You know what we grow in Alabama? Cotton.

Field after field of it. During October it mounds up on the sides of the road and is nicknamed, rightly so, Alabama Snow.

We moved to Alabama five years ago this month. I am so glad we moved during October because I got to see the cotton harvest first thing and didn’t have to wait a whole year to see what happens.

Because of the drought this year, the cotton at the gin looks pretty slim. Usually there are four or five times as many bales as you can see in this photo. I hope the farmers have some other income.

Nothing is better than birthday posts from friends!

Update: Another birthday post! I am loved!

When it comes to seafood, pregnant and breastfeeding moms are in something of a bind. On the one hand, the omega-3 fatty acids from seafood aid in neural development. On the other hand, fish, especially those near the top of the aquatic food chain, have noticeable concentrations of mercury. In 2004, the FDA and EPA recommended that moms eat no more than 12 ounces a week of fish, and that they choose fish with lower mercury levels, such as shrimp, salmon, and catfish.

Understandably, a lot of moms opted out of eating fish all together. That can have negative consequences: a recent longitudinal study published in the Lancet indicated that not eating enough fish could lead to behavioral and developmental problems.

Enter Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies. In a press conference this morning, they recommended moms eat at least 12 ounces a week, if not more. Scientists are still hashing out the benefits and risks of eating fish, so why this, if you’ll pardon the expression, sea change?

And who are Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies? They’re not a new organization: they’ve been around since the early 1980s. And they list a number of notable organizations among their members, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the March of Dimes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and more.

Or, rather, they did list those organizations. NPR did some digging, with interesting results.

The top federal government agencies in charge of delivering public health messages expressed surprise over the announcement from Healthy Mothers, Healthy babies recommending increased fish consumption.

“We are members of the coalition, but we were not informed of this announcement in advance, and we do not support it,” says Christina Pearson, spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Pearson says neither the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nor the Food and Drug Administration knew about the announcement.

Whoops. And as of right now, the members list of Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies no longer includes the American Academy of Pediatrics or the National Institutes of Health. Furthermore, it turns out the group took $60,000 from the National Fisheries Institute to pay for doctors’ “travel expenses to a Chicago meeting, where they came up with their new advice”.

(Note to members of advisory groups who read this blog: when you take any amount of money from an industry-funded group and come out in favor of something that helps that industry, it calls your science into question.)

Neonatal vitamins now include omega-3 fatty acids. Some varieties of milk have the omega-3 fatty acid DHA. And even the group’s list of other countries’ recommendations more-or-less come down on the side of 12 oz/340 grams/two portions of fish a week. Given that, I’d stick with the twelve-ounces-or-less approach and supplement with vitamins.

Fifty years ago today, the USSR launched Sputnik I into orbit. The USSR and the USA had, as part of the International Geophysical Year, been working on putting satellites into orbit. The USA’s efforts had been pulled in several directions: Werner von Braun and the newly-minted Army Ballistic Missile Agency had proposed Project Orbiter, a joint Army-Navy effort, but the Stewart Commission chose the Navy’s Project Vanguard instead. To a large extent that was because Eisenhower wanted to minimize military involvement in space efforts, and Project Vanguard’s Viking rocket had been used for scientific efforts and not military ones like Project Orbiter’s Redstone missile.

When Sputnik launched, all of that changed. The USSR launched Sputnik II, with Laika the dog on board, one month later. Desperate to show that it, too, could hurl metal globes into space, the US attempted a Project Viking launch. The rocket went up four feet, lost power, fell back, and exploded.

Von Braun and the ABMA just happened to have been working on rockets that could be either an ICBM or a satellite-launching rocket. Von Braun’s team was given the go-ahead, and on February 1, 1958, they successfully launched Explorer I into orbit.

The US Space and Rocket Center has many of those old rockets on display. I’ve wandered past them, watching them get taller and taller, until I reached the Saturn V rocket. It’s amazing what a cold war and a large amount of government spending will buy you.

Liza is leveling up nicely in Baby: The MMORPG. She has reached the point where she responds to us, smiling and laughing when we play with her, looking around at her world, pulling plates and napkins towards her and nearly off the table when I hold her during dinner. Given that I don’t much care for very young babies — a post for another time — it’s a welcome change.

What is less welcome is her newfound mobility. She can flip over on her stomach and scootch around powered by flailing limbs and a generalized discontent at not being able to see anyone when she’s on her stomach. She doesn’t have great control over her arms and legs, though. They’re apt to go anywhere and everywhere, such as in your eye when you’re holding her. The upshot is that, at night when she’s asleep, she makes her herky-jerky way around the crib until she accidentally sticks an arm or a leg between the slats. When that happens, she’s unable to free it thanks to her poor limb control. That tends to focus her discontent very nicely, and she starts screaming.

Invariably, this happens at 5 AM or so.

Back in the old days, when we let babies to sleep on flaming hot coals while chewing poison-coated razor blades, we’d use crib bumpers: strips of cloth that go across the slats and keep baby limbs from getting stuck between slats. That way, babies can sleep longer and so can parents, assuming that they can ignore the shrieking voice of guilt telling them how their kid is probably suffocating. But we, like many parents, are responsible, another word for “over-anxious”. So what are we supposed to use now?

Chicken wire, that’s what. Its flexible wire structure and large-aperture hexagons are perfect for allowing unrestricted air flow while preventing the dreaded slat limb. Chicken wire is fairly small gauge, and could harm the baby, so we’ll probably have to dip-coat it with a soft, flexible plastic like one of the polyethylene derivatives.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I have a patent to file.

Misty made me do it! Books in bold I’ve read; books in italics I only read part of.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

We should make a counter-meme. Random quotes from the above, perhaps, such as “But, my good Master Bates dying in two Years after, and I having few Friends, my Business began to fail….”

I thought this was cool, so I stole it from Limax.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. I’ve bolded what I’ve read and italicized what I started but couldn’t finish (some italicized I read excerpts of in school). I put an asterisk by the ones we have in our library.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina*
Crime and Punishment*
Catch-22*
One hundred years of solitude*
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies*
War and peace
Vanity fair
The time traveler’s wife*
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The kite runner *
Mrs. Dalloway
Great expectations
American gods*
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius**
Atlas shrugged*
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha*
Middlesex
Quicksilver*
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man*
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world*
The Fountainhead*
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys*
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath*
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel*
1984*
Angels & demons
The inferno
The satanic verses
Sense and sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest*
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables
The corrections*
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time*
Dune*
The prince*
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes : a memoir
The god of small things*
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon*
Neverwhere*
A confederacy of dunces*
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners*
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas
The confusion*
Lolita
Persuasion*
Northanger abbey
The catcher in the rye*
On the road*
The hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s rainbow
The Hobbit*
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences*
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers*

I thought I was decently well read but not according to this list. At least I know now what I can find in our house when I don’t have anything to read!

Songs Eli requested on our trip to Home Depot last Saturday.

1. 4-3-2-1 Gun (“Barrel of a Gun”, by Guster)
2. 4-3-2-1 Gun
3. 4-3-2-1 Gun
4. Rock Out Song (“Hey”, by Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives)
5. 4-3-2-1 Gun
6. Rock Out Song
7. 4-3-2-1 Gun
8. 4-3-2-1 Gun
9. Rock Out Song

It’d be a real shame if I lost that CD with those two songs on them.

Notice the chin. It met rather forcefully with the ground this afternoon. We also did stamps. Action packed day all around.

When people email me these “tell things about yourself” list thingies, I tend to not do them since the person sending me the email usually knows me pretty well already. But this time is different. I got tagged online from a reader (Hi, Plenipotentiary!) who started reading us during the LOLcat days. So she really doesn’t know me that well but she thinks we have lots in common. That’s a total compliment since I just read her eight things (actually seven, but I won’t hold it against her) and she’s about 1,000 times smarter and cooler than me. Also, I think she can kick my butt.

So just so she won’t come to Alabama and do that very thing, here are my eight things:

1. I am left handed and secretly want my little girl to be left handed also. I know this is a silly thing to wish for and it will be fine if she is not but until she proves otherwise, I want her to be a lefty. Until my nephew, Sam, came along I was the only lefty in my family. Believe me, Sam will NEVER be without left-handed scissors for as long as I live.

2. I love to take showers. Right now it’s the only time when I am guaranteed 10 minutes to myself but I loved them even before I had kids. It’s where I have my best ideas and the ideas that usually turn out to be the most outstanding art projects. I recently read that the water from the shower hitting your skin actually stimulates your brain cells firing. If that’s the case, I’m thinking I need to have a portable shower build just for me to carry around and have those great brainstorms!

3. I’ve had the same best friend since the seventh grade and I talk to her almost every day. We’ve been through a dozen boyfriends (most of them hers and never the same one for both of us, Thank God!), a husband and two kids (mine), sharing the same living space in college (almost didn’t survive that one), and more phone time logged between the two of us that a few small countries combined (usually to talk over the previously mentioned boys). Except for my husband, I’m pretty sure that no one knows me better. So if something isn’t covered here in my eight things that you want to know about me, drop her a line, she can probably answer your question.

4. In the past few years I’ve developed a phobia about poisonous spiders. Right after Eli was born, during all the sleep deprivation, a friend had to have her house sprayed for brown recluses, and that’s when I started to have a problem. We have both brown recluses and black widows living in our yard. This past week I got a gander at a brown recluse laying an egg sack on Eli’s playset and I’ve barely been able to let him go outside to play. I know they aren’t smart enough to lie in wait and jump on me when I least expect it, but somehow I still feel like that’s what’s going to happen.

5. While I was in high school I met Bill Clinton. This was when he was governor of Arkansas and he spoke at Governor’s School the year I attended. He did a lot for education in Arkansas and I think I managed to go to college on no fewer than five of the scholarship programs he set up while he was governor. Thanks, Bill!

6. I often dream about attending U2 concerts. I’m not sure why this is. Yes, I love the band, but I would think I would dream about talking to them or hanging out or something. But no, I attend concerts and usually end up in fights over the good seats. Although once I dreamed Bono sent me on a mission. I don’t really remember what the mission entailed but it was going to help a lot of people.

7. My two favorite things to read are romance novels and National Geographic magazine. Both are like popcorn to me. I get one and have to finish the whole thing in one sitting. The funny thing is, I’ve only had a NG subscription for about the past three years and I’ve been reading romance novels almost half my life.

8. I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was little. Now I’m a graphic designer. I still want to learn to sew, though. I guess there’s still time to make it big. Think Tim Gunn will have me?

I made it! There are my eight things. I told Stephen last night I wouldn’t be able to think of eight. Not only did I manage it but I think it’s stuff that most people actually don’t know about me.