Liz's Bloglet - Tuesday 30 September 2008

Today:
100 freestyle
200 breaststroke
100 freestyle

And I managed to only pause every 50m instead of every 25. _
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10:06:11 AM, Tuesday 30 September 2008

I started swimming today. Ultimately, exercise is the best treatment for spondyloarthropathy, as evidenced by how well I did with physical therapy, and the best way to avoid joint calcification (::shudder::). Also, for years my doctors have been telling me how much swimming would help my winter asthma, so that's a bonus. The Pseudo Ivy campus where my lab is has an Olympic sized pool and diving facility, which is open at lunch time and in the evenings. The campus nearer our house (home of freshmen and the humanities) has a small, 4 lane, 25-m pool, which is open in the mornings and some evenings and weekend. The morning is when I have the most pain and stiffness, so it looks like I'll be sticking to the little pool--I can walk there and then take the bus to the lab. A nice thing I found out is that the locker room there is in much lower demand so, unlike the big pool, I can actually have a permanent locker where I can leave my wet suit rather than carrying it around all day. Most of the time I was there this morning there were only 4 other people. It was very pleasant.

I grew up swimming. We lived next to a large body of water, so my parents' goal was to drown-proof us early. I think I started dogpaddling at 2. Besides living on a lake, I also swam on summer teams starting when I was 6 or so. There were several years where my brother and I competed with 2 different swim teams in the summer and so went to 2 practices 5 days a week. My best stroke was always backstroke, but I think I was pretty good at everything--until everybody else got their growth spurt a couple years before I did and it got really frustrating to compete with girls who were half again as tall and strong as I was. I tried out for the team in high school (post belated growth spurt), but the 2 weeks of tryouts overlapped with the last 2 weeks before the state cross-country meet. I was running for 2 hours then swimming for 2 hours, which was a bit much, so I didn't make the team. Which just meant more time for winter track. And that was the last time I tried swimming competitively. But I think there's a lot of muscle memory still and I feel like as my strength comes back my technique will probably not suck.

Today:
100m freestyle
100m breaststroke
100m freestyle

Yes, it's meager. But it's a start. _
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10:42:54 AM, Monday 29 September 2008

cool picture _
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08:20:51 AM, Sunday 28 September 2008

Sony's most recent ebook readers support PDF and MS Word formats Of course, you still have to use their conversion software to read them, so no wireless browsing and downloading directly to the reader, and commercial ebooks have to be purchased from their store and aren't compatible with any other reader. But, still, the future is getting closer. _
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07:19:39 AM, Sunday 28 September 2008

I was more impressed with Obama last night than I expected to be. He came off as a serious, knowledgeable guy, and didn't get so carried away with rhetoric as he sometimes does. I certainly disagreed with him on things. It's hard to hear someone talk about what a big mistake the Iraq war has been for our country without mentioning the Iraqis who are dead or displaced, since it's their country. And I have never cared for the "both the Democrats and Republicans have gotten it wrong" thing. Yes, it's true on some issues, but, as with Bill Clinton, I just doubt that Obama really knows this perfect Third Way that no one else has seen. And, really, there are issues on which the Democrats are right and the Republicans are wrong, and I think Obama would agree with me but he's been told not to say so.

Obama was certainly helped by McCain's petulant behavior, his Bush-like snickering, and his firm sticking to his talking points. Also, nobody gets to call themself a maverick, unless they're being ironic, which McCain was not. I think it's possible that we're approaching the day when name-dropping your good buddy the war criminal Henry Kissinger is no longer a good thing. _
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12:26:09 PM, Saturday 27 September 2008

It looks like my bank might be next.

For what's it's worth, Wachovia is not a made up name. It refers to the region of Austria that the Moravians who settled Winston-Salem came from. So there's that. _
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09:07:38 AM, Saturday 27 September 2008

Tonight is the first time I've really watched broadcast tv since we got our digital converter box. We failed to get it in time for the Olympics. It really is sort of amazing how good the broadcast digital picture looks. Unfortunately, we only get PBS, ABC, and CBS (so it's just as well I hadn't hoped to watch the Olympics with it). The best analog channels were NBC and FOX, so that's a little mystifying. Although it might have something to do with our rabbit ears being a little bent and banged up.

While waiting for the debate I'm watching the UNC-TV local news programming. I have learned all kinds of things about interesting festivals (one focused on molasses and one focused on Mayberry) and saw a totally bizarre interview with a meteorologist who's running for Congress. One of my friends is the director of the main public tv evening news show for the state, and I've always felt a little bad about not watching it and not giving them money, even though we couldn't actually pick up their signal. With the fancy digital box now I don't have that excuse, so the next time I don't see Katy for 2 weeks because they're having the big fundraiser I will probably actually manage to give them money.

Remi, not suffering from the cold that will not end, has gone to watch the debate over cheeseburgers and beer with Tim and Amy. _
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08:31:15 PM, Friday 26 September 2008

It's not that children's books are pure entertainment, innocent of any didactic goal--what grownups enviously call "Reading for Fun." On the contrary, the reading we do as children may be more serious than any reading we'll ever do again. Books for children and young people are unashamedly prescriptive: They're written, at least in part, to teach us what the world is like, how people are, and how we should behave--as my colleague Megan Kelso (The Squirrel Mother) puts it, "How to be a human being." _
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05:28:31 PM, Thursday 25 September 2008

I don't think this slope is nearly as slippery as you think it is _
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12:47:14 PM, Wednesday 24 September 2008

The blogmass is back so I feel obligated to say something. So, here's something: I managed to fight off a cold without getting a sinus infection or bronchitis. This is big news for me. _
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12:28:40 PM, Wednesday 24 September 2008

If there was any guarantee that I could have kids as awesome as jo(e)'s I would be much more interested in parenthood. _
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07:39:39 AM, Thursday 18 September 2008

If the goal of either side is simply to win, then neither one is looking at the whole plate. If the goal of either side could be reached the first Tuesday in November, then we need leaders with bigger goals and broader vision. _
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07:34:56 AM, Thursday 18 September 2008

St. John's is advertising for tutors with science background. I've thought long and hard about it and I would just not be a very good Seminar tutor and I would feel awful about that. I think my skills are better for a place where I would be emphasizing my actual strengths. That said, I think that having scientists who are also alums apply to be tutors would be a pleasant antidote to all of the political philosophers. _
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01:49:11 PM, Wednesday 17 September 2008

So I decided I needed a challenge and so I've chosen this as my next project. The Scarlet Quince folks assure the reader that most of their projects take years. So I'll be busy. I also checked with my friend Autumn and found out that the cool craftsy people are now hanging out at the new knitting store in our neighborhood. So maybe I'll do my crafting in some company. _
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08:31:55 AM, Tuesday 16 September 2008

This is good. If one thing has risen out of the 2008 election, it is my respect for Amy Poehler (who I mostly knew as the woman in the old Upright Citizens Brigade tv show) and Tina Fay (who never got enough credit for Mean Girls). _
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09:56:47 PM, Sunday 14 September 2008

The words for yesterday were spondyloarthropathy and sulfasalazine. I still don't have a real diagnosis, but I have an actual treatment plan for the next few months, which is pretty exciting.

The words for today are Atlantic Beach and environmental education. The ocean is warm, the kids are excited, and I'm sleeping in a hotel (with wireless!) instead of the dorm. woot. _
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07:23:47 AM, Saturday 13 September 2008

Look: Dominionist idiots They absolutely have the right to endorse any candidate at all from their pulpits. And the federal government absolutely has the right to take away their tax-exempt status for doing so. Both of those go into how the first amendment works.

Now you're just another private club. Stadium sized churches and gyms and "family life centers" all become a lot harder to build if you have to pay taxes on your donations. _
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08:29:38 AM, Friday 12 September 2008

One of the best written explanations of how human subjects trials work and why your favorite "alternative medicine" might never be subjected to clinical trial if all evidence based scientific evidence suggests no potential benefit but substantial potential risk--and those goes double for studies involving children as this one did. _
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06:27:57 PM, Thursday 11 September 2008

The blog of a former Johnnie turned geologist I'm assuming anne knows her. Her disenablement story is particularly nice. _
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05:20:08 PM, Thursday 11 September 2008

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered;
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land. _
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10:19:54 AM, Thursday 11 September 2008

Just because I don't have enough cat pictures here, and because this particular use of Photobooth-->drag and drop to Flickr Uploader just occurred to me.
And also because Artemis is half sweetness and half bile and still likes me a lot. _
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08:19:28 PM, Monday 8 September 2008

Many things to be thankful for today:
My mentee is awesome and we are going to the beach this weekend!
Remi and I are going to Athens in October for my master's advisor's retirement party (and carousing and ecology and GA barbecue and tatertots with cheese).
I am a good TA, for the hardworking smart students, but also for the students who aren't very good at biology, and even for the guy who questions everything I say. _
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07:51:10 PM, Monday 8 September 2008

For all of those crying out from the deep _
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07:19:15 PM, Monday 8 September 2008

It took me months of hearing the radio commercials (and seeing a TV commercial with it spelled) to figure out the name of the bank was WaMu. Neither of the vowel sounds used exist in my dialect and the consonants seemed strange, the W more like an H. I didn't have a guess at what they were trying to say, I just knew I was unlikely to open an account at a bank whose name I couldn't understand. I had guessed maybe it was a Scandinavian bank attempt to make it big in the US. If you're going to go to all the trouble to shorten Washington Mutual to something catchy, make sure it still sounds catchy in all of your markets. Or just say Washington Mutual, good grief. _
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06:30:32 PM, Saturday 6 September 2008

It is raining really really really hard. And the Tuxedo cat insisted on going outside. Today I'm thankful that Mr. Erwin built his mill village on high ground. _
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05:37:27 AM, Saturday 6 September 2008

This is the kind of thing our household loves _
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03:53:37 PM, Friday 5 September 2008

And it's prednisone again until I can see the doctor again. The truth is I feel so much better on it that it's totally worth the weepiness and nausea. _
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03:47:57 PM, Friday 5 September 2008

I never could get the hang of Thursdays. _
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10:32:16 AM, Thursday 4 September 2008

Today I'm thankful for: Moss!--who saves the day when tiredness makes me write something inappropriate on my blog. _
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06:46:47 AM, Wednesday 3 September 2008

Keeping an eye on Hanna _
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04:00:55 PM, Tuesday 2 September 2008

My favorite internet teen mom on why the teen parenthood of a vice presidential candidate is none of our business I am pro-choice. All of the choices, even ones I disagree with. Update: I mean the teen parenthood of the daughter of a vice presidential candidate, obviously _
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06:30:47 PM, Monday 1 September 2008

Dislocating my shoulder patting myself on the back time: I think I am going to rock out teaching this semester. The only thing I'm worried about is standing up the whole time. Knowing I would be able to sit down when it was over helped. _
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05:06:06 PM, Monday 1 September 2008

Words by Herbert F. Brokering. The setting we sing of this most often is by Cary Ratcliff, but there's another one we've sung, as well.

Lord of feasting and of hunger,
give us eyes to see your bread
in the miracle of wonder,
till all tables will be fed.
See the silent ones who wait
when the blessing seems too late.

Lord of seed and Lord of harvest,
turn the desert into bloom;
purify the sky and forest,
give your wisdom; send it soon.
See the silent ones who wait
when the blessing seems too late.

Lord of storm and heat and danger,
deep inside and high above,
break into all fear and anger,
till you reign the earth in love.
See the silent ones who wait
when the blessing seems too late.

Lord of taking and of giving,
give us back our dignity;
in our universal living,
break down all inequity.
See the silent ones who wait,
when the blessing seems too late.
_
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07:31:21 AM, Monday 1 September 2008

Prayers, thoughts, hopes, holding in the light, whatever else you've got for all those on the Gulf Coast today. _
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07:18:31 AM, Monday 1 September 2008

This interview with John Lewis has convinced me, I think. You may remember back last year when I was advocating him running for president, and I still wish he had. Obama's election will be a huge victory for John Lewis and all of those now gone who marched with him, and all of the children of this country who don't think the president will ever look like them. I still don't necessarily believe in Obama's version of Hope and Change, but I think I do believe that he may represent actual hope and actual change of a different kind. And maybe that's enough, for now. _
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09:58:32 AM, Thursday 28 August 2008

Be thinking about the people of the Gulf Coast today. On top of a hard anniversary, on top of all of the rebuilding still not done, they now face a weekend preparing for Tropical Storm Gustav. _
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09:51:10 AM, Thursday 28 August 2008

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