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Wednesday, May 05, 2004 |
I find it strange how the medical advice changes so much in 5 years. When Maggie was born, they said cord care was very important. I swabbed that cord-scab with alchohol every 4 hours, imagining that I was killing all sorts of life threatening bugs. Now, in 2004 we get the instruction to just ignore the cord-scab.
In 1999 they didn't even bother testing for Strep-B before birth, now in 2004 it was enough to cause them to attatch an antibiotic I.V. during labor.
In 2001 they didn't even try to give Frank a bath after he was born. We liked the smell of a new baby so much that we didn't bathe him for two weeks. In 2004, we had to sign a release taking all responsibility if we didn't allow a bath for our newborn.
7:07:43 PM 
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Sunday, May 02, 2004 |
I'm so tired. I just brought the kids to the hospital to hang out and Frank threw up all over the place. Hilarity ensued. Next thing I knew we were back on the street.
Maureen had some baby jaundice so she went under the lights all day. Jaundice is caused by a build up of dead blood cells. One of the breakdown products of the blood cells is bilirubin. Babies recycle their red blood cells faster than adults, leaving a lot of waste for the baby's immature liver to clean up. The waste builds up everywhere including the skin and turns it yellow. 9 out of 10 babies have some jaundice. In a few babies the biliruben levels get alarmingly high and the jaundice is treated with phototherapy. So, Maureen is in a box with lights shining on her. The billy lights, as they are called, break down the biliruben. They did a second test at 7:00 and the numbers look good ( 12 being an example of good) Maggie had the same thing and she was up to 17 or so at one point. They should be home tomorrow. The nursing seems to be going well.
Sometimes baby jaundice can be caused by a mother-fetus incompatibility of blood types but we aren't sure if that is the case here.
When I told Maggie that the baby is in a box with lights because her skin turned a funny color, she looked at me with this look like, "you ain't foolin me with another crackpot story"
9:59:26 PM
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Friday, April 16, 2004 |
sweet potatoes I decided to go public about my relationship with a very special vegetable.
The sweet potato is the most under-appreciated food in America. I have been used to seeing it (but not eating it) once a year at thanksgiving like most Americans, but that's all changed now. This change is mostly due to Sweet potato and peanut stew.
I didn't know this, but it is the sixth most important staple crop in the world.
I went to Cub to buy some last night. I wanted an example of an orange sweet potato (we call them yams) and a white one and a true yam. I couldn't convince the grocer that orange sweet potatoes were not really yams. He was depressingly uninterested in learning about true yams. He just kept pointing over to the orange sweet potatos. True yams are starchy tubers grown in Africa and Asia that can grow to 600 pounds. They are called 2-man yams, 4-man yams, or 6 man yams according to how many people it takes to carry them. The first steriods were made from yams.
In the southern united states, we feed sweet potatoes to livestock. Here in the north, we just eat them ourselves. People are beginning to realize that they make great potato chips, candy and cookies.
They are great nutritionally. Almost no fat, loads of vitamins. Medium glycemic index. (glycemic index measures how fast the carbohydrates in a food get converted to glucose) This puts it better carb-wise than white rice and regular potatoes but not as good as whole wheat pasta and black beans.
Sweet Potatoes have enemies. The sweet potato weevil can really wipe out a sweet potato crop if the conditions are right. The sweet potato has almost no resistance to these bugs.
However, the genetic engineers are working on pasting genes into sweet potatoes that make the plant resistant to the weevil and certain viruses that attack the plant.
In your developing relationship with this special vegetable, you will find yourself daydreaming about uses for sweet potatoes. Pancakes? Ice Cream? Hot Cereal? You may want to check out the tater day festival in Benton, Kentucky which is a three day homage to the sweet potato. I know I am.
6:29:25 AM
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Saturday, April 10, 2004 |
The Point of Existence: Chapter 2 If I seem crabby lately, its because I'm reading a book full of sentences like this:
More concretely, we recognize in the experience of self-realization that to be ourselves is to be aware of ourselves as the presence of Being.
Yup. Any more concrete and you are talking about sidewalks. That sentence is right in the middle of a long section that uses the words "suchness" , "isness", and "thereness". I get the sense that the author knows he has 600 pages to fill and he's going to spread himself out and get comfortable. He also threw in the word "facticity".
I obviously still believe there is some insight to be gained here, or I would throw the book down the same crapper that I pitched my $20 into when I bought the thing. The insight in this chapter is the "fall into narcissism", restating once again the theory that our egos get in the way of enlightenment.
Two capacities of the self are particularly relevant to the development of narcissism as we understand it: The first is the capacity of the mind to form concepts and structures of concepts in response to experience. The second is the capicity of the self to identify with different asects of experience, particularly with images in the mind and with habitual emotinoal and physical states.
To me "forming concepts" means something like, when I see the color green, I don't really see it, I just have a concept in my mind of what green is. And "identify with different aspects of experience" is to hitch my wagon to a projected image : father, employee, patriot, swimmer, clown.
He goes on to say how healthy and normal it is to form these associations. However, at some point, something happens that calls it all into question or at least lets you view the self from a totally new perspective. My impression is that the book tries to teach you how to get there without having a near death experience.
11:34:53 PM
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Friday, April 02, 2004 |
Trapping Turtles 
This is a turtle tag. If you are a turtle seller or recreational turtle trapper, all of your traps require one. The DNR sells about 50 turtle licenses each year. Three people here have told me they taste like chicken. If not prepared properly they can be very high in contaminants because their fatty tissues store contaminants from their scavenger diet.
To prepare a snapping turtle, you chop the head off and let it bleed out for 24 hours because the involuntary movements last that long. If you don't hang them up while they are bleeding, they can crawl away without a head and get lost. Turtle is a popular item on the menu of area restaurants west of St. Cloud. I want to find out where I can try some.
11:13:33 PM
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Thursday, April 01, 2004 |
the bill is due When the budget worry beads come out, it is usually about medicare and social security, but another 500 pound gorilla is infrastructure needs, few more pressing and costly than water treatment. It looks like Atlanta is going first:
A federal judge's ruling that Atlanta's sewer system violates the Federal Clean Water Act prompts the city to begin replacing thousands of miles of sewer pipes. Replacing the pipes, many of which are nearly 100 years old, is expected to cost over $3 billion -- a price to be absorbed primarily by local citizens and businesses.
Yow. Listen to the All Things Considered piece.
9:10:17 AM
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004 |
We want to preserve your dignity. Get the winch. The Southwest EMS in Arizona has three bariatric ambulances with motorized pulleys "to preserve the dignity of obese patients" (from jwz)
For some reason, this reminds me of the time I toured historical ships in Boston Harbour. The beds and doorways were very small because people in the 1600's were much shorter on average than we are. I think this is partly due to nutrition.
In 100 years, todays furniture will be displayed in a museum with a sign saying, "of course, any modern adult would crush one of these to splinters because our nutrition today is so much better.
One of them is in Pima county, which reminds me of an article I read in the New Yorker about the Pima indians being genetically prone to obesity.
1:01:55 PM
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Sunday, March 28, 2004 |
How not to play with your kids Two weeks ago: I thought I'd be a good dad and skip the workout so I could go in the kids gym at the Y and play with my kids. Quotidian bad judgement found me trying a move that I saw once performed by a professional Chinese acrobats. I told Maggie to bend over, reach her hands between her legs past her ankles. With several parents and YMCA employees as witnesses, I grabbed her hands and tugged, expecting to pull off a marvelous flip and land her on her feet. Instead, I ended up causing her to do an accelerated face plant into the thin exercise mat. That precipitated a two hour crying jag in which she could not use her right arm. The crying subsided after some children's ibuprofen and after Maggie learned to dress herself with one hand, we forgot about it until last weekend when my mother-in-law showed up.
"Who fractured Maggie's clavicle?", she asked upon examining her. I got to do a rendition of the scene, and even bent over into the pose that Maggie was in, hoping Carol wouldn't grab my hands and pull to see if she could at least do some soft tissue damage.
She really wasn't mad at all. In fact, she is in a very accepting phase of her life right now, having just survived cancer. Besides, a fractured clavicle is very common for kids and her own son had one when he was 4. The treatment is that the kid wears a sling for the first 24 hours and gets some ibuprofen. Since we missed the time for the sling by about 2 weeks, there was no treatment at all for us. As long as you don't pull the same crap again, it heals by itself. It leaves a bump on the collar bone for a long while. If the kid's arm feels numb or tingly, all bets are off, however.
9:06:44 PM
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Tuesday, March 23, 2004 |
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Thursday, March 11, 2004 |
Woe to the well-meaning person who brings home Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui thinking that they are just going to be reading about sorting papers and tossing out extra clothes:
"It is likely that many of you reading this book have colons that are distorted and coated in stagnant, impacted feces."
NASA research scientists have discoved traces of mother's milk in adult colons, indicating that people carry impacted fecal matter in their colons all their lives"
NASA doesn't talk much about that mission.
11:13:04 AM
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© Copyright 2004 mcgyver5.
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