Space kitty!

Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country. --Anais Nin
My cat is losing her fool mind! I bought this jar full of treats for Halloween, and since the treats are all given away, the jar is empty and my kitty thinks it is her new home - or at least the home for her head. It all started out like this...After she seemed so interested in the jar, my kids thought it would be funny to shove her all the way in. I know, I know animal cruelty right?! What can I say? The lid wasn't actually placed all the way on! So then, you'd think she would never want to go in there again, right?Wrong! Kitty decided that she wanted to climb in as much as possible. She spent the next several weeks enthralled with the jar. Isn't she a cutie? But most of the time she didn't climb all the way in, but rather was found like this... After a while she got sick of the jar, so I stuck a little catnip in there and it renewed her interest for a while. Now she is bored of it again... I'll just have to stick some more catnip in there because it cracked me up when I saw her in there, every time!

I turned in my article based on my dive to the Aquarius Undersea lab (for which I interviewed Steve Squyres - from the last blog post about pooping undersea... LOL! That was a funny conversation!) I don't know when the article will be published, but I'll keep you posted. I turned it in a wee bit long - not something I usually do, but I have for the last couple of articles because of strange circumstances! There are sometimes stories that just absolutely require more space for proper telling. It is not my normal modus operandi to turn stories in over word count. At any rate, I'm now working on article on another scary chemical/plastic danger - obesogens (chemicals that make you fat!). After doing the piece on BPA, reading about microplastics, and now this article on obesogens, I want to discarding about every plastic thing in my house at this point, especially stuff I put food in! I already got rid of my old plastic water bottles (unlined aluminum and steel only for me!) and never, ever heat anything in the microwave in plastic (never did, though). I do sometimes use plastic tupperware to store food but I have a few glass containers with lids and I think I will look for more.

Well I better get back to my reading! Soon I will post a few recipes I have tried out recently. Working on that post already - peace out!

Eating Meat & Christian Ethics, and BPA is scary

Caricature of me drawn by Emily Ruppel

Two of my latest pieces are... drum roll please...

• The American Scientific Affiliation's First Symposium on Eating Meat and Christian Ethics - I wrote up this summary of a symposium I was so happy to find (given my interest in this topic) after my attendance at my first ASA meeting. I didn't even blog about it did I? Well it was held in Naperville, Illinois, outside Chicago, and was a great conference where I connected with some truly amazing individuals who are world-renowned scientists (at Princeton, MIT, NASA, and more) and also Christians. The article in the newsletter includes a cute caricature of me with braids by Emily Ruppel, the ASA's new Director of Communications and a cool chick!
  
  Here's the first paragraph of the article:
  

  The ASA held its first-ever symposium on the Christian ethics of meat consumption on Saturday of the 2011 conference. As a first-time conference attendee, and as someone who recently committed to avoid factory-farmed meat, I was thrilled and surprised to see this on the agenda at a Christian conference. I had recently published an essay about this very topic, but my editors removed the one paragraph in the essay that discussed the long history of Christian thought on vegetarianism and avoiding meat (and there is one, surprisingly).

  
  
• Prenatal Exposure to BPA and Sexually Selected Traits in Male Mice. Environmental Health Perspectives. Sept 2011.
  
  This was my first article covering bisphenol A (BPA), a polymer that is an endocrine disruptor and used in everything we eat - it lines cans of veggies, it is in cash register receipts that are on that fax-type paper, it is in bottles we drink from... It's in plastic #7 though not all plastic-7 has BPA so it's a bit confusing. Many things will say "BPA free" now because of the scientific evidence showing it causes harm. I disregarded that until I wrote this article. Yikes - scary stuff!! I ended my piece with:
  
  

  “The obvious question is: Does this mean that it could affect gender identity in humans? Admittedly, that is quite a step away, but it does suggest that, at the very least, BPA exposure might make men less ‘manly.’” (says Pat Hunt - who first discovered that her research mice were acting funny after a detergent caused BPA to leach from their cages into their food)

  
  So, ignore BPA warnings at your peril. But I'm not drinking from BPA bottles! And trying to avoid plastic as much as possible.

I'm headed to Costa Rica's Caribbean Coast soon, and will post an update about where and such... all I Can say is I haven't been this excited about a trip in a long time! I went there back in 1999 when I wrote about leatherback sea turtles for Discovery Channel Online, but that was on the Pacific Coast. I want some Lizano salsa!! Mmmm, good.