long time though. Tonight I just have to suck it up and hope that he's tired when he comes home so we can go to bed together. I hope he overcomes his insomnia soon. I worry about him, but at the same time it makes me mad that he can't come to bed. I just want him to be ok, not tired, and happy.

My day at work was very busy. I met with four clients. Tomorrow I don't have to go to that training that I was planning on going to. That frees up alot of time to get things done at work. I can get a few job site visits in and do my homework for the administrator's meeting on Wednesday.

I really need to get to the mall to have my glasses tightened. I keep forgetting to do that.

I discovered Userbars.com yesterday. I had been seeing them around but I didn't know there was a name for them. I decided that these are my new hobby.

I can make a new one every time I get a new hobby! I can make them for other people! I love making graphics. Maybe someone will want me to make one for them. I wouldn't mind.

Alfred Went to Rural Disaster Training

2006-03-04T12:19:00.000-05:00

So I am home playing DS, reading the Nsider boards, and basically just chillin' at home with the kitties.

It's Flea Market Day in Animal Crossing: Wild World. Not one of my favorite events, but hey, it's something.

My Electroplankton is coming on March 8th. I'm looking forward to trying it out. Too bad I have training until 6:30 that night at work. I am gonna enjoy this weekend because on Monday it's back to fighting with the insurance company and I have a lot of meetings and trainings this week as well.

Last night Alfred was talking about his trip to Oregon and he said that there were just 27 days till he goes. I'm not looking forward to him being gone for two weeks at all. I've never been away from him for that long. I can't stand when he was gone for two days. Heck, I cried every time he went to work a midnight.

On a brighter note, we have our immigration interview the day before he is leaving. I am so nervous about it, but I'm not sure why. What if they don't like us? What if God forbid, they think we aren't really in love? I know about a hundred people who could tell them about us, but they aren't going to be there. I guess I shouldn't worry. Unless they're completely blind they're gonna know how we feel about each other. I guess I am just worrying for nothing as usual.

It's Friday

2006-03-03T22:45:00.000-05:00

The appraiser came and looked at my car today. I won't know anything till Monday or Tuesday. I got a rental though.

The random picture on the left is a sloth baby. Sometime soon I will be able to take my own photographs of sloths.

An Eventful Tuesday

2006-03-01T09:07:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a productive day. I got alot of work done on my proposal. I ended up staying till 6:45 last night.

I was one minute from my house when I got run over by a truck.

I was driving up the hill toward home and a Dodge Ram 4x4 stopped in front of me and proceeded to back up into and over the front end of my Pontiac Sunfire.

Up until that point, I was having a great day. Apparently, the truck has full coverage which will cover the repair/ replacement of the value of my car. I haven't heard anything from the insurance companies yet. We will see how that goes.

It's Monday

2006-02-27T21:03:00.000-05:00

There wasn't much going on today. I was tired this morning, nothing new there. It snowed a little bit, but we aren't supposed to get much accumulation, if any.

To spice things up a little bit, I have decided to dedicate the post for today to my wonderful husband. Thank you for washing my car, thank you for putting up with me, and thank you for just being you.

Here's a little song...

Why do you love me?
Why do you need me?
Always and forever

We met in a chatroom
Now our love can really bloom
Sure, the world wide web is great
But you, you make me salivate

Yes I love technology
But not as much as you, you see
But I still love technology
Always and Forever

Our love is like a flock of doves
Flying up to heaven above
Always and Forever
Always and Forever
Yes our love is truly great
Always and forever

-Kip Dynamite

We didn't meet in a chat room, but he loves technology, and he also loves....

Yes, MythBusters. He loves them, and if there was a way I could arrange for him to go and meet them I would do whatever it takes to make it happen.

That's all I can think of for my dedication.
I love you Alfredo, even when you're mean because you're sleepy.

Getting Up to Date

2006-02-26T14:12:00.000-05:00

I wanted to begin writing in January, but I guess I didn't make it. Here's a wrap up of February so far.

Alfred got me an orchid for my desk at work. it's very pretty. Nobody believes it's real. This picture doesn't do it justice, but it gives a good idea of what my desk is like.

We went to Seven Springs on Valentine's Day. It's the first time we have gone with just the two of us. I had a good time. I wish it wasn't so far away, we could go all the time after work if it didn't take so long to get there. I really would like to do more snowboarding this year, but we haven't had any snow. Oglebay is out of the question, since they can't make snow like Seven Springs can.

Since Valentine's Day, I've been really busy with work. I'm working on a grant proposal, while still fitting in my client visits, and I'm working on a project for the open house on March 24th. I also volunteered to help on a few other projects.

Alfred went to South Carolina on the 20th and he didn't come home until the 23rd. The flight home was cancelled due to fog, so he had to stay an extra night in a hotel. He had a great time visiting his old friends. He misses them alot and he wants me to meet them.

I really don't like when he goes away. The trip to Oregon in April is going to be really hard. He'll be gone for ten days. I just hope he has fun and has a safe trip. His friend Kent wants to go now. I hope he can, that would make Alfred really happy.

Tomorrow is Monday again and I haven't got any meetings scheduled so I should be able to get some paperwork done.

Aimee Valle

Love Scale

Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale

I had to record this

UK Mice are Getting Ready for Spring Break Early

Movies Not to be Missed

The Week in Review

It's a good thing I already forgot all that I learned in Physics...

This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world

I Need Fall Clothes

Ok, Seriously...

I Don't Think I Like Saturdays Anymore

I Can't Dance

You know anybody who needs an "anti-stupid" pill?

More Eggs...

Adopted Eggs..Woot

A New Day

KOSHATNIK

Camp Hyrule Signups Today!

useratonkachi

Stupid Isn't Cute

It's Not Easy Being Green

You Can Only Get So Naked

Screw You, Yahoo

Camp Hyrule

What is Camp Hyrule?

No Catchy Titles Here

Sheep of the Day

News...Just the Good Stuff

Wisdom

Land of Enchantment

A Little Slice of Hell

A Lesson Learned & Unfortunate Happenings

You Miss So Much When You're Plugged In

Last Night I Had a Strange Dream

Costa Rica

Blogthings

Blooming Aimee and the Noxious Carpet

Memorial Day Weekend Extravaganza!

Quizzes Are For Losers

Another Prick

Happy Birthday, Baby

Sunday

Hot Pink Sucks

*WARNING*Extensive Rant and Several Cheap, Overused 4-Letter Words Follow *READ AT YOUR OWN RISK*

Wow, Where Have I Been?

One Day Closer

It's Hard Being Alone...

NONsense...Because Tomorrow is the Interview

Looks Like I Missed a Few Days

Books, Books, Books

Finally Saturday

Tomorrow is the Dinner

I Stayed Home From Work Today

This is a great article

I got a new phone!

What a long weekend...

Alfred discovered Myspace

I had TAPS retraining

Alfred has to work till midnight

Alfred Went to Rural Disaster Training

It's Friday

An Eventful Tuesday

It's Monday

Getting Up to Date

WARNINGExtensive Rant and Several Cheap, Overused 4-Letter Words Follow READ AT YOUR OWN RISK