Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Abstracts

I don't hate everything about the snow. (Click to enlarge the pictures.)

Say it ain't snow

At work on Friday one of my co-workers was trying to scare up a laptop to take home in case it snowed and she couldn't come to the office on Monday. She has a kid, so when schools are closed, she's pretty much stuck home, too. I wasn't paying too much attention to the weather at that point (more worried about my car)...I did consider going down to the office to pick up some work yesterday, but instead I got caught up in going to see Les Miserable and doing laundry and so on, and, well, I never did make it to work. And today I didn't really think of it until just now...half an hour before I leave for my nephew's birthday party (in the opposite direction from the office). And I thought, oh, yeah, I wonder if they are still calling for snow. So I checked the National Weather Service, and

whoa, I have never seen those colors on the weather map before.

So, apparently

A HEAVY SNOW WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR THE ENTIRE REGION FROM 100 AM
MONDAY THROUGH 100 AM TUESDAY.

BY LATE TOMORROW EVENING...AREAS WEST OF THE BLUE RIDGE ARE EXPECTED
TO SEE 5 TO 10 INCHES OF SNOWFALL. EAST OF THE BLUE RIDGE INCLUDING
THE BALTIMORE AND WASHINGTON METROPOLITAN AREAS...6 TO 10 INCHES OF
SNOWFALL IS EXPECTED.

Well.

I hope this is either totally wrong, like that weakass little snow on Thursday, or that it comes early, because I don't want to be leaving the office tomorrow in 6 inches of snow with greatly reduced visibility. (But at least I have awesome new tires!)

Wish me luck. If things really go my way, there will be lots of blogging time tomorrow.

Ace Bailey

This is the last of the hockey collection that I'll scan...I have other cards, but this one now gives me extra pause.

(And the reverse)

Click to see it larger, and notice the "A" in Ace...see the happy face?

You don't hear anything bad about Ace Bailey, hockeywise or otherwise. After his four seasons with the Caps he went to Edmonton, where he became mentor and surrogate father to a very young Wayne Gretzky, who said of Ace:

He was like the mayor of [Lynnfield, MA]. People kept calling him for favors. He'd chop wood for one lady, pick up groceries for another, cook lunch for a neighbor who couldn't get out of his house. When we went out, it took us an hour and a half to drive a distance that should have taken 20 minutes because he knew everyone and we kept stopping to say hello.

This is from the tribute that ran in the September 24, 2001, Sports Illustrated. Ace Bailey died on September 11, 2001, a passenger on Flight 175.

Friday equals...

Carnival of the Recipes!

I remembered!

Ok, it was easier this week because Rocket Jones is my first blog stop of the day. Ted does a space theme, which reminds me that I loved grape Tang, I used to eat what I'm pretty sure were Space Sticks, and somewhere I have a package of chicken teriyaki from a space shuttle flight. (It's a condensed dried thing in plastic with a spot of velcro on the back.)

The carnival entries sound much better. Well, except for Victor's Soylent Green.

Fleece me, I'm a sheep

On the way to work this morning I started hearing/feeling a thump. A thump that corresponded to my speed. Funny, some weeks ago, on a nasty and cold morning, I thought to myself (after hitting a pothole) "Wow, it would suck to have to change a tire under these circumstances. I oughta join AAA."

Well, I started feeling the thump in a place where stopping and getting out of the car would have been a good way to get killed, so I just drove slowly until I could pull off. And in doing that it struck me that my car was tracking perfectly straight...it didn't feel like I had a flat at all. I got a surge of hope that I just had a big chunk of ice stuck to my wheel well or something.

But no. I didn't actually flat, but I picked up a screw about the size of a railroad spike. And when I got to the gas station next to the office, the mechanic said it was too close to the sidewall to patch.

Naturally this is in the new tire, the one I had to replace after hitting a massive pothole in the Metro parking lot, not one of the tires that (well, whattya know) are down to the wear indicator.

Should tires at 45,000 miles be in need of replacement? I don't know things like this. I'm a tomboy, but I know very little about car stuff. Which is really bad when the mechanic has your car up on the lift minus a wheel. Do you say sure, replace all four tires and do the alignment, and pop for a brake inspection since the wheels are off anyway and that one roter looks a little thin, even though there's a voice in the back of your head saying "Only an idiot would buy tires at a gas station."

What else do I do? Put the flat tire back on and drive home on the screw? Call Daddy on my cell phone in front of the garage full of people? And even if the tires are more expensive at the gas station...at least I can leave my car with them and go to work, as opposed to giving up my Saturday to deal with the tire warehouse. Where the last time I did that I'm pretty sure I got fleeced too, because it was the pothole morning and I was desperate, and the time before that they didn't have the sale tire my father had told me to get, so I ended up with a substitue deal that probably screwed me, too.

So I'm just going to roll with it (heh, heh. So to speak.) You guys got my Visa card; do whatever you feel needs to be done, just give me my car back at 4:00.

Baaa.

The Gretzky autograph

(Click for bigger)

Ok, this says "Please clean room," but the poor man signed a lot of autographs. You can't blame him for dropping the odd article.

What was even better was that my friend Dave was a huge Wayne Gretzky fan, and Dave's parents took a whole bunch of us to the Edmonton game at the Cap Centre for my friend's birthday. And my dad was able to get me an extra media guide and Mr. Gretzky was gracious enough to sign it "Happy Birthday Dave."

I haven't seen Dave in years...I wonder of he still has that.

Hook a kid early...

My first Caps autograph:

(Click to see it larger than life, and you can see the faded signature.)

And here's the back, if you want to see Ron's stats from 1974.

So I don't know if I ever mentioned how I got into hockey. It was genetic, passed on by my mom to my sister and me (our brother is quite indifferent). Mom was a hockey fan from childhood, going to games with her grandfather at Washington's Uline Arena. When I was a kid, she watched the NHL game of the week on NBC, and I watched because of Peter Puck. (Love that hockey game!)

My dad was a football and baseball guy, but in 1974, when tickets for the Capitals first season went on sale, a buddy of his from New England got him interested. The buddy, Bob, actually contacted the team about working on the game night staff...the guys who sit in the press box keeping statistics and assisting the working press.

Since Bob worked for the team, I had an in for autographs...I gave Bob my cards and he'd give them back signed. (I remember one night at a pool party, the adults were playing water polo and in return for staying out way past bedtime, I was running to retrieve the ball every time it went out of the pool. As I went to throw it back in, several people tried to get me to throw it to them...my dad, my uncles. But Bob said, in his flat Baaaahston accent, "Who got ya Ron Low's autograph, Nickie?" You can guess where the ball went, I'm sure.)

And by luck of the draw, my parents' season tickets were, if not the best in the house, pretty darn good: right behind the Caps' bench...a great location for getting the odd puck or broken stick. And after two seasons, a spot opened up on the game staff and Bob got my dad the job...by then, Dad had become a hockey guy. So my siblings and I pretty much grew up at the Cap Centre, making friends with ushers and vendors. And because we had to wait for Dad to finish work after the game, we were there in the lobby when the players left...perfect vantage point for autograph hounding.

Of course, once I was a teenager I was much too cool to ask for autographs, although my father kept up the "Clean your room" thing when a hero would be in town. So I have a few...Bobby Clarke, Bobby Orr, Marcel Dionne. Harold Snepsts. Bernie Parent said "My daughter doesn't clean her room when I tell her to, why should yours?" Oh, yeah, and there was one from a guy who played for Edmonton. I can scan that too, if you'd like to see it...

Gordie Howe

I was quite a slob as a kid (heh, some things never change), and it drove my father crazy. The condition of my bedroom was a constant battle. One night when we were leaving a game, I was getting Mike Gartner's autograph and my father said "Mike, tell her to clean her room."

And Gartner did.

That started a tradition of sorts, and I kept upping the ante...so Mike Gartner told me to clean my room. It's not like the request came from Gordie Howe...

I can't find the Gartner autograph, and several others. That's the irony of this collection of "clean your room" notes...if I had cleaned my room, such treasures would not have been mixed in with junk and lost. But I managed to keep track of the most special one (and who knew that Gartner'd be in the Hall of Fame?)

Anyway:

Twenty-three year old ball point pen doesn't scan so well...you can click the image to see it bigger. And Wes Unseld...well, my dad got this autograph for me at the 1982 NHL All-Star game at the Cap Centre, and Unseld was there as part of the Washington sports dignitary contingent. My father thought it would be a mite rude to not get his autograph too, since he was staning right next to Howe and all, although at the time I was spectacularly unimpressed.

Sigh

Being all hockey-nostalgic now, I was going through some stuff, looking at autographs (I lost more than I still have, sadly) and hockey cards tonight. I found my first press pass.

(The blue blur obscures my name, which was oh-so-offically written in ball point pen. And I wasn't working press, I was substituting for interns on the PR staff who'd gone home to Jersey for semester break. But working there in December I did get to go to the Christmas party, which I remember oh-so-well because my childhood hero offered me a cocktail meatball.)

And although I did lose a lot of memorabilia to youthful carelessness, I also saved a fair amount. This could be blog fodder for awhile...

I get misty-eyed even now

Silver anniversary for 'Miracle on Ice'

There are a few more stories linked there. My favorite quote is from Cammi Granato:

My brothers and I would act them out -- Herb Brooks talking to Mike Eruzione. We would reenact the last 4 seconds of the game and pile on each other just like they did. ...

"Honestly, I felt it and thought about 1980 when we were celebrating after winning the gold medal in '98. It was a strange feeling. I had watched and reenacted that so often, and now I was there."

Except Mystery Date. I don't feel the need to play that ever again.

The point of being an adult...suffering the slings and arrows of life in the corporate jungle...is not to spend your tax refund on all the toys you had as a child, plus the ones you wanted but never got.

Right?

...right?

A passion for sport

This afternoon Victor and I went to see the Delaware Valley Collegiate Hockey Conference Women's All-Star game.

Sometimes people ask me if I played hockey. I laugh. I didn't, for a variety of reasons...one being I was slow and uncoordinated.

Also, hockey gear is not cheap, and my parents had three kids and dad worked for the city. The way my feet grew, I was lucky they let me have shoes. Skates would have been a bit much, not to mention pads and pants and gloves.

Hockey also wasn't very popular, and there was only one boy's league. And back then, if a girl played on a boys' sports team, there was usually a lawsuit involved.

I did play sports, soccer and softball. Had I really had passion, I'm sure I'd have found a way to play hockey, too, even in those days.

Watching the kids play today, I was thinking...it's great to see passion. Even though girls playing hockey isn't as far-out an idea as it was thirty years ago, it still can't be easy...all the hassles of hockey in general, with the limited ice team meaning 5 am practices and games three hours from home, are probably magnified for girls. But apparently this area has the fourth-largest girls' program in the country. I applaud them and their passion.

And actually, I'm impressed by the passion that drives anybody...boy, girl, woman, man...to get out and play the game instead of watching it on tv or in the stands. Any game: hockey, basketball, rugby.

I haven't played a team sport since a company picnic softball game in 1991. One of the women in the department coached her daughter's softball team and thought it would be fun for us to enter the tournament. I agreed to play; I was only a year or two from my last rec league season. But what was cool were the women who wanted to play for the first time...there was a middle-aged lady who went out and bought a pair of sneakers (footwear she did not own) for the occasion. The young glamor-girl cut her manicured nails short so she could wear her borrowed glove. We spent a month doing batting practice on our lunch hour.

We weren't great, but we were credible. And now that I think about it, we had passion, too.

Hmm.

It's soup

Before Victor moved in, I wasn't big on soup. I pretty much only ate it if I was sick. Two of his soups changed my mind, a cream of broccoli with cheese and this minestrone:

Victor's Minestrone

Meatballs:
10 oz frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained
1 1/2 pounds ground beef
1/3 cup breadcrumbs
1 egg
Salt and pepper

Mix ingredients and form meatballs. Bake on a broiler pan (to let grease drain off) until cooked.

Soup:
1 onion, coarsely chopped
1 cup chopped carrot
1 cup chopped celery
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon basil
4 cans (14 1/2 oz each) beef broth
1 lb. can crushed tomatoes (drain)
1 lb. can kidney beans (drain)
1 cup elbow macaroni, cooked and drained
Olive oil

In a large pot, saute onion, celery, carrot, oregano, and basil in olive oil. Add beef broth, tomatoes, and beans; simmer for about an hour. Add macaroni. Garnish with shredded parmesan cheese if desired.

UPDATE to add: Doh! The meatballs. Put them in with the macaroni. You don't want to miss the meatballs; in fact, they are good by themselves, and they're a good way to sneak some spinach by vegetable-hating picky eaters.

As you can see, this is a good hearty soup. And it has pretty much been the basis for the soups I've made...lots of vegetables, beans, and pasta. As I've switched over from eating meat, I frequently make a vegetarian version. When I'm really busy, I cut every corner and dump everything in the Crock Pot:

A bag or two of frozen mixed vegetables
A big can of tomatoes with juice
A can or two of beans (usually red kidney and garbanzo)
Vegetable broth (preferrably the roasted vegetable, which has more flavor)
Several shakes of Italian or pizza seasoning (it came with the spice rack; might as well use it!)

About half and hour before eating, add

Soy crumbles or Trader Joe's meatless meatballs, if I have them (if I'm going to use fake meat I'll only use one can of beans)
Dried pasta (elbow macaroni, penne, farfalle, the little wagon-wheelish-looking ones)

Tonight I gave it a Mexican rather than Italian slant, using salsa instead of canned tomato, pinto instead of kidney beans, and roasted corn. I also left out the pasta. According to Victor, without the pasta it isn't minestrone. A quick Google search did not confirm this: one source (I failed to bookmark, so no citations) said that minestrone never contains meat, another said it contains vegetables and pasta or beans or rice. Another said that minestrone is synonymous with "a mix of things." Whatever...it's soup.

Random Saturday stuff

I hope the post yesterday made some sense...I finished it after a bottle of pinot noir. Few subjects get me that worked up, but because I get worked up, I lose my focus and ramble. (Just the thalidomide portion of the original post was like the lampblack chapters of Les Miserables.)

Anyway...one would think that if an event occurred every week on the same day, I'd remember it. One would be wrong. Friday=Carnival of the Recipes....Friday=Carnival of the Recipes...Friday=Carnival of the Recipes. Maybe if I type it 97 more times it will stick.

People have asked me why I'm not worked up over the NHL. I dunno...because I knew it was going to happen? Because I haven't felt a strong connection to the team since the move downtown? Because I'm an adult now and sports are just entertainment?

The other day Victor sent me a picture of Gerry Meehan. I said yep, and that's Tom Rowe behind him, I think. And yes, that was Vancouver's sweater in the '70s. But it didn't fill me with longing for hockey or make me particularly nostalgic, it was just looking at a 28-year-old picture.

I am toying with the idea of taking the money I didn't blow on hockey and going to see the Tour de Georgia. Which sport is more niche, hockey or pro cycling? Maybe I'll go mainstream and try to get opening day tickets to the 'Nats.

I do not have a threee-day weekend. In fact, I have a meeting that includes the upperest management on Monday (not a big-deal meeting, more of a dog and pony show), but it means I shouldn't blow off work, nor should I show up in boots and fleece. So I'm hoping that the forecast for crappy weather is totally wrong or we get another President's Day blizzard so that the office is closed.

So I need to go get some soup ingredients in case I get lucky with the snow. And I should invent a recipe, because it's only six days until the next Carnival.

Drugs

There's been a lot of drug news this week, with the COX-2 inhibitors, the jury verdict in the "Zoloft defense" case, the news about suicide and SSRI antidepressants, and the new prostate cancer therapy.

Lots of news. I have lots of thoughts, and notes all over the place, and I think I was trying to cram too much into this post. So I'm starting over, with just a few suppositions and (I'm going to try, really) one point.

The suppositions are:
Drug companies don't want to kill people. (Or even hurt them, for that matter.)
The FDA doesn't want to keep people sick or suffering.
People who lobby for bans believe the risks of a drug outweigh the benefits overall.

The point is:
People need to understand what they are doing when they take drugs.

You know those pamphlets that are stapled to your prescription bag when you pick up medicine at the drug store? Not the really long piece of paper inside the box that's covered with small type and folded 300 times...that's the manufacturer's FDA-approved label. I'm talking about the one with big type that say "You are taking Vioxx ..."

I used to write those.

And while it is good for a patient to know "Call your doctor if you notice black tarry stools," the pamphlet doesn't explain that black tarry stools probably mean you are passing blood because you have an ulcer that maybe was caused by the drug. Nor will it explain that not only might the drug directly irritate the lining of your stomach because of its acidity, but that in blocking the prostaglandins that were causing you pain, it also blocks the prostaglandins that help protect your stomach from irritating acids. (Actually, one of the selling points for the COX-2s is that they are more selective in the prostaglandins they block...but I'm going off on a tangent again.)

Now really, prostaglandins are beyond the scope of that drug store pamphlet. (And beyond my understanding too; I only get the basics.) But the point is that in the chemical processes that make a drug work, there are some chemical processes that cause adverse effects. And not everyone is going to have the adverse effects...and for that matter, not everyone is going to benefit from the intended effect, either. I have a particular type of headache I get sometimes that won't respond at all to ibuprofen, but if I take acetaminophen, it helps. (Why? Something in the chemical reactions, but I'm damned if I know what.)

Ok, back to the one point to which I was trying to stick: patients need a more sophisticated understanding of how drugs work in the body in order to understand that side effects occur, why you can't always divorce adverse effects from wanted effects, and why the same drug will have different effects in different people.

I don't think the problem is that people are stupid or that they expect the FDA to be a nanny protecting them from all harm, I think that most people are just naive. They don't understand the complex chemistry behind pharmaceuticals, and have probably never even stopped to think about the fact that there is complex chemistry at work. It's changing, but I'd guess that most people still don't really question their doctors when they get prescriptions. I don't know how many people understand the limitations inherent in testing drugs before approval, or the idea of off-label use.

So my point was...in order to take responsibility for themselves and to be able to weigh risks and benefits, people need to understand this stuff.

If the education were up to me, I'd start by recommending a trip to http://www.fda.gov/. No, the FDA isn't a flawless institution (and there's still a lot of politics), but the information on the web page satisfies needs at a variety of levels.

I would rock, if there was to be any rocking, but there isn't

Something at work today reminded me of my brush with glory a couple of years ago.

Management decided we should have an employee of the month. It was for the usual reasons: hard work, team player, never threatens to go postal, etc. The lucky employee was going to get a reserved prime parking space for the month, and maybe a plaque or something. The plaque didn't matter, but parking was a bit of a bitch in that building, so the primo parking spot was actually a pretty good award.

Well, the program never got off the ground...not team oriented, unmotivating, not fair to staff who took public transportation, etc.

But my boss did say "Nic, we've decided not to do the Employee of the Month award. But if we had done it, you would have been the first Employee of the Month."

Yum, veggie burgers

Wisconsin Firm Recalls Ground Beef Because of Possible Contamination with Hydraulic Fluid

Actually, hydraulic fluid, while not being healthy (I'm guessing hydraulic fluid would be a hydrocarbon, and certainly wouldn't sit well in the GI tract) isn't gross. Ok, it's gross, but not eewwww, gross. When I heard this story on the radio, the announcer said something like "You won't believe what's in the beef!" which had me anticipating something like human fingers, or baby frogs.

Which is funny, really, because fingers or frogs probably aren't as unhealthy as hydraulic fluid.

Anyway, I'm not really freaked out by a ground beef recall. The safety of ground meat is pretty far down the list of why I've switched over to veggie burgers. (The first reason is actually because I'm starting to really like them. Ever try the bean burger at Chili's? It's got some nice spice, and more flavor than the giant hamburgers.) But I do notice that the recall is for meat with sell-by dates of January 31 to Februay 2. After two weeks, even without the hydraulic fluid marinade, that's probably not worth eating.

And for the people who made burgers the day they bought the meat, I wonder if they were amazed by how none of the meat got stuck on the pan.

There is no ending to this story

When I got to the office this morning I noticed (like one could fail to notice) a hook & ladder fire truck in front of the hotel next door. I thought, wow, that would really suck, having to evacuate your hotel room at 7 a.m., particularly in the sleet...although there didn't seem to be any pajama-clad people milling around.

As it happens, my office is on the fifth floor of our building, with a nice view of the hotel parking lot. And over the next hour, more and more people showed up and did mill around the fire truck, though they weren't in pajamas and didn't seem to be coming from the hotel. And someone also set up a tent with a local radio station's logo and started passing out coffee.

Eventually it occurred to me (Monday morning; I was slow) that perhaps this was a radio stunt, so I Google'd the station. Sure enough:

Join WKRP this Valentine's Day (Monday, Feb 14th) from 6am-8am for Ben and Brian's Diamond Drop in the Hotel Parking Lot. We'll drop 987 marshmallows from two Fire Truck Towers...97 round cubic zirconias will be stuffed in the marshmallows, and one heart-shaped cubic zirconia will represent the grand prize-- $1,000 pair of Diamond Earrings!

Well, the second fire truck didn't show (maybe they needed it to respond to actual emergencies, since it was sleeting), but there were only thirty or forty people in the crowd anyway. I admit it...I took my coffee and swung my chair around and watched the show.

The firemen were pretty nice...they sort of gently dropped the marshmallows a few handsful at a time. The assembled...well, not masses...grabbed the marshmallows as they hit the ground, and they looked pretty polite about it. A few couples were obviously working in tandem, with one person scooping up marshmallows and another holding them in a hat or coat. One woman was out there (in the sleet) without a coat, just her perky red Valentine's Day suit and heels.

When all the marshmallows were dropped, the people knelt along the curb and started flattening their marshmallows. From five stories up I couldn't see detail, so I don't know if they were keeping the cubic zirconias, and I never saw anyone jumping around wildly like a big winner. I did see several people walk away with their hands full of marshmallow, then I saw them come back wiping their hands on paper towels. (Chickie in the red suit left her marshmallow pile on the curb, and it was still there when I left the office this afternoon.)

And as I said, there's no ending to the story. The people left, the fire truck left, and I turned around and worked the rest of the day, with Baby, if you ever wondered/Wondered whatever became of me/I'm livin' on the air in Cincinnati ... going through my head.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Yeah, so I'm early.

I wanted to give everyone plenty of time to play with the ACME Heart Maker.

As seen on Oprah

No, really...I am watching Oprah. (I heard a radio ad on the way home that Lance Armstrong was the guest, and I was looking for an excuse to skip the gym this afternoon. Er, I mean, I'm going to the gym in the morning. Live strong...) And it's actually pretty entertaining. But I really like this:

Lance Armstrong's Mom's Guacamole.

Tonight at dinner

Victor: Did you see my post today?

Nic: The one about The Association? Never My Love?

Victor: Oh, is that who the Elevator Music Singers are?

Nic: Uh, yeah. Although it was also done by the Fifth Dimension, as Ted pointed out this morning when he posted the lyrics.

Victor:

Victor: Ted posted the lyrics to that song this morning?

Nic: Uh huh. I was wondering why you were giving him a hard time.

Victor: Ted posted the lyrics...that must be why that song was going through my head all day...

In one eye and out the other, I swear. Don't feel bad, Ted, he does the same thing to me.

Like my metaphors?

So last week, the Situation looked like a runaway train. Actually, it looked like a runaway train full of hazardous chemicals about to plunge off a cliff...and onto a playground full of children and puppies. All I was doing was stressing and preparing my disaster response plan.

This week Situation seems to be snoozing in the corner. So I oughta relax, right? Except I'm not...I'm afraid Situation is a violent, unpredictable, drunken lout. I'm tip-toeing around and bracing myself for when it wakes up, not knowing if it's just gonna just want some pancakes or if it's going to come at me swinging a baseball bat.

This is actually related to Heart Month. The quote of the day (from this Post article):

"This is another in a long line of accumulating, well-documented effects of stress on the body," said Herbert Benson, a mind-body researcher at Harvard Medical School. "Stress must be viewed as a disease-causing entity."

I need to find a scientific citation for this*, but my understanding is that when your body reacts to stress, the chemical response includes changes to slow your bleeding in case you happened to be bitten by a tiger or stabbed. If you don't end up bleeding, well, you've gunked up your blood vessels just like you would if you ate crappy food. It's not going to hurt once in a while, but it's not something you want to be doing all the time.

If stress is as bad a cheeseburgers, I might as well be Morgan Spurlock on day 29 of the SuperSize Me experiment.

*Found one:

Black, P. Stress, inflammation and cardiovascular disease. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Volume 52, Issue 1, Pages 1-23:

Stress, by activating the sympathetic nervous system, the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, and the renin-angiotensin system, causes the release of various stress hormones such as catecholamines, corticosteroids, glucagon, growth hormone, and renin, and elevated levels of homocysteine, which induce a heightened state of cardiovascular activity, injured endothelium, and induction of adhesion molecules on endothelial cells to which recruited inflammatory cells adhere and translocate to the arterial wall. An acute phase response (APR), similar to that associated with inflammation, is also engendered, which is characterized by macrophage activation, the production of cytokines, other inflammatory mediators, acute phase proteins (APPs), and mast cell activation, all of which promote the inflammatory process. Stress also induces an atherosclerotic lipid profile with oxidation of lipids and, if chronic, a hypercoagulable state that may result in arterial thromboses. Shedding of adhesion molecules and the appearance of cytokines, and APPs in the blood are early indicators of a stress-induced APR, may appear in the blood of asymptomatic people, and be predictors of future cardiovascular disease. The inflammatory response is contained within the stress response, which evolved later and is adaptive in that an animal may be better able to react to an organism introduced during combat. The argument is made that humans reacting to stressors, which are not life-threatening but are "perceived" as such, mount similar stress/inflammatory responses in the arteries, and which, if repetitive or chronic, may culminate in atherosclerosis.

The title hooked me: Taste of Raspberries, Taste of Death

I was doing some honest-to-God-work-related web searching today when I stumbled across a page titled Taste of Raspberries, Taste of Death. You know I had to bookmark that sucker for later...

Turns out it is an account of a 1937 incident where a drug company marketed the antibiotic sulfanilamide as an elixir made with diethylene glycol.

Uh-huh, that diethylene glycol. (Yes, you do know diethylene glycol, though you may know it as "the poisonous stuff in antifreeze that tastes good so dogs will drink it and die.") Ooops. Talk about the wrong solvent to be using for an elixir.

I'm not trying to make light of it, actually. More than 100 people died after having taken the drug, and the chemist who'd formulated the original elixir committed suicide.

It is a sad, albeit interesting story, presented here in the context of how the tragedy of the day spurred on the enactment of the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, giving the FDA some teeth.

Mardi Gras already?

Golly, I need to get me a Moon Pie.

(Why, you ask? Well, I told that story last year. [And OHMYGOD I can buy a "Throw me some MoonPies, Mister!" t-shirt on the Moon Pie web site!])

Cool, my shirt should be here in a couple of weeks. Anyway, I was planning red beans and rice for dinner this week anyway, so I made them tonight, along with collards. Well, I opened a can of Glory collard greens; I'm not making them myself. (I remember one time I was buying a bunch of fresh collard greens for the guinea pigs. The cashier, an African-American woman, looked at me...looked at the collards...looked back at me and said "Do you have a rabbit?" I'm pretty sure going through her mind was something along the lines of "There is no way this Yankee white girl knows what to do with these." [Oh, and when I lived Down South, I actually had a client who called me that. I phoned him to set up an appointment, and he said "Are you that Yankee white girl working for my lawyer?" He said it in a really friendly way, he just wanted to make sure he knew who I was. Although in my office, "Yankee" was descriptive enough...most of my coworkers thought Auburn was up North.])

Where was I?

Oh, dinner. Yeah, so since today is Mardi Gras, I went with the southern-themed dinner, although I suppose pancakes would have been even more traditional. Alas, I didn't have the proper makings for a Hurricane, nor even a Dixie or Turbo Dog. (Dixie doesn't seem to have a web page. I guess the guys are too busy making beer to play with computers. [The best beer I ever had was a Dixie...I'd just spent hours in a traffic jam on Interstate 10 in the heat of summer, and the beer came in a juice glass right out of their brite tank. I have loved Dixie since.])

What was I doing, besides abusing brackets and parentheses?

Oh yeah, I was getting ready to bang out a short & meaningless blog post, because I had nothing to talk about today.

Spring will follow winter

I haven't been writing, or been in the mood to write...the work thing has me depressed, angry, and worn out. I took today off...leave I requested some time ago, actually, just to get a few things done at home and so that I could sleep in following the Super Bowl party...but just like it's been invading my sleep, the upsetting things have not let me calm down today, either.

I've been noticing that my daffodils are coming up through the snow.

It's wishful thinking...we still have several weeks for it to be cold, grey, and icy. But this too shall pass...this ice and this thing at work. I just have to be patient and let everything melt.

Knowing that it will be spring doesn't make it warmer now, though.

He knows better than to ask why

From: "Victor"

Please do wear red tonight

Wear red to support the American Heart Association's Go Red For Women movement.

Heart disease is still the major cause of death for women in America. Actually, it's the leading cause of death overall in America, and stroke is number three. But the reason the Heart Association pulls a day out of Heart Month to highlight women and heart disease is because the assessment and treatment for women lags behind that of men.

For example:

Cardiac imaging methods such as stress single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and stress echocardiography work as well in women as in men to accurately diagnose coronary artery disease (CAD). Women at risk for CAD, however, are less often referred for the right tests, according to a consensus statement from the American Heart Association.

It's a similar story for percutaneous coronary interventions (like balloon angioplasty and stenting to open blocked arteries), which are done in men much more routinely than in women.

And women are less likely than men to receive recommendations from their doctors for preventive therapies such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, aspirin therapy and cardiac rehabilitation to protect them against heart attacks and death.

(Source: AHA press releases, 1 Feb 05)

But the quote from here that really struck with me was this:

In addition, women usually delay seeking treatment, so much so that women who have heart attacks will seek help 30 to 60 minutes later than their male counterparts.

So I'm supporting the Go Red campaign and doing what I can to help get the word out. Women clearly need to be proactive about heart disease. Do you know if you're at risk? Find out. Are you at risk? Mitigate it. Do you know how to recognize a heart attack or stoke? What would you do if you were having one? Read this.

Waiting is not going to do you any good.

The entry that isn't

I have stuff going on at work that would make a heckuva post, or two, or forty. Stories to make anyone...everyone...laugh. Except for the parts that are so pathetic you'd weep. But stories, man, I have stories.

And because they are 100% work-related and potentially traceable back to me, I can't tell them. And it's driving me crazy, really, because...sit-com-ish absurdity aside...the situations are alternately causing me to lose sleep and giving me nightmares.

Groundhog day

I was catching up on the news at lunch today, looking at the pictures of Punxsutawney Phil and friends, when a coworker came in to my office.

"I wish I had a groundhog," I said.

She said "Of course you do." And she sighed. And I think she rolled her eyes.

I think I might have a reputation.

Who needs an iPod?

Speaking of songs...I am intrigued by the iPod, but I know I don't have the patience to go through all my CDs and load the songs. If they ever sell an iPod pre-loaded...especially if it's pre-loaded with the one-hit wonders of the 60s and 70s that I don't already have...I will be first in line to buy one.

Until then, I have an internal jukebox. Really, I hear a phrase or see something that reminds me of a song, and it triggers another song, and well, I pretty much have songs going through my head all the time. The playlist over the last few days:

Lucille, Kenny Rogers
FM, Steely Dan
Sweet Baby James, James Taylor
Slit Skirts, Pete Townshend
Goodtime Charlie's Got the Blues, Danny O'Keefe
Hazy Shade of Winter, Simon & Garfunkel (and also The Boxer)
Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, Billy Joel
Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show, Neil Diamond
Shambala, Three Dog Night
Workin' At The Carwash Blues, Jim Croce
Oh Very Young, Cat Stevens
Rainy Day People, Gordon Lightfoot

!@#$%^& hormones

I got my Depot-Provera shot yesterday. I swear, that hormone rush always makes me...emotional. Ok, sometimes bitchy. But sometimes, just emotional. Like last night, when I heard Bobby Vinton's Roses Are Red (My Love) on the radio and came very close to tears.

Victor was a huge help. I'm sniffling, trying to contain myself, and he says "Want me to put on Honey?"