Amaryllis sillyramA

Oh no! I’ve got the pine mouth again. I don’t know if this has happened to you, or if you’ve heard of it, but it’s the weirdest thing. You eat the wrong kind of pine nuts (there is a wrong kind!) and a few days later, everything you eat has a really bad aftertaste. For DAYS. Big M and I have both gotten the pine mouth in the past, and so we’ve avoided eating pine nuts just in case. Even though we love pine nuts. Because the pine mouth, it is awful. This time, I think the culprit was some pesto on a sandwich I had from this great subs place near my house. I forgot that pesto can have pine nuts in it. Doh!

Also this time, I got a bit more curious about it (why, oh WHY??), so I read a few things on the internet. Starting with Wikipedia (of course) which led me to an interesting article by a Dr. Gregory Möller. The article is pretty thorough in covering all the things that pine mouth, or Pine Nut Syndrome (PNS) is not. It’s not a food allergy, for instance, nor is it a food intolerance.

Here I’ll interrupt myself and say to you, I’m not going to tell you everything in the article because you can read, and also because I read it yesterday and that is way too long ago for me to remember what was in it. Except! There was one really cool thing in there.

Apparently there are taste buds in the gastrointestinal tract (also known as the GI tract, and also known at my house as the tummy). Specifically, there are bitter taste buds in there. And when our GI tract tastes something bitter and therefore possibly poisonous, maybe it’s more likely to send that something back up? But here’s the weird thing. When the taste buds down in there taste a bitter thing, we don’t sense it that way. We sense it as a taste in the mouth. WEIRD! And that could go a long way to explain the whole phenomenon of aftertaste, or at least bitter aftertaste.

Any case, judging by this article, we do know quite a lot about exactly what’s happening in our tummies, but there is still so much we just do not know. I’m glad the scientists are on this though, because it’s really no fun to think about life without pine nuts forever, and even more no-fun to deal with the PNS when I slip up. Boo hoo, I know, first world problems.

Also, PNS.

So, there’s an article in last week’s Stranger about how The Sound of Music turned the author gay. I just got around to reading it, and at the end it said Julie Andrews will be in town this weekend singing her new children’s book.

!!!

So I went to the bookstore website, it says it’s already sold out, doh,
but seemed to be focused on the meet-Julie-and-get-her-autograph part. So I was like, well, we could still go and hear her sing, right?

Doh again. Not singing. Signing.

Sigh.

Wind Map!

I love looking at this. It kind of reminds me of the story about the astronauts looking down on the earth — ah, here’s the quotation.

The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.

–Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud, astronaut

So what we need now is a wind map of the whole planet.
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Update: Ah! I was so transfixed by the picture yesterday that I didn’t notice the text below it. Turns out they would love to do a global wind map — they just need a source of data.

Hooray for science turned to art!

…was yesterday. A day late ain’t so bad.

Aaaaand, we are quit for EIGHT (8) YEARS! (Plus a day.) Hard to believe. We have now NOT smoked over 34,000 cigarettes, and NOT spent over $102,000.

It might seem a little weird, commemorating the anniversary of something that really shouldn’t matter much anymore. Except: it still matters. We still both notice on a regular basis how much better life is without the addiction. I was just talking the other day with an acquaintance who is trying to quit, and we both agreed it’s like changing who you are. Not easy! And I’m totally not bragging — at least not about my ability to quit. I certainly tried a lot of times before it finally worked.

I am bragging about those stats, though. I love those stats.

Go to silkquit.org for the quit meter, which I have really enjoyed using, as you can see.

On Sunday we went to Kona Kitchen for a late breakfast. After we ordered, our server brought over some crayons for the girls, along with several pages taken from a coloring book. I love it when restaurants do this. I love it when they bring coloring supplies, and I really love it when it’s not the whole coloring book but some fresh pages torn out instead. When it’s the whole book, it can be hard for the girls to find a page that hasn’t been scribbled on, and also I sit there wondering how many kids have sneezed on it. Bleah. But when just a few (fresh, clean) pages are brought, there are no such problems. (Why yes, I am a bit of a germophobe. I’m working on it though. Dirt is good!)

So the two girls were sitting across from each other, coloring away. The 5 year old finished her picture and then wrote her name on the paper. Then, to be helpful, she wrote the 2 year old’s name on her paper, while the 2 year old was still coloring on it. So, she wrote it upside down. Sort of:

When viewed right side up:

Awesome.
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When she was littler, the 5 year old used to say upside up instead of right side up. It was one of my favorite inventions of hers. Now that the 2 year old is talking more and more, I can’t wait to see what kinds of words she invents.