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Sunday Book Coveting*
The other day I was walking Genevieve, our lovely dog, and listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge on my beloved iPod. The episode is titled Women & Islam. (You can click from this page to listen, if you wish). The first segment discusses a book titled My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes. I might want to read this book, even though I’m not a big non-fiction reader. It is a series of essays written by Iranian women, and discusses the Iranian revolution, and how it has suppressed women in Iran, and yet in no way has it completely stifled feminism there. From Powells.com: In…
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Vernal Falls
(photo found here) My favorite thing to do in Yosemite National Park is to hike up to Vernal Falls. It’s a moderate hike, and takes awhile, but heck, what else are you going to do all day? 😉 If you’re feeling brave, and you have longer, you can keep hiking up to Nevada Falls. It’s a cool feeling to find yourself at the top of a waterfall (see the tiny person there, to the right of the falls?), and a unique way to experience the beauty of Yosemite. Hopefully, while you’re reading this post, our place is in the process of being sold (goes back on the market today, first…
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Why I Heart This American Life…
You may or may not know that I like to download podcasts of a few of my favorite NPR programs, which I then listen to on my beloved iPod while walking Genevieve in the morning. I download three shows from NPR. The first is Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, which makes the people walking past me think I’m insane, because I just start laughing out loud to myself, seemingly at nothing. The second is To The Best of Our Knowledge, which I’ll admit is last in my queue, and sometimes I get to it, and love it, and other times it falls by the wayside. The third show I download…
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Calorie Restriction
A few weeks ago, the Sunday SF Chronicle had an article on people who practice calorie restriction as a way of life. I’m sure you’ve read the hypothesis by now…scientists have found that if they feed lab mice 25% fewer calories than their recommended daily intake, the mice live longer. In people who practice calorie restriction, also consuming 25% fewer calories than their recommended daily intake, the health benefits are evident: lower bad cholesterol, higher good cholesterol, healthier arteries, and lower levels of triglycerides. Other benefits include very low blood sugar levels and a very high response to insulin, indicating a very low risk for diabetes. So, if we take…
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Wordless Wednesday – Baby Edition
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The Name Game
Julie Julie bo bulie, banana fanna fo foolie, me my mo moolie, Julie! (The picture is of the newest American Girl doll, Julie!) I’m totally grabbing this one from Susan in Italy, she to whom I am forever indebted, because I found out from her that Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me is available via podcast. But I digress. Here’s a fun little meme, in which the goal is “to choose a fact, word or tidbit that’s somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your name.” Since Susan’s blog, Porcini Chronicles, is a food blog, she chose a different food for each letter of her name, and she did a…
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Blessed Rain
We awoke on Saturday morning to a long, slow rain…the first rain of Autumn, coming in like a promise, a promise that unlike last winter, this will not be a drought year…a promise that there will be enough water for everyone, for long showers and healthy lawns…a promise of a change in weather, of crisp cool mornings, yet still warm afternoons. A promise of apple cider and pumpkin pie in our future. Today the sun is out, and they’re saying by Wednesday, it will be back in the mid to high 80s again. But I don’t care. I know, Autumn is here, and though it comes slowly and gradually in…
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On a wire between will and what will be
Have you ever woken up on a Saturday morning with visions in your head, scenes that tell you exactly how you’ll be spending your afternoon? You lay there, eyes not yet open, and you see a middle aged fat man, dancing in a bunny suit at a Halloween party. You hear the sleazy strip club owner call the failed comic in the alligator suit, “Izod”. You hear Alex calling for her elderly friend…”Hannah…Hannah…”, then the capable older woman bluntly says, “She died….yesterday.” Then you see Alex smoking cigarettes and picking at the threads in the holes of her 501s while Kim Carnes sings “I’ll be here where the heart is”,…
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Runaway
Last week, while banished from my house so that painter men could change our walls from a boring white to an inviting brown, I was thankful to live in beautiful California, and that our townhouse has a pool just outside the front door. So, I sat beside the pool and finished the next book in my Book Awards Reading Challenge, Runaway, by Alice Munro. This book won the Giller Prize, which is an award given for outstanding works of Canadian fiction. If you’re unaware of Alice Munro’s work, it is almost exclusively comprised of short stories, and Runaway is no exception. There are 8 short stories in this volume, all…
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Wordless Wednesday
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TiVo Alert
I was listening to Forum, a show that runs on our PBS radio station in the mornings, and they were talking about a film that is being premiered this month on PBS. It’s called “Seeing in the Dark“, and it’s about astronomy, and what individuals see and feel when gazing up at the night sky. Of course, it’s about a lot more than that, but that, and the fact that some of the music is by Mark Knopfler, got me interested. So I’ll be taping it when it airs locally, which is 8pm tonight on KQED. Check it out!
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Religion in Schools
Sometimes a subject just keeps coming at you, until you have to acknowledge it and give it the thought it deserves. Autumn’s Mom wrote a post the other day, in which she mentioned that Autumn’s 7th grade history class is teaching World Religions, and how she thinks that’s a great idea, and wishes she could take the class herself. This reminded me of a podcast I heard recently on To the Best of Our Knowledge, in which they mentioned a book titled Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn’t, by Stephen Prothero. From Amazon.com: Prothero (American Jesus), chair of the religion department at Boston University, begins this…
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Confession Meme
I surfed over to Relaxed Parents from Ms. Mamma’s comments, and found this little meme. It talks about blogging, which I’ve been thinking about since my pseudo-hiatus-thing*, so I thought I’d play along. Ten Blogging Confessions 1. Do you promote your blog? I’m not sure HOW to promote my blog. I haven’t really signed up for any services that might do that. I do leave my url when I comment, but I don’t comment randomly. I only comment when a post makes me want to chime in. 2. How often do you check hits? Rarely. I was pretty interested in it for awhile, but when I discovered that the majority…
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Kitchen Update
Before…sorry, it’s kind of blurry…the picture, I mean, the kitchen isn’t. 🙂 During… After…notice not only the counters, but also the color on the walls…this is what our realtor calls “wise owl”, and Ted calls, “brown”.
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Tasteless…
Back in December of 2006, a zoo keeper at the San Francisco Zoo was partially mauled during a public feeding of a tiger, a practice at the zoo since the 1940s (the feeding, not the mauling!). She lost the use of one arm, and had severe damage to the other. Updates have been made to the area, so that zookeepers now more safely feed the lions and tigers, and so that the public can safely witness the feedings. With the changes now in place, the area was recently opened to the media, before reopening the area to the public. This small quote, from SFGate: A steel barrier closes the gap…