Cleansing

I decided to do a cleansing nutrition diet thing. Not because I have the "I feel fat"sies but because I've been eating terribly lately and because I want to see if I'm man enough to survive one of this week long cleaning sessions.

I'm not. 

This diet is technically enough food and nutrients to be a perfectly healthy adult. I am no where near "starving" myself. But I'm so frippin hungry. Moments ago I stole a cruton (I know it's full of msg, which makes me sick to my stomach).  This evening I craved ice cream (I don't really like ice cream). Earlier I was eying egg rolls at work (they have shrimp and pork in them, neither of which I eat). While I was babysitting and the child offered me her drool covered half eaten slice of cheese, I ate it with gusto. 

Some might point out that I've always been irrational when it comes to food and chalk the previous vignettes up to my adoration of the edible. I can concede this point. What I cannot explain is my irrational behavior, grumpiness, and the feeling that I'm going to throw up. I shouldn't be that hungry. 

Question of the day: what on God's green earth have I/we been eating that makes me go into shock when I go all veggie/no starch/all organic/appropriate portions? Not enough really green stuff, apparently.

Editor's Note:
Perhaps part of the reason I was feeling so sick: I ended up throwing up for three days straight after this post. A very different kind of cleanse than I was expecting.

They made a video about me!

Not quite sure how I feel about finding a "typical" person, though.

No one has ever said anything good about him before

I was recently translating for some middle school parent-teacher conferences. It was a very impressive experience, humbling really.

One woman who came in to hear about her boy told us that she was not the mother, but that she had taken in him and his sisters from her cousin. She had accepted them instead of letting them be sent off to foster families, which is where her cousin was about to put them, out of frustration. They kids weren't living with their biological parents because their mother killed the father in front of them. So they were sent from their home country here to the U.S.. Then they were put in low-income public schools.

The teachers said good things about the boy, noting that he was friendly and intelligent, maybe a bit distracted in class, but nothing terrible. (Golly gee, I wonder why he's distracted? The fact that he's only been speaking English for two years? The fact that he's been shipped from family to family only to be put upon an older single woman with no financial security? Honestly, I think more than anything it's cause the stuff he's learning is boring and his teachers could care less about him.)

His care taker cried and cried. She cried through every single teacher's conference. She cried quietly, gracefully, thanking the teacher, asking what she could do to make him a better student, and then she would get up and we would walk to the next classroom. At the end she thanked me for translating.

"I'm sorry I cried," she said. "But I have worked so hard. No one has every said anything good about him before."

Liquid sand

My most recent obsession is emergency preparedness. Not on the FEMA scale, but on an every day, basic intelligence scale. Little things like: when there is an emergency, never go UP stairs, but instead always go down and towards the nearest ground exit. Or when some one yells "Heads up!," don't actually look up (which then lets your face be the target) but instead stand still and preferably find yourself skinny at that moment.

Anyways, when I saw this video about sand in a liquid-like state, as often happens during earthquakes, I was fascinated.
http://www.dump.com/2011/02/28/christchurch-earthquake-showing-how-the-sand-liquefies-with-vibration-video/

So I followed it up with some good old wikipedia research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction.

Here are some more pictures of what liquefied sand looks like/does. http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&biw=1251&bih=683&tbs=isch:1&sa=1&q=liquification+sand&aq=f&aqi=&aql=f&oq=

Long story short: don't trust sand. And definitely don't build a bloody city on it.
Oh and last but certainly not least: levees and dams are still an embarrassingly insufficient idea to protect populated areas from natural "disasters." Mother nature is way smarter than we are.