beetiger

The big news in several of the communities I frequent is this: two studies have been recently released showing that there is mercury in much of the high fructose corn syrup being used in industrial food processing in this country, and that it's making it in detectable amounts into foods like pop tarts, granola bars, and soda.

First of all, for those who like these sorts of things, links to the primary research. The research is solid insofar as spot sampling can be, in my opinion, though the researchers' recommendations are of course not actually part of the research.

It's known how the mercury would be getting into the syrup: the alkali used to break down the corn as part of the process is produced in chlorine processing plants using mercury cells. In fact, this study started as an exploration of what the heck was happening to large amounts of mercury that was going missing (not being recovered) each year during these industrial processes. So it's back 2 levels from the big food companies, who very well might not have been aware of the issue.

These studies were done in 2005, and the corn syrup lobby says that this data is "outdated" as new processes have been put in place in the last few years. There's no way at this moment to know for sure. The researcher who just published this work was at FDA when she did it, and is now retired; why FDA didn't act on this earlier is a disturbing question.

There's a mercury-free process for producing the alkali that is available and being used in a majority of US plants, but there are right now at least 4 major plants still using the mercury process.

The (relatively) good news is that back in 2007, then-Senator Obama tried to put a bill in place phasing out the use of mercury in chlorine-alkali plants by 2012. The bill failed, but it's good to know that our new President was actually aware of this issue before today. I suspect we'll see a similar bill reappearing soon.

I really don't know if the fact that this can probably be solved in the moderate term without needing to topple the juggernaut that is the subsidized corn industry is good or bad. I'm pretty disturbed at the industry's choice to minimize the issue rather than to agree to actively be part of the solution. In any case, our household's probably going to lay off the NutriGrain bars for a bit. If I'm going to be putting myself at risk anyway, I'd rather have tekka maki.

i went away to Arisia this past weekend, and came home to discoverthat my son has learned how to play the word game Quiddler. Really learned how to play. Apparently bard_bloom and he played a lot over the weekend, and although I think he hasn't learned all the meanings of the words or really absorbed their context, he's learned a lot of odd short words, and seems to have the talent for rearranging letters until words jump out at him. This evening, the words he pulled out of his hand included hue, queer, aa, and ye.

He just asked me if I can find a spelling bee for him to compete in. I suppose I should go look.

My son, he really likes words.

By the way, I've got some gorgeous new Hindu deity rope incenses up in the shop, under the Nepali section of the Natural Incenses. These incenses actually support a foundation that helps widowed or divorced women and their children to live independently in Kathmandu. They're also handmade and really wonderfully rich, and not at all expensive.

So, I've been playing with LEDs. Really simple playing, as in "put leads of flashy LED on battery, maybe embed in small jewelry object or something, watch flashing, be happy." I'd been using CR2032 batteries, since those are the kind that people who make piles of flashy things and toss them around as pretty graffiti use, but they're big and heavy, and I wanted to make earrings. So I got myself a CR1025 watch battery. They're both 3 volt lithium batteries, but the 1025 somehow doesn't seem to be quite sufficient to run all the colors in the flashing cycle of some of the LEDs I have, or to run the single color ones quite as bright as the 2032.

Any ideas? Is there a small button battery that would be more comparable to the 2032? Is there a factor besides voltage that I'm not accounting for? Did I just get a bad battery (which would be annoying as I paid a price-gouging $5.49 for it at Radio Shack).

Any help would be appreciated.

ETA: It's the amperage, isn't it. OK, anyone know a good higher amp button battery?

As is our tradition, I had the pleasure of having lediva here for the space-between-Christmas-and-New-Year's holiday break. It was the longest chunk of time that we have had for this "home vacation" together ever, because of the way the weekends fell --nine days. I'm pretty sure that's actually the longest chunk of consecutive time we've had together in general. It worked better than some of the away vacations we've had, just in terms of the pacing of it: she got to sleep and relax a bunch, and I still managed to get people out of the house to do interesting stuff.

Some highlights from my point of view:
-I got her an XO/OLPC computer for the winter holidays, which seemed to please her a lot, and which satified my urge for getting to take a quick look at one without actually ending up owning one personally.

-We went to see the newly reopened Air and Space Museum at the Interpid aircraft carrier. I'm really not much of a military buff, but they've done a very nice job laying everything out, and I'd recommend it. We got to walk through the Concorde while we were there as well, which when it's not moving and isn't running any fancy service, pretty much looks like a commercial plane with all first-class seats.

-We tried out some miracle berry tablets that lediva got me from ThinkGeek. (She gets many things from there.) They are taste modifiers, which mask bitter and sour flavors while significantly enhancing sweet flavors. We did the classic thing you are supposed to do when you try these, which is to chow down on whole lemons and chug Guinness. I was impressed at how well the fruit worked in tablet form. We also tried tea, which pretty much disappeared entirely, and horseradish, which was pretty insipid.

-We played a lot of Rock Band 2. I still pretty much slog through medium on guitar/bass, and do well singing songs I know and adequately singing ones I don't, or that I've forgotten everything but the chorus for, which frankly is the majority of the songs in the game.

-We did a shopping trip to Re/Dress, a plus size women's consignment store that recently opened in Brooklyn. I got a set of lingerie that would be perfect for a lounging-in-lingerie kind of party, if I ever get invited to one. :) It was just around the corner from Lunetta, a restaurant lediva had been intending to take me to for several years now. Attack of the awesome pork dishes, chestnut pannacotta, and Brussels sprouts that left lediva swooning.

-Cuddles! Can't argue with cuddles. And though we really didn't do a huge amount of relationship processing per se, I think we're in a better place than this time last year and have some good ideas on how to stay there.

I was rather sad that we didn't manage visits from any of the usual suspects that visit us when they come East at Christmas time. We missed you and hope we can get together some other way, sometime soon. (I know some of you will see bard_bloom at Further Confusion, but I won't be there.)

**************************************************

I haven't made a formal set of resolutions this year, but I've decided that the theme of my personal work for the year is "connection". I'll be trying to be better about creating and maintaining friendships that work, trying to reduce my isolation in both my work and social situations, working on both the basic maintenance of and the deepening of my intimate relationships, and in general trying to be more present and engaged in the universe.

I'd love it if you could help me with this. Give me a call or an email. Point out things I might like to do if you hear about them. Go ahead and ask me to help you with something if I could be helpful to you. Invite me to things even if you are pretty sure I can't come. If we've been out of touch, let's get back in touch.

I love you all and wish you the very best of things as you settle into the new year.

lediva came out for the weekend for my birthday, bringing with her an Xbox, cables, and the expertise to hook everything together neatly with just one extra visit to Best Buy and a little bit of hacking up of the back of the cabinets. That, together with the copy of Rock Band 2 that bard_bloom arranged to have here at the same time, is making for my new diversion. I pretty much suck at it, but I'm having fun. (Any of you who do the XBox Live/Rock Band thing, please come find me. Gamertag same ID as here.) lediva also took me out for VIP seating at the burlesque show Corio, which was a complete blast of a campy Christmas dinner show. The space had a good vibe, the food was better than I expected, lediva let me drink more than my fair share of the champagne, and we were basically sitting on stage.

projectmothra bought me a Webkinz to match the one he got for his birthday so we could play online together. Apparently he made bard_bloom go to several stores to find a tiger one.

Birthday proper mostly consisted of getting a mammogram done, with the slightly uncomfortable outcome of "we think everything's fine, but we can't see things that well, so you should go get a breast ultrasound". So yeah. I also heard from an inordinately large number of old high school friends on Facebook. Perhaps I should be paying more attention to them.

****************************************************
So, after enough bugging by friends who are teachers or who do gifted advocacy of various sorts, I've decided to bring Rhys in for some private assessments, IQ tests and achievement tests and looking at the weird way he processes information about people and seeing if it means anything I should maybe do something different about. I found a psychologist who does a lot of testing with kids and who can put a large part, if not all, of what she does under my insurance. I've explained to him that over Christmas break he's going to spend some time with "Dr. Elaine, who likes to find out about how kids' brains work and who will give you challenges and puzzles", and he's extremely excited about it.

I'm really fussy. Not about whether he's going to have a good experience with it, because he will. He's very used to PTs and OTs and speech therapists and vision therapists and all of that stuff, and he almost always enjoys working with those folks.

But I'm fussy about whether I'm pushing hard when we don't actually have problems right now. I'm fussy about dealing with the school. I'm fussy about the fact that I kind of feel like I want some numbers in order to do the advocacy that I probably should do, about why I want that. I'm worried about medicalizing a pretty normal, pretty happy kid. I'm fussy that I'm going to have numbers that tell me I'm just one of those parents who thinks their kid is more unusual than he is, that I should just take him to an enrichment program after school once in a while and leave it at that, and listen to the relatives tell me that something extreme is going on when it really isn't. (They did that to me.) I'm worried that he actually is going to test out in the profoundly gifted range and I'm going to spend the next decade trying to figure out what to do about that without allowing either or both of us to become insufferable.

This morning, Rhys asked me if the year was almost over. I said it was. He said "Oh good, I am so excited to go to first grade." Sigh. I had to explain it was the calendar year that was over, not the school year, and he would still be in kindergarten in January, and he admitted to me for the first time that kindergarten is kind of boring and he wished it had more work that wasn't relearning stuff.

**********************************************************************************
I think I'm about the fifteenth or so person on my friends' list to be in roughly this situation, and probably not the most skilled or connected one either, but I'm actively looking for freelance writing/editing/copyediting types of work coming into the New Year. If anyone can help out at all with that, either in terms of actual pointers or jobs, or just in terms of helping me out with my freelance resume or tips on looking for this type of thing, I'd really appreciate it a ton.
*************************************************************************************

Thanks for listening, everybody.

My son is talking to me about there being "pop-up" words in books, and telling me that "the" and "I" are some of them, but can't articulate to me what that actually means. Is this a term for early sight reading words or something?

It's very confusing. I have a son who is quite literate, but seems to be learning all these pre-literacy/early literacy learning methods, and is convinced he's learning something new and essential about text, like that vowels can be written in different colors and there are "pop-up" words.

I'm confused.

I need encouragement today.

Congratulations to all on my friends list who were able to win NaNoWriMo this year. Also, congratulations to projectmothra, who completed his NaBloPoMo challenge successfully. I'm proud of him!

I've been a bit on the misery side for the last few days. I've gotten locked out of both a cooking class at the CIA and some of the games I most wanted to do at Intercon I by somehow getting disorganized about exactly when I did signups. I'm coming down with a scratchy sniffly miserable sort of cold. I've been frustrated and lost about what to do with the information from Rhys' school that they pretty much have no gifted programs or support at any of the elementary levels, that the "teachers just do what they can". I'm also kind of lost about the whole jobhunting thing.

But this morning I put on an old coat to take Rhys out to the bus, and in the pocket I found a folded up scrap of paper with one of my favorite poems on it. Call me sentimental, trite, or drawn to the overdone, but this one always restores gratitude to me.
*********************************

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of allnothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)


(e.e. cummings)