Seed Toasting

I just toasted acorn squash seeds with sugar and a little salt....soo so so good. I just ate all of them in like 7 minutes. I think they are better than the pumpkin seeds because they are small and tender and cute. Try it!

Big Step!

My goal for the last week was to be able to touch my left thumb to my left shoulder...today I actually exceeded that goal with the help of my therapist. I touched my fingers to my shoulder and it sounds like such a small thing, but I really felt like I would never be able to bend my elbow that far again! Woohooo for the road to recovery!!!

Election

The best news I've heard this entire election: Rogue Palin
Maybe she is actually brilliant and planned this whole attack on the McCain campaign? Nah. But she really did single handedly derail it, and McCain committed political suicide by choosing her. I cast my vote yesterday, I'm excited for the outcome of this election.

Pumpkins!

Last night I carved pumpkins at Jesse and Lauren's. Some old friends Emy and Adam were there as well. Mine is the monster on the left. I gutted another one, but have yet to carve it. Maybe today...maybe not...I can't believe how fast today is going! Maybe it's all the tests I have this weekend that I'm putting off.



Today I made all the seeds into sweet and salty cinnamon goodness. I have got to make pumpkin pie soon, I'm craving it! Actually I seem to be craving all things unhealthy lately, I blame it on fall and the impending cold weather.

Funny!

Fall

Shudders...

Aaron just sent me this. Gross. It's the same type of spider we saw in Costa Rica Megan, webs from the bushes on the side of the road to the power lines. Yes, THE POWER LINES! I like arthropods and all, but I really wish they didn't get so big sometimes.

This guy was sneaking around right outside my door with a friend last night. I'm not sure if they opened the gate or not...the latch is down pretty low so I don't know if they can reach it or not. Anyway, they were scared off shortly after this was taken.
School is going well, I can't believe it's half way through week 4 already. There is quite a bit of work, but I find it manageable especially since I am only in class 3 days a week. I think soon I will have to get a job to supplement my savings, what I have isn't going to cut it.
I went on a 6 mile walk with Ashlee all over Eugene on Sunday, that was nice. Last night I had dinner with Lee and Spencer, they are in town for work, so it's been good to hang out with them a few times. I think I'm gearing up to begin some more batiking...it could get interesting as the only place I have to do it in cold weather is in the kitchen. Hot wax + dye = really bad idea for indoors. But my art calls, so I will answer.
In the next day or so I hope to get out and get some pictures of the fabulous fall leaves, they are really beautiful right now.

Bloggers Unite: Poverty

I received an email today from a volleyball friend telling me about Blog Action day. The topic is poverty. For the most part I think most Americans are fairly disconnected from true poverty. Sure we see homeless people on a regular basis, but I'm talking Cambodia, India, Bangladesh poverty. The kind of poverty where 4 year olds have to work to support the family just to have a meal that day.
My friend's husband has pledged to give up his morning coffee habit for a week to donate $25 to Kiva, a foundation that lends money to entrepreneurs in developing nations to get their businesses going. I encourage any of you that have a few dollars to spare to donate to a cause you feel is making the world a better place.
For those of you, like myself, that don't have a dollar to spare, you can play this rice game, and for each correct answer the UN World Food Program will donate 20 grains of rice to an impoverished area.
Lastly, I read this article on child labor the other day, and learned some important things about child labor laws and how to support them. In Bangladesh, many children worked in textile factories, trimming threads or performing other small tasks. Then a law was passed in the states, banning the import of any textiles from factories which used child labor. 50,000 children lost their jobs in these relatively clean working environments because the factories feared loss of business from the US. Those children still needed to bring in money, so they turned to more dangerous jobs to make a living. Prostitution, smashing apart old batteries for recycling, construction. Banning child labor is not going to happen in these parts of the world, so make sure that when supporting a new law, child labor is not necessarily banned, but that they are given clean, safe working conditions. It is definitely hard to imagine what life is like for those who are truly impoverished, especially without experiencing it first hand.
So take a few minutes today, donate if you can, educate yourself or others if you can't.

New Toilet Too!

Not minutes after I posted, my landlord came over to fix the thermostat on my heater...my bathroom heater wouldn't turn off. I had asked him a long time ago to please take off my old toilet seat. I had bought a new one and the old one disgusted me. As many of you can imagine, it must have been pretty bad. It was broken and stained and the whole toilet always smelled even after a thorough cleaning. It was rusted on, and I had trouble trying to get it off. The toilet started to lift off the ground when I torqued on it.
So he went to work on getting that off, and in the process broke a pretty big chunk off. He put the new seat on, and told me that he didn't think the hole would make a difference. On a whim he decided he should test it before leaving. Water shot out of the side of my toilet, all over the floor and wall. We both started laughing and he ran off to the store to get me a new toilet before all the stores closed.
So I got a new toilet seat and a whole new toilet! The old one was from 1947!!!! I think it had a good life and good riddance! It also used 5 gallons a flush, so I'm happy to upgrade to 1.6 gallons/flush.

Early Christmas

Thank you Megan! I studied all day and karma rewarded me. I got a package from Megan including but not limited to toothbrush and tooth cookies, toothpaste frosting, calculus sprinkles and a delicious smelling flax seed pillow complete with flannel bug cover! Thank you!


I also got a call that the scrubs I had ordered came in. Wohooo! The store near my house will order special sizes (i.e. petite) or colors for free.


And yesterday I got my Thanksgiving edition of Bon Apetit. I am all set for goodies for a while!

New Pizza Oven!

Jesse and Lauren just built their new brick oven and I was thrilled to be invited to the maiden voyage! We made 4 or 5 different pizzas, they were delicious and only took about 3 minutes a piece to cook.



The happy hosts


My favorite, Rosette de Lyon salami with fresh handmade mozzarella. Yum.

Sarah F***ing Palin

This is lifted from http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah-palin-sarah-palin-sarah-palin.html

Well there's a brand new political superstar on the scene and she's tough as nails and the media won't leave her alone and she's a rough-and-tumble Alaskan hockey mom and why are they asking all these questions and she is the pure reincarnation of the invincible Anglo-Saxon frontier earth mother and stop picking on her!

So maybe Sarah Palin doesn't have all that much "experience." Maybe she doesn't pay much attention to your fancy-pants "foreign policy" or "domestic policy" or "policy." Maybe she's "crazy" and "corrupt" and was picked by a "vetting process" that consisted of "tossing darts at a phone book in the middle of an all-night Ambien-and-Ketamine binge." But maybe that's just because Sarah Palin's just too busy being a real American to hang around with your namby-pamby liberal candidates with their arugula lattes and their east coast Ivy League universities and their "qualifications" while they tax the Jesus Fetus to pay for gay Muslim healthcare! Well Sarah Palin understands that being vice-president takes more than just book-smarts or regular-smarts or knowing what a vice president does! It takes gumption and spunk and other made-up words that hearken back to another time - a realer time - a whiter time - back when men were men and women were men and great big hairy-chested frontiersmen of the plains wrestled oxen and caribou and the savage Injun Man in their mighty conquest of the West before succumbing to explosive amoebic dysentery! And with the help of God and millions of dollars in energy industry donations, Sarah Palin will give us that dysentery again!

VALUES.
As a Jesus-fearing moose-hunting hockey-mom mother of five, Sarah Palin understands real American values, because she is a real American just like you, only with much more money and power and a tiny invisible fairy that lives in her brain and tells her to ban books and blow up Muslims. Sarah Palin understands that the key to America's success is personal responsibility, and the key to personal responsibility is getting lots of money from oil companies and the federal government while you enforce other people's personal responsibility! Oh, you wanted state funding to help with your out-of-wedlock Sin Child? Shoulda thoughta that before you decided to not be born to Sarah Palin!

Sarah Palin will also ban abortion, 'cause in the hardscrabble up-by-the-bootstraps wilderness of the Alaskan suburbs, they don't have abortion. They also do not have adequate access to health care, birth control, or equal pay for equal work, as it turns out.

MAVERICKNESS.
As a moose-hunting Jesus-fearing hockey-mom mother of five who hunts moose, Sarah Palin isn't some petty Washington bureaucrat. She's a petty Alaskan bureaucrat, and she's gonna shake things up in Washington! For her first reform she will pose for photographs with a gun and a stuffed moose head! For her second reform she will say something bold and brassy. For her third reform she will give birth at a live press conference to six eagle scouts, three peregrine falcons and an American mastodon, rear them in the Christian faith and release them into the wild before hunting them down, shooting them and mounting their heads in the Roosevelt Room!

Now some of you are saying "oh Giblets these aren't actual reforms" because you are boring and stupid and I hate you. But if you think about it, Sarah Palin would be reforming Washington just by being elected and finally giving a voice to marginalized white Christian evangelicals everywhere. She will also re-ban abortion, in case abortion got away the first time.

ENVIRONMENTALNESS.
As a Jesus-fearing moose-hunting hockey-mom mother of five who hunts moose for Jesus, Sarah Palin is kin to the wild outdoors and appreciates its bountiful splendor as she is gunning it down from her airplane. Sarah Palin understands that America is dangerously addicted to oil, and that the only cure is more oil. She also understands that nature is our natural enemy, created by a malevolent Satan to come between us and our God-given oil deposits with its hateful, clean water and its foul, pristine air. But Sarah Palin also also knows that we've got to leave this earth behind for our children, at least until we can find a way to drill for oil in our children. Sarah Palin is committed to exploring Baby Trig's vast and abundant petroleum reserves.

Sarah Palin may not know if global warming is man-made. She may not know if global warming is real. She may not know what global warming is. But if global warming is caused by abortions, Sarah Palin will fight it - by banning abortion, just in case the first couple times didn't take.

COMMANDERNESS.
As a hockey-playing moose-hunting Jesus-fearing hockey-mom mother of five who plays hockey, Sarah Palin lives in Alaska, which is just a couple thousand miles away from Russia and the Red Chinese, giving her valuable insight into their inscrutable foreign ways. Every day for forty-four years Sarah Palin has gotten up and thought to herself, "Hmmm, the weather is cold today - and I bet the weather is similarly cold in Russia at this latitude." Isn't it about time we had a vice-president who understands the climatological grievances of our most deadliest frenemies? Think about it! But not for very long!

Alaska is also close to the International Date Line, giving Sarah Palin the power to traverse the distance between Today and Yesterday at will and making her the Wizard of Speed and Time. She's sassy and white and ready to lead, people! And to ban abortion. Just look at that blastocyst! How can you say no!
Labels: fuck you '08, real america, the end of the world party

Disturbing

I just read this article on John McCain published by Rolling Stone. It is obviously biased, but even so, he has done some horrible things that cannot be disputed. It is terrifying to think that he or his "hockey mom" side kick could have any amount of power whatsoever. How obnoxious is it that he is always saying "my friends", repeating himself and using Obama's words ...what a slimy asshole. I might lose it if he wins.

Rough Day

After my annual (never fun) and a not so great PT appointment I was feeling down. So I went to Sweet Life and got this really good raspberry cheesecake. I'm not one to food medicate, but sometimes it just makes you feel better.

I love this set of realistic teeth! It's pretty crazy how life like they are down to every last small bump and ridge. I mean mamelon and imbrication line. Back to studying...seriously so much to do...

I love this...

I think I may have to do some posts like this:

http://pickyourposion.blogspot.com/

Be careful on that broken leg video...eeps.

The rain is back...

Well I can tell already the overly exciting life I used to live is taking a downward turn. Not much to report. I haven't been studying as much as I should be, but I finally feel like I can think again which is nice. I'm still in some discomfort from my elbow, and the clinic called today (returning my call from 2.5 days ago) regarding my stitches and also to let me know I should be able to straighten and bend my elbow all the way by now. I can almost straighten it, but not without lots of sensation. I'm getting a lot better at bending, but only at 50% or so. The resident informed me I should be going to PT, like immediately, especially since I'm not recovering as well as I should be, or I could lose range of motion permanently. It would have been nice to know that at the time of surgery, luckily I have some PT appointments set up already. I would be totally scrambling now otherwise. I have been doing my own exercises, but it's uncomfortable and time consuming, he said I should be doing this 2-3 hours a day. Ah well, I'm doing pretty well, just ready to be back to normal, get some exercise and a full night's sleep.
Stitches are coming out Tuesday and I can't wait! I either have an elbow full of bandaids or look like a Tim Burton character currently.