Merry Christmas

I have about a million things to discuss and questions to answer and I promise I will get to them. Soon. (I know, I always say that... Consider this your free lesson in patience : ) But for now I just wanted to link to this cute video of some kids in New Zealand acting out the story of the Nativity. It's just really cute and I don't think you will be disappointed if you check it out. So click here to see it and have a Merry Christmas!

Videos of Evan

So these videos are mostly for my family because my email has a ridiculously low MB allowance on video attachments. Go figure. But anybody who likes cute babies is also welcome to watch the most adorable nephew in all the land : ) Evan, I apologize in advance for spoiling you. I just know I am not going to be able to help myself.
Disclaimers:
*I had to put each video in a separate post because blogger doesn't like me lately, maybe because I have neglected it. So you will have to scroll down to see the other videos. Sorry.
*I know that other people are used to the sound of my voice but I don't think I will ever get over how strange and annoying it sounds to me on tape and thus feel the need to apologize to anyone who has to listen to me : )
*I also forgot that turning the camera sideways when in video mode does not actually work. It just puts the video sideways. I'm sorry. He's still cute sideways though.
*You probably thought I would put a disclaimer in here saying that Evan may not in fact be the cutest nephew in all the land. But you would be wrong. He is. At least until he gets a brother or cousin. No disclaimers: )

Evan vs The Stairs

Evan's Teeth

Dancing Boy

Called To Serve...

This guy (My youngest brother Kyle)


Has been called to serve in the Korea Busan (Pusan) Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Pusan is in the bottom right corner of this map. (Apparently there is some confusion as to whether it is Busan or Pusan because the mission call says Busan, but all the maps say Pusan. I am betting P's get pronounced as B's in Korean)

And here is a map of where the Koreas are in relation to the rest of the world. (Between China and Japan basically)


He leaves for the MTC on December 29, 2010. We are very excited and proud of him. Anyong Korea, here comes Elder Schultz!

I'm Alive! (Along With A Lot Of Men)

So, I have been meaning to blog for a while now and I even got so far as to do a small amount of research on the causes of humidity, as per Elise's question, but alas, nothing came of it. I am still working on that one and hope to be able to answer it soon but for now I seem to have put up a mental block that is preventing me from grasping the concept.

In the meantime I have been keeping busy with work, microbiology, and genetics (there's another mental block...)( O. Chem is having to wait till next semester on account of there are more crazy people than I thought because the class was full and I couldn't get in.) Other than that things are pretty much the same in my life. Which, all things considered, is ok.

In the meantime, I got another question which has a pretty quick and easy answer, which is about all that I have time or the mental capacity for at the moment so I thought I would tackle it. The question is, are there more males or females born in the world or is it just 50/50?
If I had to guess I would think there were more females by far, based mainly on the fact that there seem to be no single guys around..... but actually, it turns out that there are more boys born than girls. (You'd think my odds would be better...)

Apparently there are about 105 baby boys born for every 100 baby girls. And even though women have a longer life expectancy than men (about 80 years to about 75 years) there are still more men on the planet at any given time than there are women. Which leaves only one question: Where are the good single ones? If you find them you are certainly welcome to direct them my way : )

Three Things (and one of them is really long)

1. I finally read "Three Cups of Tea," which Rhonda reccommended to me approximately a grazillion years ago. And I loved it. So thanks for the reccommendation Rhonda. In the future I will try to get to your picks sooner : ) (This was a combination of the one copy the library had having holds on it for 8 months, being distracted by other interesting books, and forgetting that you had reccommended it.) At any rate it was a really great book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I highly reccommend it to anyone and everyone.
- Which reminds me, I have a bookshelf on my blog of the books that I have been reading and at one point there were stars underneath each book that indicated how much I enjoyed it. Most of them had lots of stars because I generally don't finish a book if I don't like it after 20 pages or so. There are some exceptions though, but the stars disappeared. So if you ever see a book I have read and wonder if it is worth reading just send me an email or leave me a post and I will give you my thoughts. And feel free to leave me reccommendations as well. I am always looking for good books.

2. I think I am more boring than ever right now. All I have to really post about is work, and work is the last thing I want to think about when I am away from it. (During it too, but I can't really get away from that.) Once school starts in a few weeks I will regale you with stories of my rounds with Organic Chemistry, which I have heard is really really difficult and which is therefore making me very nervous (so any encouragement from those of you who have taken it and think that I may be able to survive it would be greatly appreciated.) In the meantime I will tell you about work. Specifically, How to Annoy Your Cashier!

• Rather than handing your cash to your cashier, put it on the scanner or the place where you write your checks. In other words, act as though she has some sort of horribly contagious disease or as if you were living in 18th century India and she was an "untouchable." It's sure to make her day.
• Even better, you can put your cash on the conveyor belt. Nothing makes more sense than to send her scrambling to grab the bills and coins about to flip off the end of the MOVING OBJECT you just threw them onto. Don't worry, it doesn't make you look like an idiot at all. Nope.
• Ignore your cashier while you carry on a non-essential cell phone conversation that even the person on the other end of the line doesn't want to listen to. Take lots of time unloading your groceries during said conversation because the people behind you are in no hurry and are clearly amazed at your multi-tasking abilities. When your cashier needs to communicate with you, indicate the inconvenience she is causing you and her low level of importance to the human race by mouthing an irritated response to her, rather than HANGING UP THE FREAKING PHONE like a civilized humnan and being considerate of anyone but yourself! (And just in case you were wondering, yes, it is always 100 percent appropriate to carry on a cell phone conversation in the bathroom while you are doing your business, especially if you are discussing something as important as which sheets to bring camping (True, very disgusting, story). That old common decency rule of only calling from the bathroom if you are having a baby or a seizure? So last century!)
• Rather than taking the items out of the giant storage bin you put them in while you were shopping, just put the whole 3 foot tall bucket on the conveyer belt. It shouldn't be too difficult for her to reach over her head to fish them out blindly and scan them.
• Go ahead, write out the whole check. Slowly. In cursive. After asking to borrow her pen. And what the date is. And the amount again. Then act like you shouldn't have to sign your name electronically because you already signed the check. The one that she is immediately going to hand back to you because the machine runs it like a debit card.
• Stare at the sacks of groceries piling up on the turntable while your cashier struggles to continue scanning and bagging the 3 feet of them still on the conveyor belt. Don't lift a finger to put them in your cart. Allow her the pleasure of loading your groceries for you.
• Tell her that you have X number of cornS. Not X ears of corn. This will give her the lovely pleasure of imagining your disgusting feet, filled with X number of cornS. She will eventually realize that you are referring to the vegetable, not the foot condition, but only after having that lovely mental picture ingrained in her head all day.
• Please, bring your children under the age of 4 to the grocery store after midnight. Show society (and your cashier) what a great mom you are!

Ok, I realize that not all of these tricks apply to every grocery store, or even every cashier. Some places you do have to write out the check and most normal cashiers probably don't have my fascination with words that can mean two different things. But I would still say that the above rules will hold up pretty well in most situations. If you don't believe me, try one out on me during my next shift. I'm sure you'll love my response.

3. If I don't post often enough for you, I have recently discovered a new website that I have wasted plenty of time on myself and will now be kind enough to share with you. It is called hyperboleandahalf.com and this is one of my favorite posts. Be forewarned, she doesn't always have the cleanest mouth around but generally keeps things in check.

So there is my latest random post. Hopefully the next three things I think of to post about will be more interesting. If not, you can still send me questions and as promised ,I will come up with an answer that sounds plausible to me :)

Dear...

Dear Self,

Why is it that whenever you think of something you can write about on your blog you completely forget what it was in the 8 second time frame between logging on to the computer and bringing up the internet?

Also, are you allergic to being fat? Because ever since you gained back all that weight you lost after your mission you have gotten increasingly, and annoyingly, itchy. What gives? Is that even medically possible? Will you just quit it already?

And really, why did you gain back all that weight? Ugh.

Dear Springville City,

Is it really necessary to shut down the north-south street that I have to cross to get to my house for 10 blocks for your construction project? Especially when every time I drive by one of the closed streets there is absolutely nothing going on and no reasonable explanation for why I can't just cut across, except for the 89 million orange barrels blocking the way. Also, if it is an absolute necessity to make me drive a mile out of my way to get home (even though you only have enough crew members and equipment to work on one block at a time) could you at least not open random streets at random times to get my hopes up, only to close them less than 24 hours later? Because that is just cruel. If I have to drive around you, fine, but don't tease me. We're both too old for that.
Additionally, would you consider repealing your anti-sign law? I know that you don't want city property to be littered with yard sale and puppies-for-sale signs, but people in this city have obviously found a way around this law. They now post their signs on their cars and park them on main street. This means that people interested in yard-sailing now slow down and brake ON MAIN STREET to jot down addresses, thus blocking traffic and posing a real danger to themselves and others. Would it be that difficult to create a new law allowing signs to be hung only for 24-48 hours before a yard sale? Then you could write tickets to the people who don't clean up their signs. This would be easy because their addresses are right there on the sign! You could just ticket them through the mail! Think of the revenue! Think of the eased flow of traffic! If you are not keen on that idea, how about making it legal to hit people who brake on main street to look at the yard sale signs?
One last thing: Are you aware that the haz-mat trucks that you park next to the library (where lots of people see them) say "Participating Agency's", rather than "Participating AgencIES"? I don't mean to be a stickler, but when it comes to a professional organization dealing with the clean-up and disposal of hazardous materials you really can't afford to have people question their confidence in you. Just a thought.

Dear Winco,

How could you discontinue the most delicious toffee caramel scones ever?! They were approximately 35% of your coolness (the other 65% being made up of your amazing low prices and your selling items like cereal, granola, sugar, etc per pound like bulk candy). I can't fathom that the scones weren't selling. Anyone who has tasted their deliciousness would be unable to restrain from buying them. So maybe your problem is advertising. In which case I would be willing to help you sell them using whatever skills I may have, even if it means going door to door giving out samples. You are a company that is very new to this area so I am sure that their not selling only has to do with not many Utahns having tried them and that once they do your sales of said scones will go through the roof. However, if you are still set on discontinuing them then could you please see fit to send me the recipe? That way at least I will be able to treasure them, even if nobody else knows how good they are.

Dear Russian,

I hope you were not offended by my last post. If you couldn't tell I am somewhat sarcastic. I don't really think you are a stalker and you are welcome to continue reading my blog. And I hope you do because it makes me feel important to have international readership :)

Dear certain people,

Isn't it just a teeny bit hypocritical to be so bullheaded about immigration when you yourself are the product of immigrants? I mean, I'm not saying open the borders and have a free for all but by your own zero tolerance policy the American Indians should technically be able to kick you the hell out of their land. Your immigrant parents didn't speak their language when they came here, and they weren't forced to learn it either. And wouldn't you know it, just a few generations later their progeny managed to assimilate into the culture just fine. (If by fine you mean becoming intolerant anti-immigration bigots :)

Dear Mosquitos,

Thank you for not biting me more this year. You have gotten me a few times but thanks to my fat allergy (see above) I don't think I could handle much more. So thanks for backing off.

And finally, Dear Readers,

Thanks for putting up with me and finding humor in what I write even if if seems like a giant rant (which at times it may be. And probably is.)

Whales Probably Have Clearer Thought Patterns Than I Do. But I Still Hate Them.

Remember how I said that I was going write a real post soon? Yeah, this probably isn't it. I'm still not in a blogging mood and every time I think about writing something I get really really tired. So even though I kind of want to tell you about how much I hate whales and why, I am just not really enthused about it. So you will just have to be kept in suspense, which is bad for both of us because its not like its the funniest, most awesome story ever. But the waiting will make you excited for it, which will make me avoid telling it because I will think that I have to make it the most awesome post ever, which will make me avoid writing it for fear of failing miserably and losing all my readership (which apparently includes somebody in Moscow, Russia. I don't know anybody in Moscow, which makes me kind of nervous because what if it's a stalker person who is secretly planning to kill me? But then if they did kill me I wouldn't have to tell you the whale story and that would solve that problem and it wouldn't matter if I lost my readership because I would be dead. Shout out to you Moscow! But actually, maybe don't kill me after all and I will just tell the whale story now and save us all the suspense.)

I really wasn't planning on telling the whale story today and I apologize in advance if you are bored to tears by it or if you really really love whales, but please know that this is taking monumental effort on my part to tell. I mean, look at the horrible coherence of this post so far and you will clearly see that my thinking is tangential at best.

Anyway, back to sixth grade. I was a somewhat normal 11 year old starting fresh at the middle school. (Side note: When I was growing up there was a middle school AND a junior high and you went to both (middle school for 6-7th grade, Jr. High from 8-9th). I thought this was perfectly normal, but apparently elsewhere they just have one or the other. That's what you get when your high school is 60 years old and has more portables than actual building I guess) So there I was collecting moodies and figuring out how to work a locker like everybody else.

(These are moodies and they were more popular than anything since pogs when I was in middle school. Funny when you think about it. I mean, what could be more ironic than expressive little emoticons that tell you exactly what they are feeling being popular among the angsty non-communicative adolescent set that makes up 98.4% of the middle school?)

My best friend and I were super psyched that we had our English class together and our teacher seemed pretty cool. She even let us choose our own seats! This was unheard of in the elementary school. So of course we sat next to each other.

We didn't think much of it when our first writing assignment was to be about whales. And because we would all be writing about whales we would use some of our class time to learn about whales. No problem there. Less research to do on my own.

Now, up until this point my feelings about whales could best be described as apathetic. They were ok, but not something to obsess about like the Backstreet Boys (which of course I did, even going so far as to develop a crush on a boy I barely knew who happened to look like my favorite Backstreet Boy. Poor guy.)

But as the days turned into weeks, the weeks into months we continued to learn about whales. The right whale. The sperm whale. The orca. The narwhal (which is pretty much the only whale that I can still stand today, due to a hazy understanding of evolution that lead me to believe that they had descended from unicorns who were too proud to get into Noah's ark and thus had to learn to swim pretty quickly.)

(And really, how could they not be related? I love this picture)

We learned about the various uses of whale byproducts in the 1800s. We learned about what they ate (Krill. That's it. Stupid whales. They're like the koalas of the sea, with their exclusive diets of only one thing). We learned about how big they were, where they lived, how they gave birth, how they breathed, how they used echolocation, what their favorite colors were, who they had a crush on... no wait, that was me and best friend Chelsy. Anyway, we learned a whole lot about whales. We even went out to the parking lot and measured out the actual size of various whales and drew them with sidewalk chalk.

Finally, after several terms of learning about whales, of creating flashcards about whales, of turning in draft after draft of papers about whales, I had had just about enough. My apathy had slowly began to bubble into a deep dislike within my soul. Chelsy felt the same way. When the teacher began class one day with another diatribe about whales for the zagbillionth time Chelsy raised her hand and when called upon stated simply, "I hate whales."

Over 12 years later, I still have not forgotten the look on the teacher's face. It was as if Chelsy had slaughtered a puppy in front of her. She stood there with a look of complete and utter shock, unable to say a single word.

Now, I am a pacifist at heart so despite my dislike for the whales I tried to smooth over the apparent horror that Chelsy's statement had caused.

Me: I think what Chelsy is trying to say is that it is getting a little boring learning about whales after so much time and maybe we should...

Chelsy: No. I hate whales. I really do. That's all.

Me: I mean, hate is a strong word, so maybe she just means....

Chelsy: I. HATE. WHALES!!!!

Me: Ummm...

Teacher: Stunned silence

Jenny (Stupid artsy-fartsy superfake girl in English class): You know, whenever I start to get a little bored with learning about whales I just stop and think about what amazing creatures they are and how they can do so much and blah blah blah, defense of the whales, I'm a teacher's pet and am incapable of speaking in a normal way, instead choosing to articulate random syllables unnecessarily and pause for dramatic effect.

I don't remember exactly what happened after that. The rest of the day was kind of a blur as the dislike in my soul boiled over into pure, unadulterated hatred of the stupid whales and the utter inability of anybody in the class to see them for the floating blobs of lard that they are.

Even after all these years I still dislike them. It is probably misplaced hatred and what I really should hate is the essential brainwashing of an entire 6th grade class. I don't think Save The Whales International could do a better job of recruiting whale lovers than that 6th grade teacher did. (Maybe she was secretly working for them. Although, landlocked Utah is a strange place to do undercover whale lover brainwashing...)

Anyway, that is why I stand today with Tim Calhoun of Saturday Night Live as he says, "I like whales, but they have to go. I will organize a whaling party that will not stop until all the whales are dead."


And Nelson Munce of Simpson's fame as he proclaims "Nuke the Whales. Hey, you gotta nuke something."
(Okay, so maybe I am not that twisted and cruel. But if you ask me to go whale watching with you after this, I will slap you. And I will do the same thing and worse to any Russians who try to kill me. Just saying.)

Aww

Just thought I would post a picture of this cute baby, since he has gotten so big and since I haven't been in much of a blogging mood lately (if there is such a thing). Plus, the kid's parents blog even less frequently than me if you can believe it, so the forums in which he can be shown off are limited.

You might not think it's possible, but he's even cuter in person : )

Oh, yeah, and things with me are ok. I'm just being lazy. One of these days I will get around to writing a "real" post, I promise. In the meantime, Evan will have to do : )

If You Can Forward, You Can BCC

And you should!! Because in the first place, I don't want to get your quadruple forwarded email, but if I do, I don't want the 68,00 other people you forwarded it to to be able to see my PERSONAL, PRIVATE (I thought) email. Grrr. I have a junk account for that exact purpose. Maybe I should send out a mass email to everyone in my address book and tell them that if they have any forwards, spam, junk mail, etc to send me they ought to send it to said account. But of course, that would probably get forwarded again, thus defeating the purpose.

So instead I will tell you all about a neat little feature in your email account called the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC). This amazing (and amazingly simple) feature allows you to send out all the annoying forwarded emails you would like to everyone (everyone!) in your address book as if you were only sending it to one person. So everybody gets the email but they don't know that you also sent it to sexyman312@aol.com, moviemaven94@gmail.com, goth_gurl21@hotmail.com and all the other weirdos in your address book. They also don't have to scroll past all those names to get to the actual email you sent to see how naive you are. Granted, the way to access the BCC is different depending on which email service you use but generally it is found under the "To:" section where you type in the addresses of the people to whom you are sending your lame forward. I know it requires some brain power to figure out but if you can breathe on your own you should be able to get it.

And even if you are not a math genius you should be able to figure out that money isn't free. (Even if it comes from your parents, it wasn't free to them:) So if you get an email telling you that Microsoft will give you $250 for every person you forward an email to you should realize that it's too good to be true.

I am no math genius myself, but with the help of a calculator I was able to look into the economics of this proposition. (I think this math is correct, but if not don't leave me any snarky comments about my stupidity, thank you. I'm well aware.) Basically, for every 10 people you forward it to, you earn $2,500. That means that if 1,000 people forward it to 10 people each, they earn a collective 2.5 MILLION dollars. (Or Microsoft pays out 2.5 million dollars for every 1,000 people who forward it to 10 people, whichever makes more sense to you). The population of the US is around 300 million, but assuming that half of them (150 million) forward this email to 10 people each (this is where the math could get tricky, but remember that Microsoft is a global company so we're going to assume that each of those 150 million people could forward the email to people outside the US and not just to people in the US who would have already received it from somebody else) Microsoft would pay out 375 BILLION dollars!!!

Now you may think that Microsoft has that kind of money, but you would be wrong. In fact, they make about 60 billion dollars in revenue per year. A lot, yes. But still 6 times less than what they would have to pay to all those forwarders. It just doesn't make any economic sense.

I know most people hate math so here's an even simpler solution: snopes.com. This is an amazing website that will tell you all about folklore, urban legends, and the validity of forwarded emails. So if you get a forwarded email and you wonder if it's legit, all you have to do is go to their website and perform a simple search. (Just like google, and even if you can't do math I know you can do google.) There's pretty much nothing they haven't heard of and they will tell you with a big red sign if it's false (or a big green one if it's true).

But if you are too lazy or uninformed to do that, let me know when you get your check from Microsoft. I will have already gotten mine from the advertising company to whom I sold all the email addresses in your forward. HA HA!

Dreams Can Shatter Like Glass

Ok, so that's an overly dramatic title. I haven't suffered any tragedies or anything like that but my recent trip to Seattle did crush a small dream I've harbored for awhile. But we'll get to that later. First, the travelogue. (Because that way I don't have to give it in fast and testimony meeting. Ha Ha. )

So two of my mission companions and I recently took a week-long trip back to Seattle before one of them moved to Hawaii for the next three years. It was a really fun trip. We got to see a lot of people we taught and worked with and do most of the things we didn't get the chance to do as missionaries. (Dork alert: we were all secretly excited that we got to go outside of our mission boundaries in all directions (if you include the ocean as a boundary, which I do since we were never allowed to set foot in it before). Seattle is a really small mission by the way. It basically covers one county. It looks like this:

Anyway, I could probably bore you for hours with mission information. Instead, I will bore you with travel pictures. This is the start of our journey into Seattle.

Yep, that's snow. It was there to greet us at Snoqualmie pass on the way into Seattle. Also, you will notice my grey sweater. You will be seeing a lot of it. I promise that I did change my clothes every day. I just also always wore my sweater so it looks like I didn't change for a week.

These are my former (now travel) companions Lindsey (I have an odd tendency to hang out with people named Lindsey. In Jr. High, two of my good friends were named Lindsey. Promise I'm not a narcissist) and Courtney. I call them McNovia and Powellita. Cause it's weird to think that mission companions have first names. They call me Schultz for the same reason.

This is me at the Seattle Center with my favorite animal: a whale. If you can't tell by my expression how I really feel about them Tim Calhoun from Saturday Night Live sums it up pretty well:"I like whales, but they have to go!" Let's just say that ever since 6th grade, whales are about as popular with me as Daylight Savings Time. But that's a story for another day.


This is me with the starfish I found and rescued at Alki Beach. It was low tide and he got stuck out of the water. I was secretly a little disappointed he wasn't dead because then I could keep him. But saving him was nice too :)

This is a crab that I found at Redondo beach in Federal Way. We used to jog along the boardwalk there in the mornings and the only redeeming quality was seeing the beach at sunrise. Even then, it was a stretch for me.

This is the troll under Troll street. It's kind of a random place for a troll, but really cool nonetheless.


We also visited the locks on Lake Washington. They have fish ladders for the salmon to get past the dam. As you can see from the picture they didn't have salmon. I guess April is a little early for them to start their journey upstream. Either that or they didn't want to see me in my grey sweater.

Another picture at the locks. I think these were supposed to be waves. We thought maybe an octopus at first, but there were only 7 of them so we're going to go with waves.


This is me outside the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. Those things behind me look like a water fountain but are actually glass.

This is the Venetian wall by glass artist Dale Chihuly. It's an enormous wall on a bridge outside the museum filled with glass pieces. The bridge actually crosses over a main street so you can pass under it in your car and see the pieces as well.

The picture makes it look small, but this vase is probably only about a foot or so shorter than me.

This is the Seaform Pavilion, where all the glass pieces are in a bridge over your head. I think if I were less socially inhibited I would have laid down on the ground and stared up at it all for hours.

Instead we took pictures like this.

And this. (This is me pretending to be artistic taking a self portrait. Ha)

And this is where my dreams began to shatter. This is the Hot Shop inside the museum where you can watch the artists work. Now, I am the first person to admit that I have no artistic abilities whatsoever. Even my stick figures have self-esteem issues. But I always attributed that to not having the right medium to work with. So secretly I always thought that if I had the opportunity to be a glassblower I would be good at it. My reasoning is that it seems to be more technical than other art forms. Painting and sculpting require a certain type of skill, which I definitely don't posses. But glassblowing seemed somehow more learnable. Like the piano maybe. Something anybody can learn with a little practice and patience. Then I watched him work:

This is Preston Singletary, who was a visiting artist the day we were there. (You can see some of his AMAZING work here.) After watching him work I realized that my ideas were all wrong and that in all likelihood I would be about as good at glassblowing as I am at sketching. (Which is very depressing.) I can't really explain what it was about watching him that made me realize this. I guess it was just the fact that there was so much more than just blowing air into hot glass and so many intricacies to the process than I ever imagined.

So now my secret dream of becoming a glassblower is pretty much shattered. Sigh. I guess I can still hold on to my dream of hosting Scientific American Frontiers. At least until I meet Alan Alda and watch him at work. Then I will have to come up with a new set of impractical but not impossible secret dreams.

In the meantime, I discovered a book on torchwork, which is like glassblowing but on a much smaller scale. It involves using a blowtorch to shape glass rods into things like beads and rings. With my track record of clumsiness I am a little leery about taking it up but I think I might just be able to do it without burning down the garage. And if I do, I will call the remains "Artist's Dreams" and sell it to an art museum.

You Can Count, Right?

Because if not your kindergarten teacher should be beaten. And if you can count to twenty and still come through my express lane with 48 items, you should be beaten.
I'm just sayin'.
Also, while I'm on the subject of grocery store checkouts I will let you in on a little secret: The self checkout lanes are sooooooooooooooooooooooooo much slower than any cashier, even one-armed Tina. In order to save any time at all at a self-checkout lane ALL of the following conditions must be met (ALL OF THEM! NO EXCEPTIONS!) :

• You must have fewer than 10 items. More likely 5, but maybe you are one of the exceptional people who can handle 10
• You must not have any produce. Zero. Even if you are a genius. No exceptions.
  
• You must not have any items you do not want bagged. Yes there is a skip bagging button but if you have to press it you will not save any time and will only become frustrated at it when it refuses to let you continue without the assistance of a cashier.
  
• You must not have multiples of any item, especially items you don't want bagged. See above.
  
• You must be willing to accept the machine as omnipotent. I do not care if you are the offspring of Stephen Hawking and (I'm trying to think of the most genius female ever and I can't come up with one. I'm not so sure how I feel about that...) I'm sorry, but you are not smarter than the machine if you stand there slack-jawed with your scanned item in hand while the screen reads "please bag item." Berating the machine to its screen, while amusing to the cashier, will only serve to prove your inferiority and unworthiness before the all-knowing machine.
  
• You must not have unruly children with you. (And really, who comes to the grocery store without unruly children :)
  
• You must not be purchasing phone cards, electronics, restricted items (R movies, cold medicine, spray paint, etc) or price matching any items. All of those require the assistance of a cashier, who is probably busy helping 3 other novices who foolishly thought they could beat the odds and take on the machine.

In other words, if you are just buying chapstick, please, feel free to use the self-checkout. Otherwise, please wait behind the jerk with 48 items in the express lane to check out. And don't be frustrated when she pays with a combination of cash, check, credit card and beads. It's still better than hearing "Please wait for assistance."

Cow Magnets

And you didn't even know cows had magnetic properties!

I was reading a book today and one of the characters was a farmer who briefly mentioned cow magnets. Never having heard of such a thing and thinking that since it was a work of fiction perhaps the author was making things up I decided to investigate.
And guess what? There really are such things as cow magnets. But they aren't gigantic magnets to attract cows.

Apparently cows have a propensity to eat random metal objects in the course of their grazing and this can obviously lead to digestive problems. Enter the cow magnet.This magnetic rod is fed to calves at branding time where it gets stuck in one of the stomach chambers and attracts said metal objects. In the book the farmer says that they are eventually passed through the cow's system but according to wikipedia they just stay in the stomach. Either way I found it fascinating on two counts. One, that cows are more goat-like than I had ever suspected and actually swallow things like barbed wire and Two, that humans invented such an interesting solution.
I can think of maybe one of my friends who has heard of these things and is probably not particularly impressed but I expect the rest of you to be as fascinated as I am. Isn't the world such an interesting place ?

I'm So Hungry I Could...

Throw Up! Lemme guess, you were thinking I would say "eat a horse" right? Well, for some people that may be the way they feel. But feeling nauseous or throwing up are also options. Maybe not super common, but hey, the world needs a little variety right?

I must admit I haven't really experienced this myself. Mostly when I'm hungry I get really irritated and short tempered and nobody wants to be around me. Same goes for when I'm really tired. So basically as long as I am fed and well rested I'm a pretty pleasant person. According to my mom this has been the case pretty much since I was born. What can I say, I'm a creature of habit.

But back to the original point which is that some people experience nausea or even vomiting when they are really hungry. Elise first brought this phenomenon to my attention and asked why it would be the case (she seems to have a lot of good questions like that). And I have finally found an answer. I think.

At first I thought that it had something to do with Substance P. And no, I didn't just make that up. Substance P is a neurotransmitter associated with pain and inflammation. It is found in high quantities in the emetic (read: vomiting) center of the brain. There is also a drug that is a Substance P antagonist that is used to stop nausea and vomiting in patients on chemotherapy. So I thought that maybe when your body has little or no food in it Substance P levels increase and cause nausea and this may be the case. But only because I couldn't find any studies saying that this wasn't the case: )

Amazingly enough, scientists who are interested in studying Substance P do so in rats and apparently it's hard to measure nausea in a rat, since they can't really see it and the rats can't fill out surveys or anything. So there just aren't really any studies to confirm my hypothesis. And considering the way my experiments tend to go I am thinking it's best that I don't set up a study myself : )

There is however a disease (I hesitate to call it that because it sounds so dirty and really it's not. So we'll call it a condition ) that can cause these symptoms. And its pretty common. Hypoglycemia to be exact. (Literally meaning "under-sweet blood." Which makes me wonder how you would know the proper sweetness level of your blood to begin with.) Anyway, it turns out that a common symptom of hypoglycemia is nausea. So it is possible that people who would rather throw up than eat a horse when hungry (and honestly I don't think anybody really wants to do either) may be slightly hypoglycemic. You'd have to go to your Dr. to be sure, but if the problem goes away after you eat then there's a pretty good chance that this could be the case. Unless you did eat a horse, in which case you have bigger problems to deal with : )

Crisis (Narrowly) Averted

As you may have noticed, the days are getting longer. (The hours of sunlight actually. Again, there are always 24 hours in a day.) This means that it gets dark later. Where I am it doesn't get dark until about 6:15, which I LOVE!!!! And even better, the hours of sunlight in the day increase every day and will keep doing so until about June 20th when we will get a full 12 hours of beautiful beautiful sunlight. That gives me something to look forward to every day till June! (I know, I'm simple that way)
So you can imagine that I was upset when I heard about the Chilean earthquake knocking the whole earth off its axis and thus decreasing the hours of direct sunlight it receives. (And just to be clear, this wasn't the most upsetting thing to me about the earthquake. I'm not that shallow. I was also really concerned about the increase in the cost of Chilean produce we are bound to see. Kidding!) Anyway, for somebody who is as excited about sunlight as I am this was bad, bad news. However, the sunlight crisis of 2010 has been narrowly averted. How narrowly, you might ask? By approximately 1 millisecond. That is how much less daylight we will see because of the shift in the axis. Impressive to a scientist, to be sure, but I think its something I can live with. 8 milliseconds is a dealbreaker though, so lets cool it with the earthquakes for awhile, eh mother nature?

Going Private...

Is not something I am going to do. Just thought I would let you know, since it seems to be the trend as of late. Maybe someday that will change but for now my readers (all three of them) can breathe easy and keep viewing without logging in : )

PS- This is not a jab at those of you who are going private. I just felt a little left out : )

More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Seeds

Or maybe just as much as you wanted to know. If you make it through the end of this post you'll have to tell me which it was.
After the post about the unexpected sunflowers I got a lot of questions about seeds and flowers and the like.
(Incidentally, my plans for roasted sunflower seeds never came to fruition {Ha ha, fruition, how appropriate}. There were several reasons for this , the main one being that the seeds never got very big. Maybe about half the size of normal sunflower seeds. Also, there were only two flowers so there weren't that many seeds in the end. Also I was lazy. Mainly I was lazy. It just didn't seem worth the effort to harvest, dry them, look up how to cook them and do so when I could go a few blocks and get a huge bag of ready to eat sunflower seeds for a couple of bucks. And in a variety of flavors like ranch and bacon. [Really and truly. They have bacon flavored sunflower seeds. To me they just taste like salt though, so they aren't my favorite.]
Anyway, back to the seeds. For lack of creativity on my part (I blame it on my un-stimulating job but it could be something I was born with. Or without, I suppose) I'm just going to list the questions and answer them.

Q1: How do you tell the difference between types of seeds?
A1: Well if I knew the answer to that I would be eating watermelon right now, wouldn't I? However, since the mishap with the sunflowers I have since learned that there are two other ways to identify seeds. The first is that they tend to look like the plant they grow into.

Case in Point

Mmmm. Gotta get some of those. However, the most reliable way is to consult an expert (read: not me), either a gardener or a book or maybe the internet. Whichever you prefer.

Qs 2&3: Can you eat raw/uncooked seeds and can you plant cooked seeds?
A: Yes and no, respectively. That is to say that, yes, you can eat raw seeds (with caution. More on that later) but you can't plant cooked seeds. Well, I guess you could plant them, but don't expect anything to grow from it. (Except maybe weeds. They seem to be the only things that are subject to spontaneous generation.)
Subjecting seeds to high heat (aka cooking) destroys their reproductive abilities, so planting cooked seeds would only be worth your time if you wanted to fertilize the soil.
As for the caution in eating raw seeds, some of them contain high levels of phosphorous, which through a complex physiological process that I won't go into detail about (meaning, I don't know ;) causes calcium loss in the body. (Actually, I vaguely recall something like that from physiology. That's not saying much though. Physiology itself is a vague recollection for me.)

Q3: Are there sunflowers without petals?
A: No. I have never seen one and couldn't find an example of one anywhere so I am making a cataclysmic decision that they don't exist. I mean, the first thing people generally notice about a flower is its color. Which is found on its petals. So if it has no petals it isn't really a flower, right? Sounds plausible, no? So that's what we'll go with.
However, there are a few flowers I found that if you squinted real hard and had really bad allergies and maybe some optic nerve damage you might mistake for a sunflower without petals.

Example AThis is a sunflower that has lost its petals. It had them once but they fell off. This has been known to happen from time to time and when it does people might think that it never had them to begin with. Hence, the petal-less sunflower.

Example B
(And the most likely, in my opinion)

This is called a yellow cone flower. It looks a lot like a sunflower and if it lost its petals I think it might just look like a sunflower without petals. Just maybe.

Example C

This is called a pineapple weed and its a stretch. But again, optic nerve damage can do funny things to your eyes, so maybe somebody could mistake this for a sunflower without petals.

Q4: What kinds of garden plants grow in Logan?
A: The person who asked this question isn't going to live in Logan after all so I am assuming he/she doesn't really care anymore, therefore I am not going to answer this question. Ha Ha Ha!
I will tell you though, that a hardiness zone is a geographically-defined area in which a specific type of plant is capable of growing and that a certain college town in northeastern Idaho is in hardiness zone 4. The zone number depends on the harshness of the winter and a 4 means an extreme winter low of -30 to -20 degrees Fahrenheit : ) So you can look up a particular plant's number and as long as it can survive that kind of cold then it will thrive in your area. Too bad people don't come with those numbers too.
Well, we have reached the end of this post and I have pretty much exhausted my knowledge of plants, so if you have anymore questions, you'll have to askSomeoneelse :)

Not Forgotten

Just wanted to say that I have not forgotten about your very interesting questions and I do plan on answering them. Soon. I just have been a little busier than I was expecting lately. So, be patient. In the meantime, tell me your favorite word (or words). For some reason I have been thinking about mine lately and one of them is penguin. I also like it in Spanish: pinguino (pin-gwee-no). Maybe more in Spanish, hard to say. Anyway, that's all for now. Thanks for continuing to read : )

Generally Not A Fan...

But for these I'll make an exception.

As a general rule, I don't like leggings. There are very few fashion trends from the 80's that should ever see the light of day again and in my opinion leggings are not one of them. Leggings in church, especially over dresses that are essentially long shirts, were once on my "things that must go" list. Just because they cover your legs doesn't mean they are appropriate in that setting. I mean, skin does the same thing right, so really why bother wearing pants at all? That being said, I think there are a few ways that they can be worn tastefully, though you will never see me demonstrate those ways. (I'm sure you all look to me as a fashion icon and take what I have to say about the subject very seriously, right? :)

Anyway, I randomly came across these skeleton leggings on the inter-web and there is only one word for them: Awesome! I so wish I had known about these when I was taking anatomy. Maybe I would have gotten a better grade :) Actually they're probably not really anatomically correct, but I still love them. Maybe because they remind me of this guy:

Did anybody else watch this show as a kid? I think I was a little too young to really get what he was teaching about the body but I thought his suit was cool, in a creepy sort of way. Apparently he still tours the country and does educational assemblies in elementary schools. (Sidenote: I would love to get his opinion of the full body scan machines at airports. Wouldn't it be kind of ironic if he were against them?)

Anyway, in conclusion, if any of you would like to wear the leggings shown above you have my express permission to do so and the official AskLinds Seal of Awesomeness, which I just made up but will now use in the future: ) Just make sure your shirt-dress covers your butt when you do.

A Lesson in Botany

This is a sunflower

More on that later. First, a few items of business. (Random information you probably don't care about knowing: Every time I spell the word business I pronounce it BUS-EE-NESS in my head, as in the big yellow bus. I do this because I used to have a hard time remembering whether it had one s or two. I also always say BEE-EE-AE-YOU-TIFUL when spelling beautiful, for much the same reason.) Anyway, the business.

Um, I have been a slacker. Every time I think about writing something on this blog it works up into such a monumental task in my head that I lose any sliver of interest I had. This wouldn't be so much a problem except that I have been doing it with many other things in my life as well. Such as communicating with my friends. If this is you (and it most likely is, because I think anyone who reads my blog is pretty cool and I would be your friend even if I don't really technically know you right now) then I apologize. I don't know why it is that when I feel most isolated and really need to keep in touch with people it becomes the last thing I want to do. Strange.

Anyway, I apologize and propose that as a partial solution we examine the name of this blog. That is, AskLinds. Now, if you separate the syllables in this name, you will see that it becomes two words: Ask Linds. Crazy, I know! But, in order to help me get out of this funk of slackerness and apathy, I propose that you the readers ask me some questions : ) (I know my track record for answering questions promptly is pretty poor but I think that the quality of my answers somewhat makes up for that, right? And I promise I'll try to do better) Anyway, like I tell people, I may not know everything (and definitely don't), but if I don't know the answer I'll make up something that sounds plausible to me :) So if you have something that you've always wondered about but never really gotten around to finding out, send me your thoughts and I will see if I can come up with something. I think it will be good for all of us.

That concludes the business portion of this post. Now back to these guys.

These sunflowers are about two feet tall and growing in my bedroom. This is due to a project that my dad conducts every winter to stave of his slackerness during the cold months, namely a mini-greenhouse. Being as how my bedroom gets ample sunlight from the two windows (which also allow ample cold in) the greenhouse is set up there. This has never really bothered me because I was always at school in the winter so I never saw much of it. This year, knowing that I would be living in the greenhouse, I decided that I might as well participate. So I decided to grow some watermelon.

This was a bit of an afterthought actually. My dad happened to notice some volunteer watermelon plants growing in the crack between our patio concrete and the grass. We figured maybe they had sprouted from people spitting seeds from the back porch. It seemed more sanitary than volunteer tomato plants and I don't like tomatoes anyway, so I brought them inside, visions of ripe watermelon in my head.

I was a little surprised after a few weeks to see that they grew straight up, rather than spreading like a typical vine, but I figured maybe they were trying to attach themselves to the blinds. But when they started to sprout big yellow flowers I suddenly remembered the bird feeder hanging from the back patio. The bird feeder which we stock with sunflower seeds.


Not exactly the juicy watermelon I had envisioned. Then again, it does brighten things up a bit. And maybe I'll get some roasted sunflower seeds out of it :)