Take those Tinker Toys out of your ears and put them in the basket! You’re supposed to be cleaning!

Problem:

1) I hate wasting things. My kid’s coloring with crayons from the 1960s and markers from the 1980s. I’m using my grandmother’s bobby pins that I inherited because I can’t stand the idea of throwing them away. That’s CHEAP. Truly and really cheap. (My grandmother would have been proud.) No, I don’t save butter tubs (well, actually, now that I’m buying the BIG ones…ahem…), but I break out in hives at the idea of tossing something truly useful.

2) I hate stuff. I hate clutter. I hate things lying around the house, taking up space, filling up my closets. I don’t want anything that’s extraneous. It makes things hard to find, hard to use, and hard to store.

The result is…well, a bit of a mess. *g* I have no problems getting rid of things that I’m simply not going to use, like clothes that don’t fit, for instance. I really have no problems selling things on eBay or donating them if I think someone else can get some good out of them. But when it comes to things that I can use and probably should use and intend to use…that’s a problem.

For example, take socks. In our house, socks stay in the drawer unless one is absolutely certain that the sock’s mate will never be found or else it is worn out. When a sock gets a hole, it is cut up and put in the rag bag. Once a rag becomes unusable for cleaning, it is tossed into the donations rag bag (I really am not kidding here), which I then label “MIXED RAGS” in big letters when I finally donate it so the donations triage folks know to throw it all into the mixed rags pile that they sell to recyclers in bulk. (DH is worse than I am, BTW. Until I began cutting socks for rags, he’d fight me to keep socks I could stick my thumb through. He has the excuse of spending early childhood in China. My only excuse is that I’m cheap.)

But this is a bit of a problem. Why? I still have one sock from 5th-7th grade and about 5 pairs still remaining from 7th grade to early high school that I really don’t like. They’re rough textured now. Most of them are largely–but not completely–worn. And they’re just not pleasant to wear anymore. They have been lurking in the bottom of my sock drawer for years, the package worth of socks I bought just after I got married sitting squarely on top of them. They’ve out-lasted at least one entire bag of socks from late high school, in fact. To look at it another way: One of these socks might actually be old enough to be a high school senior this year.

That is just ridiculous.

(And no, even though *one* is definitely a lone sock, it’s just a plain white sock, so it’s way too similar to my other plain white socks for me to just toss without guilt.)

So now, I have a new rule: I must wear my old socks before I am allowed to wear my new ones. That way I’ll wear out the old socks and reclaim that drawer space.

So far, I’ve gone through two socks in as many weeks. At this rate, I’ll have gone through them all by Christmas!

As a child, I was incredibly drawn to descriptions of pioneer life. Homesteading was a dream near and dear to my heart. I believed firmly in the superior craftsmanship of handmade items, and I even fantasized about not only growing all my own food but even spinning fiber to make clothing that would, of course, be far superior to the soulless mass-produced stuff that most of us live with. I was philosophically opposed to immunization, and other than hygiene, I was generally dismissive of modern medicine as a whole.

What changed?

Well, the philosophical objections ended up with a philosophical answer. *g* As for the rest, I got educated. And let me tell you that it was a very painful and protracted education because the facts drew me to a conclusion that was personally repugnant.

The fact is that in preindustrial societies, people are most valuable as a source of direct energy, with human labor the common raw material of any endeavor whatsoever. As a result, people are CHEAP. Life is cheap. Humans become chattel. People are engaged in the most brutal and undignified economic activities–because there is no other alternative.

In preindustrial societies, the human being is the essential unit of production. It’s no wonder that slavery is the rule, rather than the exception, in preindustrial agricultural societies. When labor is cheap and things are expensive, people become saleable.

Slavery isn’t dead. Illegal sex slavery will never die, unfortunately, until the invention of affordable prostitute robots–the sex trade is the one human activity in which the basic unit of production is still a human body. But most slavery can be destroyed in the most devastating way possible–through economic pressure by the industrialization of the rest of the world.

This is one of the major reasons that I want to find a way for the rest of the world to maintain a first-world-like existence when it comes to energy consumption. The human economics of it mean that the more energy–in the form of goods, money, whatever–that a single person represents, the more that person is worth economically. And economics *always* has crucial social repercussions.

So I’d like to find a way to make the energy/goods conversion much more efficient while simultaneously finding a way to allow the rest of humanity to share in the riches while not destroying the world to do it.

This would also lower the total population to be supported, ironically. When the worth of a human being is raised, then so is the *cost* of a human being, meaning that more and more people will choose to have fewer kids because they’re just so darned expensive. Population decline is bad for economies, of course, but with such a healthy older population, we should figure out some way of working it out!

It’s a shame that CNN has chosen to give Jenny McCarthy a voice on autism as if she were and expert just because she’s a celebrity whose kid happens to be autistic.

The Indigo Child crap and the silly idea that autism is some sort of disease contracted overnight should be firmly quashed.

It is true that certain types of severe brain damage can cause autism. This, however, is not the reason for most kids’ autism.

There are GOOD studies now that show that autistic kids were never normal–not even as infants. As others’ pass by them, their differences become more obvious. Many retreat from speech, it’s true, but the most fundamental characteristics of autism were there from the beginning.

Autism isn’t something that can just “be cured.” Not with drugs. Not with therapy. Not with anything. It can be treated in different ways, and some of its effects can be overcome. Those on the high functioning end of the spectrum, like those with Asperger’s, typically turn out being perfectly normal engineers without much intervention at all. Others, even with the greatest amount of intervention, will never speak. It all depends upon the level of autism.

Eventually, we can hope that there will be a true cure. Now, it just doesn’t exist.

Autism seems to occur more often for two reasons:

The first, and the major one, is that people who aren’t completely incapacitated are actually being diagnosed these days. This almost never happened in the past. My mother’s search for a diagnosis for my brother was quite hellish in the mid-1980s despite the fact that my brother was *screamingly* autistic at the time. He had speech–autistics weren’t supposed to have speech. Autism was supposed to be extremely rare. Etc., etc.

The second, and less important one, is that those with autism in the family are marrying others with autism in the family in bigger and bigger numbers. A good portion of engineers–especially good engineers–and computer scientists are on the autistic spectrum. If they marry other engineers or computer scientists, their chances of having a kid with at least Asperger’s is very high. Their chance of having a kid who is PDD-NOS or ever a “true” low autistic is considerably raised, as well. Want a good autistic program? Go to a hot tech area or a town with a good engineering university. The truth is that the chance of autism appears to be a liability of high IQ. So the more that smart people marry smart people, the more autism that you’ll see.

Darth Vader’s last breath

How do people who are actually *creeped out* by the idea of reusing towels two days in a row specifically because they HAVE TOUCHED THEIR OWN REARS AND GENITALS WHEN THEY ARE FRESH FROM A SHOWER ever have sex? I mean, really? Especially GOOD sex?

“Honey, I want to have sex with you, but I’m so freaked out by the idea of my own genitalia that I can’t imagine touching yours. Maybe we could cut a hole in a sheet and pretend that we’re golfing.”

Ay-yi-yi.

A nursing mother is refused extra time to pump during a NINE HOUR medical licensing exam.

Reason? The judge says that the test is offered multiple times per year and that she can take it when she is “done breastfeeding.”

EXCUSE ME?

It is extremely important for a child to be breastfed for the first 6 months if humanly possible and still quite important for a child to be breastfed for at least 12. Two years is *better.* The idea that the mother should put off getting her medical license for two years because she had the effrontery of bearing a child is almost as obscene as the idea that she should stop breastfeeding in order to make it through a 9 hour exam.

The judge is a shame to the bench.

1. She’s trying to impose her own idiosyncratic comma usage on me when mine is perfectly fine–and a LOT more consistent.

2. She flags words alike “bemused” and “abstracted” because she doesn’t know what they mean and can’t be bothered to look it up.

3. She questions things like whether a man would wear gloves (and not just women) and changes my reference to a “belt” to a “sash” when adult women did not WEAR sashed walking dresses in the 1860s.

4. She can’t understand why the question “how is married life suiting you?” accompanied by an eyebrow wiggle might offend a lady.

5. She forgot a tense public argument a mere 10 pages later.

6. She keeps trying to rewrite the damned book. It’s MY BOOK. You’re the COPY EDITOR. GO AWAY.

7. She pointedly marks all my POV changes because some dumbass along the way told her that a POV shift without a scene change is always headhopping, and she believed it.

ARGH.

I’ve had this copy editor before. I asked to never, ever get her again. Why do I have her again???? I’m not going to turn in another ms without a specific request not to get her–and a specific request for two of the others.

Read down for the reason for this ebay auction.

I made this recipe up because I learned that my DH now hates alfredo sauce *sigh* and so this was my attempt at giving it a stronger flavor more to his liking.

Well, whether or not the dish is to HIS liking or not, I tried it, and it ended up being pretty danged good.

INGREDIENTS
————-
.5 lbs cooked crumbled bacon
2 lbs pork–cheap cut, thinly sliced (Italian sausage would be a really nice alternative here–so is shrimp, though I’d go sausage-shrimp rather than bacon-shrimp, personally, and would tend to go more understated with the flavors and to add only spinach in veggies)
1 Tbsp olive oil
1-2 jars alfredo sauce (I used Classico Three Cheese Alfredo Sauce)
mushrooms (I used dried oyster mushrooms, reconstituted, with the liquid–nice smokiness)
.5-1 C cooking sherry (for sweetness)
.5 C fresh parsley
dash onion powder
dash pepper
dash garlic powder or two garlic cloves
big dash Italian seasonings
dash Season-All Season Salt
1-3 chicken bullion cubes with .5-2 c water
2-6 oz frozen spinach (optional)
3-5 broccoli crowns (optional)
1 bell pepper, seeded and thinly sliced (optional)
pasta al dente

INSTRUCTIONS
————–
Brown pork in olive oil in large skillet. Add bacon and alfredo sauce. When husband makes horrible face, quickly add mushrooms, sherry, parsley, and spices. Simmer to allow the taste to permeate the meat and allow some of the extra liquid to cook off. Add spinach, if desired. Add bell pepper, if desired. Steam broccoli (in microwave is fast and foolproof) and mix with rest of dish.

Serve over pasta and stick out tongue at DH if he still doesn’t like it because now it’s darned good, so there.