Ahhhh…. Break.

Still have to work, but with the students gone, there’s hardly anyone here to ask questions, and I’m sure that will be even more so as the week continues. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a lot done this week, although I may end up being distracted by the bright shiny object that is the Internet.

Michael and I both enjoyed doing as little as possible this weekend, although we’ll have to get in gear and get our papers written/projects done/studying for the end of the semester. Luckily, the only thing I have left to do it write a ten to fifteen page paper–and keep it down to fifteen pages. :)

We watched ‘Master & Commander’ again this weekend–much better with subtitles on, as it was really difficult to understand most of the dialogue. Despite that, it really is a good movie, and I highly recommend it if you haven’t already seen it.

I still like the doctor the best.

We made bourbon balls this weekend. Three batches. One to give away as a gift, and two batches for us. Yum! One year we’ll remember to make them before Thanksgiving, but that won’t be this year. But the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas has worked well for us in previous years, so they’ll still be quite delicious–assuming that I can get any this year, before Michael eats them all.

Never send a non-baker to the store to pick up one ingredient. Bourbon balls need coffee/espresso powder, and I can’t find espresso power, so we just use instant coffee. Which I forgot to pick up. So Michael ran out to pick some up. And came home with individual serving packs of Sanka.

(sigh)

Lastly, I’m looking for another cookie scoop. I have a very nice Pampered Chef one, but I’d like one that’s a little larger–cookies should be just a tad bit larger than mine have been coming out. I’ll have to make a decision soon, as holiday baking time is almost upon us. And I have to decide what to make this year. I’m still looking for a sweet potato pie reciepe if anyone has one.

Friday night we went to the planetarium with my parents. Every year they have a special show for the holidays “Tis the Season.”

Michael, who knows more about astronomy than I do (I’m lucky to be able to find the big dipper), said he already knew everything they told us in the show, but I didn’t, and found it quite interesting.

They seem to have more shows than are listed, because they list only 7 and 8 pm shows, and we went at 9.

Of course you have to remember that we are in WV, so the seats were those old wooden swivel chairs that tilted back, but it was still pretty interesting.

From Improbable Research:

One of the dilemmas all professors occasionally face in the classroom is what to do about sleeping students. Should we ignore them and let them snooze away? Or should we awaken them?

E is for our Empire
Where the sun never sets
The larger we make it
The bigger it gets

Just an astounding number of posters on everything from Cubans Welcome US Troops to “A Maid and a Million Men” to Is your washroom breeding bolsheviks?

G is the Game
We preserve with such care
To shoot, as it gracefully
Flies through the air

Thanks Bob!

My presentation is over. Hopefully my professor is the one determining my grade, not the guests.

My topic was the legality and ethics of physician assisted suicide, and my position was oppposition to physician assisted suicide.

The guests were two members of the WV End of Life Care Center, and a Community Medicine faculty member who seemed to be an advocate of voluntary euthanasia.

(gulp)

At least my classmates seemed impressed by my presentation.

The tragedy!

A Bristol Royal Hospital for Children team found the frequency of nursery rhyme violence was more than 10 times greater than in pre-9pm programmes.

pericat wrote a quiz.
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I give my presentation for my Legal/Ethical Issues in Public Health today.

20 minutes for 35 slides.

Good think I talk fast.

It’s not like I didn’t try to pare things down, it’s just that there’s a lot of information that I needed to cover, and there was really very little that I could leave out. For every two slides I cut I realized there was another I needed to insert to meet the presentation requirements.

Let’s hope it goes well.

Then all I should have left is a 10 to 15 page paper on the same topic. Piece of cake. My difficulty will be in keeping it under 15 pages.

I had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon, and although the appointment didn’t last as long as expected, I went home anyway. Along my route home is a McDonald’s. It’s set a bit back from the road, with the parking lot out front. It’s really a terrible location for pulling in and out of traffic, but they get a lot of walk ups, as it’s located between two dorm complexes. Usually there is so much traffic that I don’t even notice the place as I drive by. But today there were no oncoming cars, so I had an unobstructed view of the store and its parking lot.

The lot was mostly empty, so it was hard not to notice the old man leaning up against his car, eating a hamburger. He was especially noteworthy because he looked like the kind of old man you always expect to see in West Virginia, but never quite do: John Deere cap, old t-shirt under an even older flannel shirt, beat-up work pants, and scuffed boots. The car was one of those old Ford Escorts you see everywhere around here, with the red paint gone dull, and rust coming through in spots. The driver’s side window was open, and through it I could see a woman.

She looked not like the stereotypical old woman, but instead was the woman you always see at Wal Mart. Straight brown hair in a large barrette on the top of her head, and then pulled back into a pony tail. A pink shirt was all I could see of her clothes—that hot pink color that no woman her size should wear. She was sitting in the passenger seat, eating her meal, staring straight through the windshield, while the man leaned against the back door, staring out at traffic.

It was a strange sight, the two of them eating like that.

Was it an argument that drove him out of the car, unwilling to remain one second more than necessary in the car with his daughter? Or were they husband and wife, on a long trip, stopping only to get a quick bite to eat. He had to get out of the car to stretch his legs, even if just for a bit, but she was tired and wanted only to eat and get back on the road?

Then they were gone and I couldn’t have seen them in my rearview mirror even if I’d looked.

I think Hardees qualifies as public health enemy number one.

1,420 calories and 107 grams of fat.

Who on earth would buy and eat something like that? Makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about it.

And the rest of their menu isn’t much better:

Big Country Breakfast Platter with Country Steak: 1150 calories
Big Country Breakfast Platter with Chicken: 1140 calories
Six Dollar Burger: 1120 calories
Double Thickburger: 1230 calories
Double Bacon Cheese Thickburger: 1300 calories

For comparison, my calorie intake is around 2200 calories per day.

Apparently their goal is to kill off all their customers and then go out of business in 20 years.

Speaking of things that are addictive…

The World did a segment on Round-Up resistent coca in Columbia. They interviewed Joshua Davis who wrote an article for Wired on the subject.

Over the past three years, rumors of a new strain of coca have circulated in the Colombian military. The new plant, samples of which are spread out on this table, goes by different names: supercoca, la millonaria. Here in the southern region it’s known as Boliviana negra. The most impressive characteristic is not that it produces more leaves – though it does – but that it is resistant to glyphosate. The herbicide, known by its brand name, Roundup, is the key ingredient in the US-financed, billion-dollar aerial coca fumigation campaign that is a cornerstone of America’s war on drugs.

The most disturbing part was this:

He does have a clear sense of how the new plant is affecting his region. At first, he says, the aerial spraying was successful, but now, with the arrival of Boliviana negra, it’s affecting only those who are growing lawful crops. “The truth is that the fumigation drives us to the one thing that will survive – and that is Boliviana negra,” he says. “Not bananas, not yucca, not maize.”

The Colombian and US governments want farmers to grow legal crops, he explains, and in the past have paid them to eradicate coca. But though American embassy officials insist that the spraying campaign is more than 99 percent accurate, Don Miguel says that almost all the farmers he knows and represents report that legal crops are sprayed as well. He says that his own tree farm was sprayed, pushing him to the edge of bankruptcy. If Boliviana negra will guarantee income for farmers, Don Miguel says, they will grow it and have less incentive to discuss eradication with the government.

Just further proof that my brownies are a health food.

I’d go home and bake a batch, but unfortunately I have a presentation due Thursday that’s worth about a third of my grade. And it’s no use trying to get Michael to make them. He absolutely cannot bake, so that would be a waste of good chocolate.

For the curious, here’s what I’m listening to this week when I exercise.

There’d be even more Bob Mould, except that I no longer have any Husker Du albums. I’d thought about just listening to “Black Sheets of Rain” or “File Under Easy Listening” but decided I wanted some variety.
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Denial of the Soul (1997) M. Scott Peck

My introduction to M. Scott Peck was the abridged audio version of this book, purchased when I regularly listened to books on tape at work, and preferred non-fiction to fiction. I listened to it several times, but when I chose physician assisted suicide as my topic for my legal/ethical issues in public health class, I felt that I wanted to read the entire book, and have it as a reference, for although I do not agree with all of what he says, I felt that he made many good points that I would want to expand upon for my project.

Read more about Denial of the Soul