Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I have no doubt that Israelis are very embarrassed by these tourists.

I read a brilliant article today called “Is Science As Important As Football?” that I highly recommend. It makes the point that we don’t mind when sports routinely injure students, but we don’t allow it in science, making chemistry, physics, and so on incredibly boring, which drives people away from hard science careers. Nefarious and I are always doing “experiments” — simple chemistry, dissecting dead things, and generally approaching her environment with an exploratory mindset. Her school is great, but I think even at her school, they tend to “play it safe” in this age of lawsuits, and I won’t be seeing her coming home from school with chemical burns.

Oh, and I installed Windows 7 today, over top of Vista, which meant that it was a clean upgrade and all my programs and data were retained. It’s noticeably faster, and has fixed some of the problems I was having with the system out of the box, including a very aggravating “stuttering” of audio (and video to a lesser extent) on video playback (unacceptable on a nice quad-CPU machine!)… So far I’m very happy with the upgrade — and I love the surreal background images it comes with (although Nefarious to my surprise prefers my old Vista background which was of the Northern Lights)!

We went to the park today with some school friends, and amidst the playing we found a turtle — alive this time (the last one we found was dead). It’s really amazing that anything can survive in that revolting water completely saturated with both natural and man made pollution.

I’ve said it before, but I really do love living in this studio. There’s so much about this place that feels like an urban commune — a good sense of camaraderie between tenants, an interesting collection of people (for example, my three closest neighbors are a musician, a trapeze artist, and a Jeet Kun Do instructor), and great friendly kids of Nefarious’s age — I think we’ve had dinner guests every day for the last week, and the few days it hasn’t been that way, Nefarious has been out with a friend.

Other than that, I got a call from my doctor today with a very worried tone of voice telling me that she was moving me up the food chain to a specialist, and I guess that next on my medical calendar is a muscle biopsy. I don’t know yet how invasive the procedure will be, but I am definitely not looking forward to it! This all — not knowing “how long I have left” — does motivate me to work on my memoir at least, although one of my new medications makes me extremely tired, so I have not been up to writing… I think I’m going to cut out that pill because mental acuity is pretty high on my list of life priorities.

I’ve given a lot of thought about whether I want to write a full memoir, or if I want to focus exclusively on the history of BME, and I think I’m going to do a full memoir… It’s pretty much impossible to separate my personal life and motivations with the site’s history, and now that enough time has passed to be able to write objectively about the more recent events, I think it’s time to get to work. Since Caitlin is on vacation this week, I may take the opportunity to dedicate an hour a day to getting earnestly to work — not that I haven’t written an outline more than a few times, and even some chapters, since scrapped. Cory Doctorow wrote a great piece on “writing in the age of distraction” full of good advice.