rivka

Via AckB, a little something to lift your spirits this morning.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Someone just came onto a message board I read, seeking guidance for a friend. Her friend, who is in her early 40s, just had a miscarriage when she was four weeks (i.e., just barely) pregnant and wants to try again. The poster is looking for a list of recommendations she can give her friend about ways to change her diet and do healthier things so she can prevent future miscarriages.

Here's my Public Service Announcement:

Don't ever do this.

No matter how well-meaning you are - and this woman seems to be very well-meaning - there is no loving way to say, "I figure that you probably killed your last baby. Please straighten up so you don't kill the next one, too."

Especially when you are probably wrong. The vast majority of miscarriages, especially early ones, are caused by profound chromosomal or genetic abnormalities in the embryo. That's even more likely for miscarriages in women over 40. Unless your friend is a crack addict, or something, the odds are overwhelmingly high that she didn't do anything to cause her miscarriage and won't be able to do anything to prevent another. Conception and embryo formation are high-error activities.

I know this woman doesn't mean to imply that the previous miscarriage was her friend's fault. But she's skating reeeeeal close to that, and vulnerable grieving people are awfully susceptible to guilt. It's just... yikes. Just don't.

Photo gallery of churches, synagogues, convents, meeting houses, and mosques across America displaying banners that simply say "torture is wrong."

It's nice to see these 125 pictures, but I'm left with the question: why doesn't every single house of worship in America have a similar sign?

There's a teenager in our church who wants to go to SUUSI. Unfortunately, her parents aren't able to go. So last night Michael and I met their family at a notary public and signed forms that make us her temporary legal guardians, for one week in July.

She'll live in the teen dorm, of course, and do teen activities. The teen staff seems to be both ample and skilled. Our responsibility is to have face-to-face contact with her once a day to check in, and to be an emergency back-up if she gets in trouble, breaks the rules, or gets sick or hurt.

The SUUSI teen program is a weird middle ground between supervised summer camps and an open campus situation. The kids have rules to follow, and the teen staff provide 24-hour supervision with a full schedule of activities (Tie-dyeing! Midafternoon story-and-naptime! Capture the flag! 3am 7-11 run! Thrift store trips! River tubing! Teen worship every night at 1am!), but teens aren't required to be connected to supervised activities unless they want to be out after the 1am curfew. There are mandatory daily teen meetings and touch groups, but other than that our adopted teen will be on her own to organize her week.

She's gone to weekend UU teen conferences regionally, and she has at least three friends from conferences who will be at SUUSI. So she's got both similar experience and friends' advice to go on. We passed on our own advice: that SUUSI is a marathon, not a sprint, and that if she tries to run on a weekend con schedule she will burn out. And of course we handed on the traditional recommendation of one shower, two meals, and five hours of sleep every 24 hours, and the traditional caution not to try to reverse the numbers for meals and hours of sleep. At SUUSI we'll try to sit down and have coffee, or something, once a day to check in.

It's a bit weird. Michael had met the teen a couple of times before, casually, at coffee hour after church. I never had. Both of us thought the mother looked vaguely familiar, once we'd seen her, and agreed that we'd never met the father at all. Our Director of Religious Education privately vouched for the teen, to us, and presumably she also gave the parents some assurance that we're not axe murderers. But for the most part, they are sending their only child off with strangers.

What it seems to come down to is this: they trust their child. When we met yesterday at the notary public, the mutual love and respect and joy their family has in each other just sort of beamed out everywhere. They have faith that she's going to make good decisions for herself. But they're obviously not checked out or uninvolved. At one point the teen's father said "[Name] is going to be very respectful of the rules" in a tone of voice that precisely blended confidence-in-her and a touch of firmness, and they beamed at each other, and the whole thing was just such a perfect model for the kind of relationship I hope to have with Alex thirteen years from now.

Alex just came into the room, announced that she was a witch, mounted herself on a child-sized broom, and pranced away.

Then she came back in. "I flew to Earth to get some of its energy," she informed me. "Now it's in my space broom. I'm going to Jupiter now!"

On her next trip through, she was holding some big pink pipe cleaners. "I went to the moon," she said. "I brought some more gravity."

Three-year-olds can be a trial, but you know what? They can also be AWESOME.

I lived in Iowa City for five years.

Follow that link. Large parts of Iowa City, and Cedar Rapids, and eastern Iowa in general, are now underwater. They're closing part of I-80, one of the country's major east-west interstates. The Iowa City Press-Citizen reports that, due to the flooding of Cedar Rapids, most of eastern Iowa is about to lose Internet service. There are mandatory evacuations of thousands and thousands of homes.

It's pretty horrifying to read about. The chapel where Michael and I were married is expected to be underwater soon. The university art museum. The main university library. All of these buildings are expected to be flooded by the weekend, and the Iowa River isn't even expected to crest until the middle of next week.

Here's how bad the flood is expected to be: "UI had been bracing all at-risk facilities based on a measurement equation of the 100-year flood level plus one foot. Officials have added an additional 18 inches to that equation, which is how much higher they expect the river level to reach." The hundred-year flood level, plus two and a half feet. That's a bad flood.

What strikes me most, reading the coverage in the Press-Citizen, is how orderly and well-planned the disaster response is. And all of it seems to be being organized at the local level. Iowa City was badly flooded in the midwest floods of 1993 - they've been there before, and it shows.

( Read more... )Is there going to be a Hurricane Katrina reprise?

No: As with earlier evacuations, public safety personnel will inform residents in a direct, door-to-door canvas. Transportation will be provided to those who require it. Those without housing options will be transported to the Red Cross Shelter at the Johnson County 4-H Fairgrounds. Emergency pet care is available, call 356-5295.

It's not that difficult. You deal with people individually, door-to-door. You provide them with transportation to a safe place. You set up an established, well-supplied Red Cross Shelter. You make provisions for people's animals. Remember Bush's wide-eyed protest, after Katrina, that "no one imagined the levees would burst?" Apparently people at ground level in a disaster like this have no similar shortage of imagination. They know. They know to expect a hundred-year flood, plus two and a half feet.

If I were still in grad school, we'd be sandbagging right now. Or setting up cots at the Johnson County Fairgrounds. Or loading up book carts in the library and taking them upstairs. Or something. There would be something we could do to help.

I lived in Iowa City for five years. Now it's underwater, and there's not the slightest hope of improvement any time soon.

Fox News described Michelle Obama as Barack's "Baby Mama."

Just a couple days after the whole "terrorist fist jab" incident.

This election is just going to keep on digging out the ugliest, ugliest depths of the American psyche, isn't it?

It's fucking embarrassing to even share a country with some of these people.

Edited to add: In the middle of a charming full-on rant, Scalzi offers this concise summary of the issue:

Calling Michelle Obama a “baby mama” isn’t just Fox News have a happy casual larf; it’s using urban slang to a) remind you the Obamas are black, b) belittle a woman of considerable personal accomplishment, and c) frame Barack Obama’s relationship to his wife and children in a way that insults him, minimizes his love for and commitment to his family, and reinforces stereotypes about black men.

My psychic prediction: If this can't be buried - and I doubt that it can - expect to see the right wing attempt to turn it around with bluster about "the real issue" being all those African-Americans who have children out of wedlock, and calling for Obama to denounce the "social pathology" of his people.

I am too sensitive of stomach to actually Google "the real issue" and "social pathology" to see if I've already been proven right.

If our houses are about fifteen feet apart, and they face each other at the back, and between my bedroom and the back of my house is a landing and my kid's room and a bathroom, and another neighbor's air conditioner is running, and it's 3:30 in the morning, and I can hear you having sex,

YOU ARE TOO DAMN LOUD.

Thank you.

Chaste hugs and kisses,
Rivka

I tried to log in to my account this evening because I'm in the middle of an auction. I went to www.ebay.com, which had the typical "Hello rivkawald!" message on it. I clicked "sign in." My username was prepopulated in the right field. I entered my password. And was directed to what seems to be a phishing page.

"We have noticed an increasing fraudulent activity recently. In order to provide your security and protect you from fraudsters we have introduced a new system of identification that will help us to avoid any kind of fraud or unauthorised access.

Please enter as more information as possible to provide your complete identification and to activate all the features of the new system."

The page then proceeded to ask for my full name, date of birth, mother's maiden name, social security number, credit card number & security code, ATM PIN, bank account number, and routing number.

No, really. And there wasn't any way to get past it.

(Screencaps are here and here.)

I went back to www.ebay.com and tried to log in again. Same thing again. I tried their "live help" chat and got routed to "account security live help," where I waited and waited and WAITED to no avail. "Thank you for your patience. Please hold for the next available Live Help Agent." And hold. And hold.

Finally I got through to a live agent. She had me clear my cache and cookies. I cleared everything out and then was able to get a regular login page when I went to ebay.com. I immediately changed my password, obviously.

But what the hell? I typed in the address to the eBay main page myself. I didn't follow a link in an e-mail. How could this happen? I am running AdAware and a full virus scan, but... yikes. This scares the hell out of me. I thought only stupidcredulous people were victims of phishing scams.

I can't stop thinking about the dinner I made last night, and wishing there were leftovers to have for lunch today.

I took some thin-sliced chicken breasts (if you can't get those, pound regular chicken breasts flat with a mallet) and topped each one with a slice of prosciutto and two fresh sage leaves. Then I rolled them up tightly and seasoned the tops with salt and pepper. I sauteed the roll-ups (you want to start out seam-side down) in olive oil over medium-high heat for 10-15 minutes, until they were cooked through in the middle and were golden-brown and a little bit crisp on the outside.

Then I made a pan sauce with the drippings. I added a half-cup of white wine, about a third of a cup of chicken broth, and three or four more sage leaves chopped up; boiled it all for a few minutes to cook off the alcohol and concentrate the flavors; and finished it with a chunk of butter.

It was YUM. I am desperately hungry for more.