We’re living with in-laws and what we thought was going to be two months with them has stretched into a year while we’re in between pastoral calls.
2. How do you find out about news and current events?
Usually via Facebook and Twitter. 🙂 If I see or hear something that piques my curiousity, I’ll sometimes go to other news sites. We don’t have TV so that’s not usually an option and I don’t listen to any local radio stations.
3. Would you be able to make change for a twenty right now? For a dollar?
Nope. I keep very little cash on me out of habit more than anything else.
4. What’s the craziest food you’ve ever eaten?
Probably sea cucumber at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. The weirdest to a lot of people would be bison (it tastes like gamey beef) or sushi (I grew up in California so it’s a taste I acquired 25 years ago).
5. Which of the commonly removed parts have you had removed? (tonsils, wisdom teeth, appendix, etc.)
I’ve had my adnoids (1986), wisdom teeth (1998), and gallbladder removed (2005).
I thought I’d do something different this time and do an audio recording of my Quick Takes. (The last time I did this was here.) The actual text with links is under the cut.
Vaccine Take #1. This week, we’ll focus on the ethics of some vaccinations. For this first take, let’s talk about the issue of the MMR vaccine being derived from aborted fetal cell lines. This is one where I’m not happy that these cell lines were used for the vaccine (being pro-life and all) but it raises the question of whether putting a large number of people in danger by refusing the vaccine is ethically a better decision than getting it despite its origins. There are pro-life alternatives for measles-only and mumps-only shots but no alternative for rubella. Rubella *has* been eradicated in the Americas but that could all change if someone who is unvaccinated returns from an area where it is present (example: Africa) with the disease and goes into a group of people like the hippies in northern California or certain Hasidic enclaves on the east coast that don’t vaccinate. Another alternative situation for it spreading would be someone unvaccinated coming from Africa and being treated for symptoms in an ER with other unvaccinated people (example: cancer patients, transplant patients, etc.) before they can put infectious disease protocols in place.
So… my question for those who are concerned about the MMR vaccine for these reasons: what would be an ethical solution to this situation given that you can’t get around the rubella vaccination? Do you refuse to get it and risk contracting it yourself while any pregnant woman in your path risks severe birth defects for their baby or miscarriage? Assuming that you could get ahold of the only version of the MMR from Japan that is free of this cell line, do you pay through the nose to have it shipped to your doctor’s office? Do you bite your tongue and get vaccinated, after which you write sternly-worded letters to pharmaceutical companies to tell them off?
Here is the list of alternatives to the vaccines that are not derived from these particular cell lines. I tip my hat to JoAnna of A Star of Hope for providing me with it.
Flute duets. My amazingly talented friend Kathleen just published a collection of flute duets called Childhood. She’s asking people to help spread the news so… could y’all let any flutists or band teachers in your cohort know about this? Thank you. 🙂
Prayer Request #1. My friend Ian fought leukemia in 2013 and we thought he’d won until this week. Please pray for him, his wife Christy, and his daughters Asha and Fiona as they are dealing with the gravity of this.
Prayer Request #2. On my way back home from San Jose on Monday, my battery light started coming on and I thankfully made it home safely without a problem. I finally got a chance to take my car in today (Thursday) and it turns out that there was a problem with the alternator. It is at the repair shop of the guys who have kept my father-in-law’s Volvo running for almost 30 years and they’ve had to replace the alternator and 3 drive belts in addition to possibly having to replace the A/C. Could y’all pray that they can finish my car tomorrow (Friday) and that the bill isn’t more than the actual value of the car? Please and thank you!
Pentecost fun. At Bible study on Wednesday, my priest mentioned that she’d love to put copies of different translations of Acts 2:1-21 around the church on Sunday for Pentecost. I asked if she wanted help and she told me to start sending her languages. Between Bible Gateway and The Unbound Bible, we found some pretty interesting languages ranging from Maori to Wolof to Quechua to Coptic.
Prerequisite baseball take. The Giants swept the Dodgers this week, shutting them out each time. If it was in the budget right now, I’d make Jon go get a pedicure in Giants colors. 😀
Can we say “duh”? News flash: Measles Vaccine Still Doesn’t Cause Autism. The paper on this is here. I will be writing more about this in order to explain the scientific bases of all of this in the next week or so.
Until then… VACCINATE YOUR FREAKING KIDS!!!! And for those who claim a selective/delayed vaccine schedule is a good thing, your argument has been proven invalid in this study.
Wonderful concert. I was blessed to be able to hear the Claremont Chamber Choir sing tonight at the Drinkward Recital Hall at Harvey Mudd College. One of the basses was conducting it as part of his studies toward a DMA in Conducting. It was interesting to watch Dr. Charles Kamm (the actual director) sing because he was so expressive and looked like he was having a lovely time.
Seriously, one of the positives of my living situation is that I have free concerts in the community that are of serious quality. Tonight’s concert was a collection of madrigals and folk music from around the world and it was heavenly.
Rachel Held Evans’ most recent book. I finished Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans today and I highly recommend it to anyone wondering why Millenials are leaving the faith in droves as well to those who have left the faith and might be slightly amenable. Rachel’s sister Amanda is a singer/songwriter and she composed a few songs based on the sacraments framing the book. Everyone who pre-ordered the book received a download code for the album and I found them to be positively fabulous.
Another person created seven pictures of birds based on things they read in the book. I think my favorite one is for “Communion” and involves hummingbirds drinking around a flower.
A thank you. I was at Target with Daniel this afternoon and decided to have him put stuff on the belt to practice good behavior while shopping. The woman in front of us watched for a bit and complimented him on how he was doing. She then looked up at me and said, “You’re a good mother.”
I honestly don’t think she realized how much I needed to hear that after Daniel had a rather public tantrum on Sunday.
On the subject of kids and cats… I saw this online a few days ago and had to share. It’s a tongue-in-cheek list of reasons that kids should never have cats. It’s amusing to say the least.
Love. I’ve missed two Sundays due to fibro-related fatigue so Bible study on Wednesday was one of my chances to connect to church. I ended up sitting next to one of our founding members M who is 94 and reminds me so much of my grandma. Our priest was passing around pictures she took while walking the Camino de Santiago last year and M had just gotten shots in her eyes so she couldn’t see them. I spent much of Bible study taking her hand and pointing out various things in the pictures for her. When Bible study ended, she gave me a hug and told me she loved me.
No lie, it brought me to tears at that point and remembering it brings me to tears now because she reminds me so much of my grandma who I thankfully got to see a few months ago (for the first time in 4 1/2 years) but who I miss dreadfully. (She’s in Washington and I’m in southern California.)
I am thankful for getting to spend some time with my brother and sister-in-law. They are down from Tacoma for the holiday weekend and it has been good to see them for the first time in 6 months. Jeanette (my SIL) and I worked on making the various sides today and she has been a FABULOUS aunt for Daniel.
I am thankful for my in-laws. When I mention that we’re living with in-laws currently, people usually eye me suspiciously and ask how it’s going. The answer: we’re making it work. They’ve been my other set of parents for 14 years (12 of them legally) and I’m not sure I could share a house with anyone else. It takes LOTS of communication and apparently my mother-in-law and I are wired so similarly that people have a hard time believing that we’re not related by blood.
I’m thankful that I didn’t engage in any trash-talking with my extended family before the San Francisco-Seattle game today. I think the 49’ers sent in a junior high team against the Seahawks. It was pretty brutal. The next big sporting event for my family is on Saturday when the UW Huskies (my parents’ alma mater) take on the WSU Cougars (where my cousin Sarah goes to school and is in the marching band). It should be… interesting.
I am thankful that I am not homeschooling Daniel this year. I have all the tools to do it, not to mention a mother-in-law who homeschooled both kids from K-12. However, I really don’t have the patience to do it — my personality is like the one of a drill sergeant. When I want Daniel to do things, I want them done correctly the first time and I want immediate obedience. However, 5 year olds do not do well with this approach, especially Daniel. I am more than happy to leave the main part of his education to the professionals.
Rules for eating and such rendered in the style of the Old Testament. I first read this 10+ years ago and it still makes me almost die from laughing so hard. Anyone with small children will understand. My favorite line is, “Leave the cat alone. For what has the cat done that you should so afflict it with tape?”
So… I guess you heard that the Giants won the World Series? It was an amazing series and I’m thankful that I got to watch/listen to all or part of 6 of the 7 games. (I watched all of Games 1-3, saw a portion of Game 4 in addition to my mom checking the score on her smartphone during dinner on Saturday, listened to Game 5 on my long drive home on Sunday, and got to watch/listen to over half of Game 7 last night.) I’m impressed that Madison Bumgarner pitched in Game 1, Game 5, and then 5 innings of Game 7 last night. (So is Jason Motte, my favorite closer with the St. Louis Cardinals. Real classy, Jason. It’s why I follow you.)
To the Royals fans who read: you guys have a kick-@$$ team and you made my boys work for that World Series victory. I wouldn’t doubt that y’all give the MLB a run for their money next year because Game 7 could have gone either way. And seriously… your team had the Kansas City Symphony play the national anthem one night and had one of your opera stars sing it the next night — y’all are classy. 🙂
Yet another baseball Quick Take. One interesting trend this season has been “Hunter Pence signs”. It was a weird trolling thing started by some Mets fans this past summer and it went viral. At all of the away games, fans of the home team bring the signs. There s a Twitter collection of them here.
One of the few times I miss having a TV and cable. I’m kind of bummed that I likely won’t be able to watch Election Night stuff from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Apparently, it’s going to be fun.
This one goes out to all the moronic conspiracy theorists claiming that vaccines cause autism. Actually, there are more than 100 genes that contribute. That many genes are a bit much to be turned on by the body’s response to a vaccine.
And for the morons who are citing a bad reading of a Canadian study linking the MMR vaccine to febrile seizures, you might want to read the part of the study which mentions the seizures occur most often in kids who had been selectively vaccinated or on delayed schedules. There’s also the fact that some kids get these seizures around ages 2.5 to 4 years old and said seizure is the first sign that the kid has a fever. I should know… Daniel is/was one of them and we made 3 trips to the ER for them in the year after his third birthday. (One of those trips was actually the night before his third birthday.) It’s terrifying to watch your kid seize like that, but it sure beats watching your kids on a ventilator because your delusion and paranoia over pseudoscience landed them in the hospital with a completely preventable disease.
Wow… a somewhat balanced look at Common Core. I don’t love everything Simcha Fisher has to say but her piece on Common Core was very balanced. I hear a lot of complaining about the math portion, but the way they’re doing math actually makes a great deal of sense to me. There was a teacher who taught my elementary school class how to do mental math, how math works, and how numbers relate to each other. This means that I have a better than average grasp of the metric system and scientific notation, both of which make infinitely more sense than the English/imperial system used in the United States.
As for literature, Simcha mentioned that they tend to err on the side of non-fiction which is fine with me. I always read things that interested me and my parents didn’t have to introduce me to good literature because I generally found it on my own.
Here’s something for Halloween. I found this piece on the history of witchcraft to be pretty interesting. (Then again, my college degree dealt with this sort of thing, especially in the history and anthropology classes I took.) She’s not endorsing the practice of Wicca or anything (and she mentions that Wicca is a 20th century invention) and she makes some interesting points about cultures in which witchcraft is still an excuse for stuff going wrong. It’s definitely worth a read.
You know you’re loved when you walk into church on Sunday and the acting music director hugs you and tells you that you should have shown up earlier so you could have sung with the choir. Before June, I hadn’t been back to the church for 11.5 years and in the two times I’ve been home since, I’ve gotten recruited for music the next Sunday. (I’m not THAT good — the music director has known me since high school and knows that I can sightread vocal music passably on my first try.) This Sunday, the anthem is “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” with organ and violin. I haven’t sung soprano in 16 years… but I’ll be trying to help the section on Sunday and practice went really well tonight. Thankfully, it’s a piece I know backwards and forwards.
Coffee dates. I got coffee with my friend Rebecca twice while I was home. It’s hard to do, given that I usually come up here with Daniel, so it was good to see her. She also came to church with me on Sunday which was lovely.
World Series. I’m kind of bummed that the Series is tied at 1 game apiece because I was hoping the Giants would sweep and I’d get to see all the games. (I don’t have access to TV in southern California and I’ll also be driving home during the game on Sunday.) Still, Game 1 was glorious and I’m glad that Blanco got a lead-off homer in Game 2.
I’m (almost) caught up on all the TV I usually watch. My parents have “On Demand” so I’ve been able to catch up with all the CBS stuff I usually watch but haven’t this fall because I don’t have much online time and that makes watching my shows online hard. I haven’t watched the new NCIS spin-off yet and I may not just because it’s another couple hours of stuff to watch.
I’ve gotten some fabulous walks in. I’ve taken some walks on the trail by Los Alamitos Creek and they’ve been really nice. It’s a good setting for getting in some prayer time because while there are people around, it’s also pretty quiet.
I’ve unfortunately had to watch political ads. “On Demand” usually protects me from them but I’ve had to put up with them if I’ve wanted to watch baseball. It’s kind of scary how normal people don’t actually look to see who has paid for the ads… because it is really quite telling. I also wish there was something that killed all the ads, mailings, etc. if you have already voted. (I’m a permanent absentee ballot voter so I voted about a week and a half ago.)
Thankfully, the only really contentious races this year for us in California are the House ones and some of the ballot measures. Neither of our Senators is up for re-election and our Democratic governor is about 20 percentage points ahead of the Republican challenger. (He’s so far ahead that I think the GOP in California has given up on the challenger because I haven’t seen *ANYTHING* about that particular race since the primaries in June.)
