3 weeks!

So, I received an email from some college friends today, that they had their little one just this last Wednesday - 3 weeks early! Yipes! It definitely shocked me. Sputnik is due in the middle of September, and since the whole due date thing is really not an exact science (plus or minus 2 weeks either side) I've pretty much been assuming and saying that the baby is due in just generic ol' 'September.' But the thought of August sort of freaked me out today - that's seems so much sooner! A couple of weekends ago I wrote out all of the stuff to try to do before the kiddo comes, and it's a lot. Ah well. My friends said the infant car seat had just arrived that morning, so really, all was well. It was a pretty short labor for a 1st child (only 7 hours) and the mother was able to have the natural birth she wanted. So, congrats to them and the now 3-person large family!

avoiding cankers

After yoga this morning I treated myself to lunch at Whole Foods, and went ahead and grabbed a few groceries while I was there. I was so excited when I found Tom's of Maine new toothpaste. Because I get canker sores occasionally, due to stress or accidentally biting the inside of my cheek, I had been using a Rembrandt toothpaste that did not have SLS (sodium lauryl sulfate, which basically makes all sorts of things, including soap and toothpaste, fizz) in it. When Rembrandt was purchased by Johnson & Johnson a couple of years ago, they dropped the SLS-free product, unfortunately. The SLS-free toothpaste doesn't stop the canker sores, but I certainly get fewer of them, so am so happy to see this new toothpaste!

Vacations Are Good for You, Medically Speaking

So really, obviously, we were very fortunate to be able to live in Munich for 6 months. Kyle was working, but for me there were quite a bit of vacations involved. And everyonceinawhile even Kyle was able to take some time off of work. Previous to that, I think the last time we had taken a vacation (just the two of us, and not for any other reason like visiting family or going to a wedding) was our honeymoon - in 2002!

So, frankly, I'm not that surprised by this article. I get 10 vacation days a year, plus holidays. By the time you take out events like weddings, Christmas, and Thanksgiving, there really isn't that much time to actually take a vacation. That's one of the reasons why Kyle's birthday surprise was so wonderful - it was a real vacation, and worth it even if I did have to take some time off without pay. Now if only I could somehow swing that every year... :)

State of Science

Found this editorial article interesting. An excerpt:

"These past seven years might be termed a Galileo moment—a hopefully brief interlude in which the priorities of leaders shifted from a respect for science and facts (convenient or inconvenient) to one in which science was ignored—or denied—if it interfered with policies, politics, or ideology.

A similar situation occurred in 17th-century Italy. Galileo Galilei‘s support of a heliocentric universe, as proposed by Nicolas Copernicus, ran afoul of the Roman Catholic Church. Earlier, during the Renaissance, the church had embraced scientific discovery but had then returned to strict interpretations of ideology and dogma as it fought a bitter feud against Protestant reformers.

Church officials declared that the earth is the center of the universe, despite evidence to the contrary—and forced Galileo to recant his views under threat of torture.

The papacy's denial of science caused technological development in Southern Europe to languish while momentum for progress grew in the north and west."

The above may be an extreme comparison - I hope so. No matter your views on (embryonic) stem cell research, reducing funding for such basics as the FDA puts many people at risk. Time for someone who isn't scared of science to occupy the top position in the executive branch and actually lead this country and encourage, in turn, our country to lead the world instead of lag behind. We still have to wait almost a year to find out who that will be...

I love not washing dishes by hand

Our old dishwasher broke (conveniently right before big junk day, so we didn't even have to haul it away ourselves). Marcus and Kyle put it in, while I dried laundry in the sun - so much faster! And now we have nice clean dishes, and I no longer have dry hands. All is well with the world.