Remember when I mused about our ancestors drinking from human skulls?
Well, that subject is all over the blogosphere right now thanks to a new discovery in the U.K.
Here's what Pharyngula, ZME Science, Gadling and The History Blog have to say about it. No one has yet answered my question about the volume of the average human skull.
Image credit: Megan Reardon
Today marks seven years since I first started this blog. The posts dated earlier don't count – they're pre-blog things I wrote that I wanted to get out there. My first official post was Average Jane Goes to the Prom on February 15, 2004.
For the first couple of years I didn't include photos in my posts, which was actually a deliberate decision. I liked the idea of keeping the blog as visually plain as possible. Obviously I've changed my mind about that.
This blog has never exactly hit it big, but I greatly appreciate my small but loyal readership. I know I don't have anything particularly profound to say, but I'm glad there are people out there who enjoy my random musings, cat pictures and occasional recipes as much as I do.
Thanks for reading!
When I was a kid, we had a pomeranian named Valentina, although we always called her Tina. She was a sweet, lovable dog with more health problems than any pet I've ever encountered. The photo above probably represents the best she ever looked.
I don't know where she came from, but in retrospect I'd guess that a puppy mill and severe inbreeding were involved. She was allergic to fleas, so every summer most of her fur would fall out. Something was wrong with her gums and she lost all her teeth at an early age. Finally, she was prone to huge, non-malignant tumors which had to be removed every few years. In short, the poor girl was a mess.
Still, we loved her and she lived a surprisingly long time considering her ailments.
Late in Tina's life, we went on vacation and left the animals in the care of a woman who boarded her horse in our barn. When we got back, we found the most extraordinary note, "Tina had a puppy, but it died."
My parents had never had Tina spayed because the vet assured them it was unnecessary due to all of her health issues. Yet somehow she had managed to get pregnant well past her first decade of life. It was the equivalent of the nursing home calling to say that great-grandma had had a baby.
Tina lived for several more years after that, and my sister has continued the family tradition with two pomeranians: first one called Chigger and now one named Sooner. Neither of them had the unfortunate health problems of their predecessor.
It's been a busy week, but not in any way that's interesting enough to report about (not yet, anyway). So here are some photos I've taken recently.
I think of these as "lecture cookies," rather than fortune cookies. Notice how they contradict one another.
This is The Naughty Band. I caught their show a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it a great deal. Kansas City needs more bands that do pop rather than classic rock.
Speaking of naughty, here's Dr. Jones sporting his fluffy winter coat. I was going to say that the only time he behaves himself is when he's asleep, but considering some of the places he chooses to sleep, that's not entirely true.
"Hi, may I help you!" This is the foyer at Gates Bar-B-Q. I can't decide which I like more, the scale or the mechanical horse ride. I know for sure what I like further inside: Beef on Bun (lean).
Finally, here's my tiny girl, Trillian. She enjoys hanging out with me in my office at home.
All of these photos are from my iPhone, which actually takes better pictures than my digital camera these days.
Have a speedy Friday and a long, leisurely weekend!
I have no objective basis for saying this, but I think today is going to be a good day. I slept well, my cold has almost completely subsided, and I'm going to pretend that the sky doesn't look like it's moments away from launching yet another snowstorm.
I'm telling myself that it's almost spring and everything is about to start fresh. I like that thought.
I looked at my calendar and discovered that I have nothing whatsoever planned for today. I do, however, have a cold. So my plan is to stay home, eat warm, comforting food, drink warm, soothing drinks, and take as many naps as I can.
A review of the winter months represented in my blog archives would quickly reveal that I generally get sick as soon as the temperature drops and stay that way until spring. This year has been different, which I credit to the asthma/allergy medication my doctor has me taking. In lieu of my usual allergy-triggered cough leading to bronchitis or pneumonia, this year I stayed healthy until a real live virus came my way.
It seems a little strange that I came down with this cold after nearly three days of working alone at home, but I blame the throngs of people at the grocery store before the last storm hit. They had to have been teeming with germs, don't you think?
What I'm trying to say is that I'm taking this whole cold thing pretty well. With all of the remedies I mentioned above in addition to judicious use of my neti pot and my bottle of ibuprofen, I think I'll kick this and be back to normal in no time.
Until then, I'm sure the cats will appreciate my relative motionlessness.
I grew up at the end of a quarter-mile-long driveway which itself was at the end of a long, dead-end road. We had a few blizzards like the one we're having now when I was a kid and I remember them well. For one thing, we were helpless to leave the house until a snowplow came and as you can imagine, we were low on their priority list.
My mother worked in advertising and I recall one big snowstorm that hit right when she had an entire crew booked for a car dealer's TV commercial. Also booked for the spot: a lion. Ever the professional, she saddled up her horse, put packages of raw meat in the saddlebags for the lion, and rode up to the main road to put her horse in a neighbor's barn and catch a ride to the shoot.
When I woke up this morning, the snow hadn't really gotten a foothold yet, but I stayed home and worked from my home office anyway because I well remembered those blizzards from my childhood. Those, and the snowstorm last week that caused my usual twelve-minute commute home to take more than two hours.
I get a lot done when I'm working from home because the distractions are very minimal, especially if I refrain from letting any cats come upstairs to "help" me.
My home office is set up so that my computer faces into the corner and I have a window on either side of me. I watched the snow fall all day long until it covered all the leaves in the yard and finally accumulated to an impressive degree, as you can see from the photo above. I was very glad I'd stocked up on groceries the previous two days.
Lunch today was a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. It turned out I didn't have any lettuce, but bok choy worked just fine as a substitute. Dinner was Zesty Roast Beef Sandwiches, which cooked in the Crock-Pot all day long.
Here's how Dr. Jones and Trillian spent their day (I presume):
That's the first video I've ever edited, so don't judge it too harshly. I'm hoping to start doing videos more often. I turned off the sound on purpose because all you could hear was dialogue from the BBC version of "Jane Eyre," which I was watching when I noticed how cute the cats were being.
Did it snow where you are? How did you spend your day?
If I were keeping up with my blog, by now you'd have read about the get-together where my friends and I played Zombie Dice, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game and Shrek Operation.
I might have told you about A Librarian's fun birthday dinner at Blanc Burgers+Bottles and her adorable foster kitten who looks just like Skippyjon Jones.
Skippito! (A Librarian is totally going to adopt this cat, no matter what she might tell you.)
I would have told you about going to a Missouri Mavericks hockey game for my brother-in-law's birthday, which was really fun even though I didn't understand most of what was going on.
Then I probably would have written an entire post about my sister's wonderful new yoga studio, Core Balance Yoga, which opened last weekend and is doing extraordinarily well. I helped her do a faux finish on the walls of the massage room the previous weekend and I attended the lovely grand opening.
Of course, I might have written about how I'm still doing various volunteer projects, attempting to keep the house clean, discovering new features of our Roku and trying to get a morning walk in now and then.
I would probably have lightly touched on how wrung out I'm getting from all the job interviews I've been doing. I'd mention that I've expanded my search to other cities – Nashville, Tennessee and Austin, Texas – because either of those places would also have great opportunities for my husband.
So now that that's all out of the way, maybe I'll start blogging about the next batch of things I do. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll have some wonderful things to talk about.
My husband and I bought our house in 1995 and at the same time purchased a set of bedroom furniture and accompanying mattress. Up until about a week ago, we were still sleeping on that mattress.
It was absolutely shot: lumpy, unsupportive and visibly broken down. Even with a fancy memory foam pad on top and frequent turning, it was the architect of endless uncomfortable nights' sleep.
I got a small windfall a few weeks ago and even though it might have been slightly more responsible to use the money to pay down a bill or two, I told my husband that I thought we should take advantage of the opportunity to buy a new mattress.
We went to the store in our neighborhood where we'd bought the previous mattess because, really, who wants to shop around for a mattress? We self-consciously moved around the store lying on different mattresses suggested by the shopkeeper until we found one that suited us and was on sale. We paid cash for that very mattress (it was a floor model) and paid a little extra to have the old one hauled away.
The last four nights with the old mattress were awful. I think I spent them all lying flat on my back because lying on my side made me wake up limping from a sore hip. Finally, delivery day arrived.
My husband reported that when the delivery guys saw our old mattress they said, "Wow, that IS old!"
Apparently they don't make mattresses with blue floral covers anymore; the new ones were all white. We also learned during the shopping process that flipping your mattress is no longer a thing. Now all you have to do is turn it front to back from time to time. Who knew?
The first thing I realized when I got home and saw our wonderful new mattress installed on the bed frame was that we weren't going to be able to use the memory foam pad on top until I got some new sheets. Another thing that has changed about mattresses since the 1990s is that they're considerably thicker now.
Without the pad, the new mattress was a tad more firm than I found ideal, but it was still such an improvement over the old one that I could hardly stop marveling about it. On the rare occasions when my husband and I ended up sleeping at the same time, the old mattress used to crowd us together toward the middle because its structural integrity was so lacking. The new mattress, on the other hand, seems HUGE in comparison because it allows us to stay put on our own sides of the bed.
Today was the day I finally got the whole bed put back together. I'd shopped online until I found the best possible deal on extra-deep fitted sheet sets and the new ones arrived this afternoon. After a quick wash, I put the memory foam pad in place, made the bed with the new sheets, and somehow ended up lying down and reading for a couple of hours, just to test things out. It was delightful.
I haven't had a moment's regret about buying the mattress. We really owed it to ourselves and our health to get a mattress that didn't try to cripple us on a nightly basis.
Now I think I'm going to have to go lie down and read some more, just to make sure I've thoroughly tested it out.
Yes, Rude Cactus reminds me that it's already Delurking Day again. So if you've been hanging around despite my spotty posting schedule, please comment and say hello.