Friday Randomness

(This is a lovely hookworm…want this in your intestines?  The answer…perhaps.  Find out more, below.)

I’m behind on this whole blogging thing. I’m behind on my book review, having finished ‘The Night Listener‘ and ‘This World We Live In‘, but I haven’t reviewed them. I’m halfway through ‘Three Cups of Tea‘, but I left it at cheer-leading tryouts last week, and it’s lost, so I went to get another copy from the library. Now I’m finishing up ‘The Bride’s Farewell‘, and then I’ll get back to ‘Three Cups of Tea‘. So I guess you’re going to see a lot of book reviews around here in the near future.

I have a recipe mash-up that I want to post here. A recipe or two, mashed together, and how that turned out. Can’t wait, can you? I know.

Genevieve has been having tummy issues as of late. We bought her a different brand of dog food on New Years Day, since the specialty dog food store was closed. She hasn’t been the same since, even since we switched her back to her regular brand. So the vet tested her stool to see if there was some kind of parasite or something. Nope. So the vet put her on a medication to help, some mild antibiotic, which seems to help, but when we take her off, her problem returns. So then they put her on an antibiotic/pro-biotic combination, and she flipped out. She was acting like a puppy again, running around all frisky, galloping about like no blind dog should do, playful and puppyish. Nice, right Sure, it was great during the day. But at night, when she couldn’t sleep, when all she could do is pace the house, and keep us all awake with her pacing and crying, it wasn’t great. Then there was the day we woke up to clean poop in Maya’s room, then ended the day cleaning poop in the living room, that she then stepped in and spread around the house. Fun. So now she’s off of the meds, and seems to be feeling much better. Hoping the problems have ceased.

This American Life had a freaky as hell story the other day, about a guy who found a strange and effective cure for his allergies and asthma. He read that people in some parts of the world do not suffer from allergies the way we do, and that it was because of hookworms in their intestines. So he called around to try to find a place that would sell him some hookworms. He couldn’t find any, so he flew to Africa and spent a couple of weeks walking barefoot through village latrines, hoping to be infected by the buggers. It worked. He became infected, and his allergies went away. So he decided to make some money selling hookworms to help others with their health issues. So he farmed the hookworms from his own fecal matter, cleaned it up and shipped it out, until the FDA shut him down. UGH. Freaky as hell, right? Excuse me for a minute, I need a Claritin.

Maya’s on Spring Break this week. I decided to take Wednesday off and spend the day with her, so we went into San Francisco, to the Academy of Sciences. We were hoping to see the new temporary exhibit, Extreme Mammals, but it turns out you need tickets for that, and they were all out by the time we got there, four hours before museum closing. Sigh. We did get to see the planetarium show, and our favorite part, the aquarium. My favorites are the Sea Dragons. They’re gorgeous and strange and alien, relatives of the Sea Horse. I also love the sea turtles. It was a lovely day. We then went to dinner at an old SF favorite, the Clement Street Bar and Grill, which is housed in an historic building, over 100 years old, which is old for California. The restaurant has been in its current form for the last 28 years, and we’ve been going there for about 23 of those years. It’s kind of old faithful, with food that is always delicious, at reasonable prices. Today, Ted took the day off, and he and Maya have gone to have a hike and a picnic on Angel Island, otherwise known as the ‘Ellis Island of the West’. I love vacations, even when they’re just a day or two.