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 :)