Some Interesting Facts:

It is impossible to lick your own elbow. (don't try this)
A crocodile can't stick its tongue out. (neener-neener!)
In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80years,
   no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried it's head in the sand. (unless it's dead...)
It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky. (even if they are flying)
A pregnant goldfish is called a twit. (or just preggos)
Rats and horses can't vomit. (what about pigs?)
Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times. (how about techno?)
The cigarette lighter was invented before the match. (movie film was developed before b&w prints)
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why. (because ducks are not real)
A quarter of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and
   photocopying their buttocks. (this explains so much about office life)
In the course of an average lifetime you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders. (and one iguana)
Most lipstick contains fish scales. (cigarettes are still worse)
Cat's urine glows under a black-light. (did someone find this out at a rave?)
Everyone's tongue print is different. (tasty ID scanners at CIA?)
I bet you tried to lick your elbow!

Music Illusions.

I like visual illusions so much that when I stumbled on this, I couldn't help but post it!

There are a bunch more - at least one of which I successfully linked Google Reader to - but such a cool concept ... your brain can just as easily screw up what you are hearing as what you are seeing ... yes! so cool.

enjoy the link.

btw - you might want a pair of really good headphones on hand to get the full effect (I used Bose noise reduction!).

My Brain Just Shut Off.

Yeah.

back in Vermont ... but the real crux is: at the homestead. You got it. 56kbs modem at its best - more like 8kbs download, 4kbs upload averages. Hence the reason that I no longer need to pay attention to what pages I have loading in the background. I can throw up six new tabs of news, or feeds, or pages that I want to visit - and then go take a nice relaxing bath while I wait for the full load.

... say what? you sent me a sweet picture attached to that email. heh. don't be silly. I'm only here for a few days, that's not nearly enough time. I feel like I must be making a 'your mama' joke here but here's the stark reality.

-This internet is so slow that the auto-save feature on ALL of the Google/Gmail apps takes three tries to contact the server and actually push trough a save.
-This internet is so slow that Gmail asked if I wanted to load in plaintype, not regular html.
-This internet is so slow that I got up, found some cookies, BREWED TEA, and then came back and scrabulous still hadn't loaded my games.
-This internet is so slow that I've been browsing facebook simply because the pages contain so little raw data they actually load in under a minute.
-This internet is so slow I now have a child in grade school.
-This internet is so slow I forgot what pages I was loading and just shut them down, in the hopes that the one page I remember wanting to load might actually use the strength from its fallen comrades and pull through.
-This internet is so slow, Google Reader won't even mark feeds as read, because it doesn't yet know that I've scrolled over them.

yeah.

btw - the feeds at the right side are from Google Reader - they show the recent pages, links, pics, that I've been JUST browsing online - and change every day. check 'em out! usually I find decent stuff for everyone!

Ice Storm Upgrade

I upgraded the links at the side of the page to show 20 items, and posted a few new YouTube links as well. It's an ice storm in VT today ... so I figure that everyone will stay home, drink hot cocoa, and browse the internet for hours on end (certainly what I intend to do, while using the Oxford comma uncharacteristically consistently).

Oh yeah - and i'm making a huge vat of split pea soup. Delicious. I guess that I don't really have to say 'huge vat' anymore ... if you know my cooking at all, you know that I can't help but make way more food than personal or guest consumption could ever validate! Hurray for cooking in excess. It's all training for when I decide to have a huge family of ten kids. Not mine of course. just I'll have them around on occasion to cook for. And then send them away to annoy someone else. Maybe I should do a summer camp! oooooh ... what a concept. I've always wanted to do an artist retreat, bed and breakfast, teach someone something and cook, and get paid for it type of thing.


rain rain ice ice freeze
scrambling pedestrians
I lounge warm inside

In Response.

The chili I made
both spicy and bountiful
sits cold in the fridge


three mile walk tonight
was colder than expected
so I made cookies


cartoons have a way
of drawing me in for more
procrastination


the essays from my
med class continuously
fail to grade themselves

Chili.

I made chili.

it is delicious.

I may have made enough for about 4 days.

yep.

that's all for now.

55:8

I woke up this morning, in that only partially awake sense of the word awake - where you know that you should be lucid soon in the near future but the alarm hasn't gone off yet, so you've still got time to sleep - and your brain isn't quite ready to do anything constructive, because it still plans on going back to sleep as soon as you've checked the time.

so I did. and the time said 55:8.

and in a rather distracted haze, I watched my brain deal with that input. first I tried adding the two fives together, to get 10:08, but that seemed a little late - so was I supposed to wake up? Or maybe the colon had somehow jumped ship and moved over a space from where it usually sits - so it's far too early to wake up at 5:58 then. plus, I thought that I had just looked over a bit before when it was 8:05. what happened? what is this weird time?

oh. wait.

I'm upside down.

and the part of my brain that was watching me do all of this figuring just laid back and chuckled at my expense.

Essays!

GaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahHhhhhhh!

what happened!

every MCAT class is submitting essays!! who would have thought that after all of these years of telling them to do the essays, they would finally listen to me?? If only I'd known. how do TA's deal with it? grading dozens of essays, and more coming in every day!

anyone certified to scare AAMC style essays and want to do a little extra work on the side?

Microcosm.

I was told today that I live in my own little microchasm.

And I think that the spelling was supposed to be microcosm. But the choice was so fitting, that I actually like it better. Because chasm could be a cleft, or gorge, or rift, or abyss. But it can also be a separation or division. And I like them both.

Either it's a tiny abyss that I have created around myself, or a miniature separation from reality. But neither has a necessarily positive connotation when viewed as a chasm. So, I think: fitting. And really, it's just me, so the more micro and focussed that it can be, the better. I certainly am not ready, or of the inclination, to accept the responsibility of subjecting many others to this self-styled diminutive fjord.

Just interesting that the misspelling adds a better connotation than even the original ward.

Sleep.

The crazy part about going to sleep is that you assume that you will wake up in the morning. You put aside those projects for another day, procrastinate a workout, decide to start reading more tomorrow, plan on doing the crosswords puzzle. But what if your chance was just that night. right now. and you'll never actually get the chance to do it again.

I'm not saying that you die tonight in your sleep. but not necessarily any less morbid. you put it off for tonight. plan on doing it tomorrow. but that day comes, and you think, well, I just put it off for a day, what can one more hurt. but then it does. and the thing that you meant to do that night comes back ten-fold later in the week, in repercussions. And maybe it doesn't right away. like your plan to eat more vegetables. so you buy some V8 and put it in the fridge. running on all 8 cylinders and all. But you don't drink it. because just having it in the fridge made you feel good enough, was just the right level of commitment to the cause to placate your will to continue, and the V8 sits and sits. and you open it one day and have a glass - just reassuring yourself that, yes, you are eating more veggies. because, if it hadn't been in the fridge, well, you wouldn't have drunk it, right? but then, because it was open, it rots in there. and the next time that you want some it's a tangy sludge that smells like rotting cabbage. So you don't buy it again, and decide to try eating more grains by buying Slim Pockets with whole grain. the name has slim in it after all.

so. when I go to bed, and think - hey, there's still some stuff that I really think that I should just get done right now, and not sleep yet. I like to do it. but then I find it is 4am, and I really should sleep, because it will impact this hypothetical, future day that I think I will have. what if that day is totally different than I expect? what if by doing that work, completing that project, having that serious conversation, the day that I expect is irrevocably changed? and instead of putting it off again and again, I just move forward. so. what I'm getting at. is - isn't sleep just another fancy way of saying procrastination? why do I wake up early and try to get things done? is it out of motivation? or just fear that it will pile up, and I will be forcing there to be a reckoning somewhere at the end?

and how did I get into debt? that's stressful.