This is a true story

In 1987 by best friend went into the hospital to give birth to her second child, a daughter. There were complications. She had to receive a blood transfusion. This was before mandatory testing of hospital blood supplies for HIV was established.

Six years later she was gone.

During that six years, her husband divorced her and sued for custody of the two children, stating she was unfit to raise them because of her HIV status. He won. As a result, she cut off ties to everyone except her father and brother because she was afraid that her friends would exhibit the same ignorance her husband had.

I lost six years with a woman that was closer to me than a sister. I didn’t find out she had died of AIDS until her funeral, when her father told me.

Please support me & AIDS Walk LA.

For her, and for all of my friends currently living with HIV.

http://aidswalklosangeles2010.kintera.org/jtomalley

Before & After :)

See Jessica's Dead Girl Guide for reference

Part II - Invasions and the New York Mosque

With all of this being said... do the Muslims have the right to build a mosque  in that space near Ground Zero in New York? Yes, they do. Should they? No. Probably not.

At the very least, they're either totally obtuse and completely  insensitive to the fact that to build a symbol of the very religion that caused  such destruction and pain to the US in general and New York in particular would  be pouring salt in an already festering wound; or they simply do not give a  flying fuck what Americans think or feel.

I don't know if this is truly the case, but it looks like they want to  erect a monument in honour of the guys that were piloting the airplanes that day.  It looks like they're using our own laws and freedoms as a tool to rub our faces  in it.

If the Muslim people want to truly change the opinion of the American  people regarding who they are and what they stand for, this group would  graciously back off, and agree to build it further away from Ground Zero. Or  build a museum instead, with educational displays and invite Americans to learn  about their culture and offer opportunities for the city of New York to  participate in the planning and content of the building and the displays therein.

Can we do anything about it? Yes - we can protest - intelligently --  and voice our concern about the wisdom of such a building in that area. We can  try to appeal to their sense of humanity and ask them, in the name of peace, to please see why we have such a problem with this. But the moment we raise a hand  in violence or deface or vandalize -- well, at the very least, some indignant  and righteous American will be arrested for a hate crime. At the worst, all it  will do is perpetuate the hate and add to the already significant body count  that has already resulted and continues to climb due to the events of September  11, 2001.

Invaders

Human beings are interesting.

We’ve spent the better portion of our existence on this planet invading other people’s space and then coming up with all matter of justifications for it.

An example, take the Romans – they managed to expand their empire to unbelievable proportions by invading areas outside of their realm, attacking the indigenous people who lived there and either killing or enslaving anyone that refused to join them or tried to defend themselves. The end result, other than the expansion of the Roman Empire, was quite brutal; a fairly significant body count, which grew exponentially over the course of the next months or even years due to famine, pestilence, and the occasional retaliatory attack by the seriously pissed off people left behind.

Jump ahead a few centuries – and we will find the Christians. They decided, through their own mysterious and meaningless studies of the aboriginal people living throughout the far reaches of the European continent, that they were superior in all ways, and it was their responsibility to enlighten everyone – everyone – to their way of worship. The way they brought this about was to label anyone that didn’t subscribe to their point of view a heretic, who would then be systematically tortured in unspeakable ways until they either relented or died. This jihad (although they called it “The Inquisition”) resulted in a very similar situation as the Roman excursions — a fairly significant body count, which grew exponentially over the course of the next months or even years due to famine, pestilence, and the occasional retaliatory attack by the seriously pissed off people left behind.

Then some ambitious explorer discovered this huge new body of land on the other side of that ocean to the West. He, excited to share this new discovery, went back to Europe and told everyone how beautiful it was and how seemingly endless its resources. This set off a whole new slew of invasions and disputes… far more elaborate because the little European countries couldn’t agree who would be in charge of this new land and fought viciously amongst themselves in an effort to gain control. Meanwhile, in the new land, large groups of settlers and explorers shoved the natives out of their homelands, brought new germs with them that decimated entire populations, and attacked villages. The end result was a fairly significant body count…

Yeah.

In the end, the new world was conquered, bloodily, and the native people were relegated to small encampments in largely inhospitable areas such as North Dakota and the deserts of Nevada, where many of them still live to this day in veritable poverty.

Then some ambitious inventor came up with something called the internal combustion engine. It relied on this gooey black stuff that bubbled under the surface of the earth’s crust to burn as fuel. As this new invention caught on and became de rigueur, the leaders of the first and second-world countries remembered that a whole lot of this black stuff was available for the taking over there in those third-world countries. An invasion was organized and deployed.

The invaders brought drills and guns and war machines, because one thing history has taught us is that the people living in countries being invaded have this annoying habit of being very put out by the people coming to invade them. But there was this black stuff, see, and the industrial nations wanted it at any cost and intended to fetch it, like it or not, never mind that the incumbent citizens had deemed the land to be holy and something to be revered.

The invaders also brought the narrow-minded belief that anyone that didn’t agree with their way of life and idea of democracy was inferior, so while they drilled for oil in the sand, they staged their own version of the Inquisition – hiring the subdued native people who would be hired to work at unliveable wages; and raping, pillaging or killing the ones that raised a ruckus at having an army of people drilling in their consecrated land.

They left behind a ravaged hole of sand and ruined ancient mosques and temples — as well as a fairly significant body count, which grew exponentially over the course of the next months or even years due to famine, pestilence…

The people left behind were seriously pissed off, and also suffered a lack of important funding for education or rebuilding, resulting in an entire generation of angry, ignorant, desperate people with a really big chip on their shoulder.

Unbeknownst to all, under the guise of political cooperation, the leaders of both the invading countries and the invaded countries all struck deals for huge sums of money so that the black stuff in the ground would still flow freely across international boundaries.

Then somebody got greedy. The deals were broken on one side or the other, and the leaders of the invaded countries decided they didn’t want the invaders to continue plundering what was left of their country and told them to get out. The invaders refused. So the leaders then appealed to the generation of seriously pissed off and undereducated people that were trying to eke out some kind of pathetic existence in the middle of drilled out sand and got them all riled up. Told them how evil and treacherous these invaders were, and that their home country was full of people who were even more evil and greedy and godless. The leaders got them so agitated that they organized a little group of very angry people and sent them over to invade.

The end result was a widely publicised, fairly significant body count, which grew exponentially over the course of the next years due to famine (the economy tanked), pestilence (the very dust in the air was toxic), and the ongoing retaliatory attack by the seriously pissed off people left behind…

Product review: Dryer Balls!

I made a terrible mistake this week. I went and bought dryer sheets from my local dollar discount store. Only 99¢, I figured dryer sheets were an innocuous enough item that it was no big deal. I washed my bedding and tossed them in the dryer with the cheap dryer sheets. BIG mistake.

The first night I felt itchy and thought it was a dry skin thing. By the morning, my skin was covered in a pink rash and felt like I'd been sleeping in mosquitoes. I thought I'd developed bedbugs overnight.

After the second night, my skin was on fire and I was convinced that my next-door neighbours had infested my bedroom with some alien bugform that came through the walls and invaded my bed to torture me. Taking a shower was excruciating.

Finally, after tearing apart my bed and inspecting every inch of the mattress and platform, I figured I either had invisible microscopic multi-legged demons in my bed, or I'd developed an allergy to my bed linens. Then I remembered the dollar-store dryer sheets. I took a fresh one out of the box and rubbed it on my arm. Instant agony.

I went to my local natural products grocer and saw these blue "dryer balls" on the laundry aisle. They were priced at $9.99, and after reading the package and thinking that I'd give ten times that much to never itch like that again, I purchased a pair. They claimed to fluff and soften laundry without chemicals.

They're made of some kind of rubberised plastic and look like giant, blue pollen spores. I took them home and washed my sheets and pillowcases twice, with one extra rinse cycle to get all of the offending chemicals out. Then I tossed everything into the dryer and threw in the Dryer Balls.

The first thing I noticed was the muffled banging noise as the dryer ran through the cycle. Mildly annoying, but not too bad. I had set the timer for 40 minutes instead of the usual 60, because the package claimed that my laundry would dry in less time (therefore saving even more money on energy costs).

At the end of the cycle I discovered that yes, the load of fitted sheet, flat sheet, and four pillowcases was totally dry. They also looked poofier than usual, as if the Dryer Balls had beaten air into the cotton fibres. They were slightly less wrinkled than usual, and I noticed that there was no static, which was kind of a big deal since I live in an extremely dry climate and I usually have very serious static in the laundry if I don't use liquid fabric softener or dryer sheets.

I put the sheets back on the bed, and they were at least as soft as fabric softener would have made them, but without the weird oily film that it can leave. Encouraged, I tried the Dryer Balls with a load of bath towels.

The result was quite dramatic. They came out so fluffy that the stack of folded towels was almost too fat to fit on the linen closet shelf! I also noticed a measurable increase in absorbency and a decrease in lint fuzz - my lint screen in the dryer had caught far more lint than usual, but the towels were left fluffy-soft and almost totally lint-free.

I am very pleased with the performance of the Dryer-Max Dryer Balls and would highly recommend this product, especially to anyone who has skin sensitivity to chemical fabric softening agents.

Life flashes in front of your eyes one frame at a time

In the summer when I was five or six years old, I remember sitting in the grass in the back yard, seething about some annoyance. I was peeved. Really peeved. About something. 

My Dad got home from work and came outside still in his work clothes and sat in the grass next to me. He didn’t say anything. He just sat there for a few minutes, and then, looking into the trees, leaned over and nudged me with this shoulder.

“What,” I said. Short, clipped, the anger of a five year old.

“Wanna see a trick?”

I didn’t look at him. “What?” Still clipped. 

He looked around in the grass for a moment, and then pulled a fat blade from the green, prickly carpet. He fiddled with it and placed it between his thumbs and then put it up to his face and blew. It made a screech like a train whistle and I jumped.

“Wow! How’d you do that?” 

Anger forgotten. To this day I don’t remember what I’d been mad about.

Yeah, Dad… how did you do that?

Deja Root Beer

This afternoon I went to the vending machine at work and discovered they'd stocked it with real brown glass bottles of IBC root beer for one dollar. Cool.

At the first swig I was catapulted back 35 years to my favourite family tradition: Every spring, usually in late April or early May, my whole family would get together on a Sunday evening and retreat to the cool shadowed basement to cook up a batch of homemade root beer.

Amidst the washer and dryer and the gigantic concrete wash sink that was bolted to the cement wall, Dad would bring out the cases of empty glass bottles, our huge 10-gallon pickling crock, the hoses and bags of shiny new bottle caps and lay them out on the cement basement floor. Mom would fill the sink with scalding hot water and all the bottles went in the bath to clean out any bacteria (and possibly spiders) and my brothers and I would put them on the drying rack that dad made out of a plank with a forest of wooden dowels growing out of it.

Meanwhile, dad made the root beer. He filled the crock with water, sugar, real root beer extract and active yeast and mixed it all up with a huge wooden spoon. It took about a half hour, stirring slowly, for all the sugar to dissolve. By then the bottles would be dry.

Dad used a red rubber piece of tubing to siphon the root beer into the bottles, making sure to leave a space for "growing room" at the top. He then handed the filled bottle to me so I could carefully place one of the bottle caps on top, and I'd hand it to my oldest brother so he could use the long-handled bottle cap crimper to seal it tight. Then my middle brother would take the filled, sealed bottle, wipe it off with a towel and place it back in the wooden crate. After an hour, we had about 100 newly-minted bottles of homemade root beer, give or take a few, lined up in the crates like little brown soldiers.

While Mom cleaned out the pickle crock in the big sink, Dad and us three kids would nestle the cases of root beer in the dark, cool space beneath the stairs in the basement and cover them up with a furniture blanket to catch any glass if one of the bottles should burst. We always lost a few, and sometimes we would hear one blow if we were in the kitchen when it exploded. There they sat for 30 days in the dark so the yeast could ferment and make the fizz. (No mean feat in Colorado, where the altitude could cause cakes to bake flat like goopy chocolate tortillas.)

The day after school let out for the summer in early June, Dad would wake early and take out six bottles and sneak them into the back of the refrigerator. We would have a great feast that lasted all day, with roasted chicken, potato salad and fresh corn on the cob from the local farmer who sold it 'thirteen-ears-for-five-bucks' from a rickety stand right on the edge of his cornfield. We would make hand-cranked ice cream in the afternoon, and have watermelon-seed spitting contests in the back yard. Dad would take the train out of its shed where it slept through the long winter and spend the day tinkering and adjusting the engine and sending us kids out to clear any grass clumps from the train tracks. He would never let it run on that first day -- he just took it out so he could check it over and get us kids excited about it all over again. The first 'train day' always came later.

When the sun was going down and the fireflies were just starting to spark little wavering spotlights in the trees, Dad would bring out the ancient, thick art-glass mugs filled with scoops of ice cream, and with much fanfare and anticipation, he would open that first bottle of root beer. It was always a tense moment... would it be fizzy and foamy or would it be flat?

But always, with a satisfying *pop*, the bottle cap would go flying, we all cheered, and Dad would pour the root beer over the ice cream in each mug, insert a long-handled sundae spoon and a long straw, and the five of us would enjoy the rewards of our labours in the summer grass. We always agreed it was the best batch of root beer ever.

And thus, Summer officially began.

Smart Car vs Jetta

It happened. My nightmare. My Smart car, Maxwell, was hit.

On my way home from work on Wednesday, January 13th, I was in a line of cars waiting for a red light (I was 5th or 6th in line) when I looked into my rearview mirror and saw a car coming up behind me. I could see the top of the driver’s head, which told me he was texting!

I watched in horror and realized he wasn’t looking up to check the road. ‘Crap,’ I thought. ‘He’s not going to stop.’ (Actually, it wasn’t ‘crap‘, but this is a family-friendly blog…)

I took a deep breath, and tried not to seize up for the impact. He was going about 35 MPH when he hit me square in the rear. Then he looked up. The collision pushed me forwards about two feet and I rammed into the pickup truck that was stopped in front of me. HARD.

I sat there for a moment. I didn’t feel any pain, no whiplash, no bumps or bruises. ‘No, no, no, this didn’t happen… I don’t want to get out and see what he did to my car…’

Shaking, I backed out of traffic and pulled over to the side, out of the lane of cars. The 1996 Jetta that hit me had already pulled over and I parallel parked behind him and immediately snapped a camera-phone picture of his car, making sure to get a clear shot of the license plate. The pickup truck pulled over and parked ahead of the Jetta.

Deep breath. I got out of the car and walked to the rear. The first thing I noticed was the rear bumper panel was exactly where it should be. I could see the crease where it had folded in upon impact and then popped back in place. The plastic cap over the tow-hole was broken off, and the plastic around the tow hole was gouged, and slightly cracked. My exhaust pipe looked like it was bent down, and the black side bumpers were creased as well.

The driver of the Jetta was apologizing. The pickup driver came back to see if we were okay. He looked at my car, then at me. “Whoa. Are you all right?”

“I’m okay. Are you all right?”

He looked at my car again and kind of chuckled. “Um, yeah. I’m fine. So’s my truck. Are you sure you’re okay? Totally that guy’s fault.” He went to talk to the Jetta guy.

(Judge me by my size, do you?)

I walked around to the front of Max, while the Jetta driver was exchanging info with the truck driver. My front license plate was embedded into the bumper panel and the license plate frame was shattered. The black plastic grate beneath the bumper panel was creased, much like the rear bumper had been. However, all of the bumper panels appeared to be aligned right. I was stunned by the lack of major damage, especially considering the force of the impacts. The front end was damaged more than the rear, but it looked largely cosmetic.

I walked all the way around Max. The doors looked straight. None of the side body panels appeared to be displaced. The rear hatch opened and closed normally. I couldn’t believe it.

After writing down the Jetta driver’s name, phone number and insurance information, I got back in my car. The police weren’t called — in LA they suggest that if there are no injuries and all parties have exchanged insurance info, you don’t have to call the police unless there’s a dispute. The Jetta driver already admitted his fault to both me and the truck driver in between multiple apologies and was very cooperative, so we didn’t call the police. Besides, when I phoned in the claim to my insurance agent, I would give a recorded statement then, so there really was no point.

Max hesitated just a moment when I turned the key and my heart skipped a beat. But then he started like always. No knocks. No weird grinding noises. I carefully put him in first gear and pulled back into traffic. The front end wanted to pull slightly to the right, but not sharply. Other than that, it felt normal.

I drove home on surface streets like a myopic old lady wearing her husband’s bifocals. The first time I had to use the brakes, they kind of went ‘thug-thug-thug’ as if there was a flat spot on the disc somewhere, but since I had been braking when Jetta guy hit me, they probably had gotten torqued. But if I went easy on them, it stopped.

I’m still waiting for the estimate from the body shop my dealership sent me to, and the dealership wants to do some testing as well. They said something about having to check the airbags — they didn’t deploy, and frankly I’m sure they didn’t need to because the seat belt did its job. I spoke to the body shop today and they assured me that Max was indeed repairable, and when I got him back he would be every bit as perfect as he was before the accident. Then they gave me a “cautious” estimate of $1500, including labor. The Jetta guy’s insurance company will be overjoyed.

I’m completely impressed about the safety features of Smart. Even more so than I was before. The rear bumper body panel behaved exactly as described… it folded inwards and dampened the impact, and then popped back into place. The super-duper body frame felt like it was holding me in a strong cradle when the Jetta hit me. It felt solid. The front bumper panel took the impact of the pickup’s bumper and squished inwards, effectively slowing the hit so I wasn’t slammed around inside the car.

So I’m driving around LA in the insurance rental PT Cruiser (I could park Max in the back seat for Pete’s sake). I figured this would be a good time to do a CostCo run and pick up a side of beef or a piano or something.

But I’ll tell you all right now… as long as Smart Cars are available in America, I will own one.

Who's the coolest person you know?

I know an awful lot of really cool people... famous actors, athletes, musicians. If we talk about people I knew, my father was by far the coolest ever. He wasn't stylish and he cussed a lot, but he could build anything -- check this out: http://tinyurl.com/yc3sgom -- and he was the most hard-working and honest man I've ever known or will ever know. But he's not here any more.

Out of my current roster of acquaintances? What constitutes "cool", anyway? I mean, I have a close friend who's a stuntman that sets himself on fire and crashes motorcycles on purpose for a living. That's pretty cool.

Then there's the army of doctors that have spent the better portion of 20 years helping me fight my multiple occurrences of cancer. They've saved my life more than once, and save other lives every day. That's way cool.

There's every-day cool, like the guy who works at Peets Coffee that can still give me a genuine smile after dealing with the lady in front of me who ordered a half-caf, half-skim-half-soy mocha latte with a shot of hazelnut, no whipped cream and double chocolate sprinkles while holding a deafeningly screaming baby. Or the ancient Asian lady at my dry-cleaners that re-knitted the worn elbow of my favourite sweater and I can't tell where the hole used to be. It was a really big hole, too.

So truthfully, I can't peg one person as the coolest. I'm surrounded by cool. From the people I work with who build the lighting package for the Vancouver Olympics to the grocery bagger at Trader Joe's that made me laugh after a hard day at work. They're all pretty cool.