May 15, 2008
now you suckas are doomed
snapper coming to get you!
Originally uploaded by sassyass
May 9, 2008
saving the earth isn’t free, apparently.
oh great. just when i felt more or less at peace about driving my prius because of gas prices and saving the earth, this just in from the nytimes about how they might be killing us softly (greenly?):
…
A spokesman for Honda, Chris Martin, points to the lack of a federally mandated standard for E.M.F.’s in cars. Despite this, he said, Honda takes the matter seriously. “All our tests had results that were well below the commission’s standard,” Mr. Martin said, referring to the European guidelines. And he cautions about the use of hand-held test equipment. “People have a valid concern, but they’re measuring radiation using the wrong devices,” he said.
Kent Shadwick, controller of purchasing services for the York Catholic District School Board in York, Ontario, evaluated the Toyota Prius for fleet use. Mr. Shadwick said it was tested at various speeds, and under hard braking and rapid acceleration, using a professional-quality gauss meter.
“The results that we saw were quite concerning,” he said. “We saw high levels in the vehicle for both the driver and left rear passenger, which has prompted us to explore shielding options and to consider advocating testing of different makes and models of hybrid vehicles.”
In a statement, Toyota said: “The measured electromagnetic fields inside and outside of Toyota hybrid vehicles in the 50 to 60 hertz range are at the same low levels as conventional gasoline vehicles. Therefore there are no additional health risks to drivers, passengers or bystanders.”
The statement adds that the measured E.M.F. in a Prius is 1/300th of the European guideline.
The tests conducted by hybrid owners rarely approach the level of thoroughness of those run by automakers.
…
Lawrence Gust of Ventura, Calif., a consultant with a specialty in E.M.F.’s and electrical sensitivity, was one of the electrical engineers who tested Mr. Collins’s Insight in 2001. He agreed that the readings were high but did not want to speculate on whether they were harmful. “There are big blocks of high-amp power being moved around in a hybrid, the equivalent of horsepower,” he said. “I get a lot of clients who ask if they should buy hybrid electric cars, and I say the jury is still out.”
great. something else to worry about. how do i know this isn’t some secret rumor put out by opec or by hummer? not that i really am afraid about nuking myself, but this is a family car! my baby is tender and delicious and i can’t have her cooked prematurely!
also, this just in: recycling causes cancer. and genital warts.
May 7, 2008
May 6, 2008
month 8 (belated)
dear snapper,
you’re 8 months old now! yes, i know that it was actually a few days ago, but you have certainly been keeping us busy so you’ll have to forgive me for being a little bit late with this.
if anything, this has been a month of anxiousness on our part. starting off with you crawling for real, you’re now definitely mobile and a GO-er. if there’s something you see across the room, now you just slither on over there, and BAM you’re sucking on it. or pulling it down. or pulling it down to suck on it. all of which underscores our need to start babyproofing the house. which we haven’t exactly done yet, but we have actually purchased a bunch of babyproofing gear that is sitting in a bag somewhere. that’s almost the same, right?
from there you did your short stint in baby school, which was good since you probably needed more socialization than just staying at home all day with boring old mommy and daddy, which might have been causing/exacerbating your stranger anxiety. instead, you went to baby school where they all said that you were doing really really well for your first days showing all the other babies just what crawling was about. you were practically set to take over the whole place until you started coming down with every single virus and germ that they had there.
this resulted in the past couple of weeks of varying levels of illness: from miserable days of sneezing and coughing, to days where you looked totally fine and were bouncing around and laughing your head off. then sprinkled in were days where you vomited or coughed up a meal, and nights where you had a fever or woke up repeatedly coughing.
i know that in the grand scheme, all of these things are good for you, or at least that’s how the theory goes. both going out and socializing with other babies and caretakers, as well as being exposed to germy germs and building up your immunity will make you better adjusted and stronger in the long run, but that does nothing when you’re sitting here screaming and we can’t explain to you what’s going on.
it turns out that you’ve also come down with the feared ear infection, so hopefully some antibiotics will clear that up.
meanwhile, we’re adjusting back to you sleeping more intermittently, which means that we are also sleeping less. which means that we all can’t wait until you get much much better and we can all get more sleep. amen.
April 30, 2008
apparently, not quite.
hm, looks like something is still borked. there’s somewhere in MT that is still pointing to the old pathnames, causing individual entries not to show up on their own page. which means that no one can comment at all. hmmmm…
i’m sure this is fascinating to all of you. more snapper pictures soon, i promise.
April 29, 2008
daycare is a petri dish of filth and breeding
we’re getting over our second week of snapper being sick.
sure, we knew that a side effect of going to baby school was being exposed to other kids and potentially coming down with something, but really? immediately? she went that first wednesday and thursday, and by saturday night had already come down with a cold. that sunday was terrible, but she was better through most of last week, until thursday where she threw up at baby school and had a fever. hmc went and picker her up, and snapper was tired and lethargic, which FREAKED us out. sudden trip to doctor’s office said that there was nothing really wrong, but just to give her some children’s motrin to help take down the fever.
again, up and down over the weekend. but much much better on monday, except for a still runny nose and a little bit of coughing. nothing like that other baby tobias’s HORSE COUGH, though. geez. lay off the menthols, kid!
they had me come pick her up today because she was fussy and had a tiny fever. although i got there and she was acting TOTALLY FINE. i think the only reason she was fussy was that we forgot her pacifier, otherwise they probably wouldn’t even have taken her temperature in the first place.
in any case we had a weight check-in appointment at the doctor’s office later that day anyway, which confirmed that she’s fine and getting better.
the only lingering effect so far is that she wakes up much more often at night (often = more than never, which is what she used to do), but hopefully that will rectify itself once her sinuses clear up and cough goes away. go hello kitty humidifier!
(in case you were wondering, the survey said 13lbs. which is back on track. relatively. go carbo loading!)
April 27, 2008
hello world
if you can see this, we have been successful. welcome to a whole new world of actually paying for hosting. however, i’ve chosen to be nickle and dimed instead of drawn and quartered. which means that instead of eating my own dogfood and going for hosting at dreamhost which is stored on netapp filers and allow you to use snapshots for recovery, i opted for nearlyfreespeech.net, which charges you in increments of pennies for exactly how much storage and bandwidth you actually use.
i’ll tell you if it’s worth it.
April 26, 2008
prepare for oblivion
i’ve got two to-do items for this website:
- fix comments (comments work if you click on the date and go to the actual entry, but if you try and click on the comments link you get some cryptic error. i have no idea. probably some missing/nonstandard template thing. ok, maybe i have some idea. but not enough to fix it easily)
- move this entire domain to another host
i’m actually tackling #2 first because i think that might be easier. but this may mean that this website and all my email might not work if everything goes wrong.
i suppose you could just, uh, call if you need to. do people still have phones?
April 17, 2008
separation anxiety
we’ve got snapper in temporary daycare for a few weeks. someone in hmc’s mom’s group was going on vacation for a few weeks, so they had a spot open and cut us a deal. we thought it would be good to have snapper get out and socialize with other people and other babies more, which may help with her stranger anxiety issues.
all in all, she’s doing great so far. the daycare people, who are really great and really sweet, say that she’s doing fantastic for her first couple of days.
however, it seems to be much harder on me than it is on her. when i went to pick her up after that first day, she glanced up at me with one of those, “oh, yes. it’s you. what do you want?” looks.
and dropping her off this morning was somehow terrible and wrong. certainly not from her perspective, but just to me: leaving my baby with complete strangers and walking away? is that right? doesn’t that sort of thing get you in trouble with child services and arrested? what do i have to do that is so important that i can’t take care of my litle girl?
of course, i’m overreacting. everything is fine. this is actually good for her.
but it’s hard on me. i can’t wait until preschool/school/college/space academy.
April 11, 2008
welcome to our doom
coming to get u, originally uploaded by sassyass.
snapper just started crawling today.
now she has made the link that she’s mobile: if she sees something over THERE that she wants, she knows she can actually GO over there and get it, instead of it being out of reach and not worth the interest. now she’s going and going and going, and nothing can stop her!
we are so doomed.
