Crazy week

Lessons learned this week:

Lesson 1.

Country people carry chainsaws in the backs of their pickups just in case there's a tree down across the road.

Other country people cut trees and just leave them when they fall across the road.

If someone hasn't gotten there with a chainsaw to clear the road, it takes a REALLY LONG TIME to get to Mass if you don't know alternative routes.

The Moral: when you live on a dirt road, always know alternative routes.







Lesson 2.

That drain pipe that goes from the gully on one side of the driveway to the gully on the other side that empties into the pond is there for a reason.

When the drain pipe is full of leaves and the forecast calls for 8 inches of rain overnight, you ought to clear it out.

If you don't, your barn is going to flood and a lot of boxes are going to be ruined.




A snow shovel is a very efficient tool for moving water from your barn floor into buckets.








Lesson 3:

Sometimes one's front pasture turns into a river, when the skies let loose 8 inches of rain. There is no moral to be gleaned from this, just miscellaneous wisdom.

Also, when one's front pasture is no longer a river, sometimes it's still a lake for a while. And then you might not want to haul dead branches from the banks, because you might fall in. I didn't, but I might have.





I will post pictures of the flood once I finish this roll out. In the meantime, pictures are going here: pictures, so check back. I tried to embed pictures in this post, but I failed somehow. I'll try to figure it out again, because it's much more interesting to read posts that have pictures in them.

Adventures in a Very Chilly Wonderland

You know why they tell you to run your faucets when it's cold? It's so the pipes don't freeze. But what if you have a well and you never know when the holding tank is going to run empty? You can't really waste water all night, can you?

Well, if you're an inhabitant of the Cedar House, you can't.

Turns out, if you're an inhabitant of the Cedar House, you get to spend the first half of the next day figuring out how the siphon works, collecting buckets, and siphoning water from the holding tank into the buckets and lugging them up to the house. Because the pipes don't refrain from freezing just to accommodate your desire to save water.

When your hands are all wet from siphoning water into buckets and you don't have a towel, and then you have to stand next to the bucket holding the plastic tube to keep it squirting into the bucket and not all over the floor of the well house and it's nearly freezing outside, it's a good time to get some souls out of Purgatory.

I really don't like getting souls out of Purgatory.

But about half an hour after lunch, after I had lugged another batch of water buckets up to the house and was washing dishes (with a bowl of lukewarm soapy water and a sponge, and rinsing the soapy water by dousing the dishes with icy water [remember what I said about the temperatures?] from a pitcher), the faucet (which was now open because you never know when plumbing will start working again) magically started to drip. The drip turned into a steady stream, and the steady stream got larger, until there was no doubt that the pipes were thawed. So now all faucets are running merrily, wasting water for sheer joy of having plumbing that works.

Tonight I am definitely setting the sink to run.

In which our heroine begins a new life, and finds it uneventful.

Well, I'm a country girl now. I'm not quite sure I'm ready for this adventure, but I guess you're never really ready for anything; you just have to start. If the digital camera weren't at my aunt's house in Dallas, I'd post pictures of how quiet and rainy it is here - just my sort of weather. Perfect weather for curling up under a quilt and reading Narnia. I gave my parents lots of tea for Christmas, and brought my own as well, so there is no shortage of hot beverages; unfortunately, though, the well water is tasting sort of funny lately, so the tea definitely needs sugar to mask the well water taste. I usually go sugarless, because otherwise how can you taste the tea?

I would just like to announce that I am a very spoiled person. The entire time the folks have been up here, they've been suffering with dial-up internet. About a week before I came up, the satellite finally came through, so I only have to deal with pages that take 30 seconds to load, instead of 3 minutes like it has been up till now. I don't quite appreciate how spoiled I am, though, since 30 seconds is still inexcusably long with any reasonable internet connection. And my dad works in telecom, so we always have stuff long before anybody else does. All the neighbors except two still use dial-up. Yeah, we're in the country. There is no DSL. There is no spoon.

I was planning to start leash-training the fat white cat today, because he's obese and has no muscle at all, and if I can manage to leash-train him he will at least be able to take walks up our driveway, which might be good for a couple of pounds. (In case anybody thinks this is a paltry sort of exercise regimen, you're quite right, but we do live at the back of a very narrow 10 acres, so the driveway is fairly substantial.) But it's rainy and cold today, and I feel like reading Narnia instead of going outside, so the Cat-Drag will have to be postponed till tomorrow. I hope Mr. Fatso appreciates how lucky he is.

Christmas, Christmas time is here

Quotable moments from the sisterly edition of Christmas this year:

My nephew Joseph: That's funny looking.
My niece Elizabeth: Your face is funny looking.
Joseph: Your mom is funny looking.
My sister Robin: You have the same mom!

Joseph: Because I'm sooooooooooooooo glamorouth.
(the kid is destined to be a drama major.)

Joseph: Man, guys, that was a great party. I'm totally hammered.
Robin: Joseph! Do you know what that means???
Joseph: No, I heard it from Elizabeth ...
Elizabeth: YOU DID NOT!!!

Wow

And just like, that, four and a half years of college are over. I'm free, but I feel so empty. How could I have spent the last semester not savoring every moment I had here?

The study referenced below

Quoted from the Mayo Clinic Proceedings

"...patients should know that sustained oral contraceptive use prior to pregnancy increases a premenopausal woman's risk of developing breast cancer, saysDr. Kahlenborn. He says physicians should better inform their patients of the risks associated with oral contraceptives and calls it a "clear-cut informed consent issue."

The study noted that 21 out of 23 retrospective studies have shown an increased risk of breast cancer in women who took oral contraceptives prior to pregnancy. It also showed that those women experienced an increased risk of 44 percent.

What's more, in 2005, the World Health Organization officially classified oral contraceptives as a class one carcinogen, the study's authors say.

These are staggering results given that more that more than 45,000 women each year develop breast cancer prior to menopause, Dr. Kahlenborn says. "

Full article here: http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2006-rst/3722.html




And a year after it came out, WHY is there still no news coverage on this story??? Oh, right, because we women are so ignorant that we need big strong men to tell us which studies to believe and not to believe about our own reproductive health. Ideological censorship, much? If it were about Advil, the FDA would be all over this baby. See previous entry for an opinion on this from the Chicago Tribune.

Another reason not to trust people who shove pills at you

Ladies, your ob-gyn isn't going to tell you this, and neither is your pharmacist.

"...this debate has been going on for years, if not decades, and judging by the last studies given wide exposure a few years ago by the media, the issue seems settled: Oral contraception does not significantly increase the risk of breast cancer.

There's just one problem. According to an analysis in one of the most credible peer-reviewed journals in the country, the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, the risk is real. The study employed an often-used medical research technique called "meta-analysis" that allows researchers to combine data from other studies on the risk to get a larger picture. The result: Premenopausal women who used oral contraceptives prior to having their first child have a 44 percent higher chance of getting cancer than women who didn't use the pill. If they used the pill for more than four years prior to their first full-term pregnancy, the risk increased 52 percent. Chris Kahlenborn, an internist at the Altoona (Pa.) Hospital and the study's lead author, suggests one additional woman in 200 could get breast cancer. Extrapolated throughout the population, that could mean thousands more cases every year. I'd say that's an important story.

The reaction? Nearly total silence. Since it was published more than a year ago, I couldn't find a single reference to it in the archives of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times or this paper. The Associated Press appears not to have covered it. I couldn't find a single mainstream media article about it in a Google search. But stories about other breast cancer risks were plentiful, including one about how sleeping with a night light on can increase your chances of getting breast cancer. The National Institute of Cancer doesn't mention the study on its Web site, but it did detail a 5-year-old study claiming to find no higher risk to pill use. The American Cancer Society also doesn't mention the study and concedes only that "it is still not clear what part" the pill plays in breast cancer. Such guidance, if not deceptive, is certainly incomplete.

"The last word seems to be that the pill is safe," Kahlenborn told me, as he called me with his frustration with being unable to get this important information out to women. "The word basically in the medical community before the study, and it continues to be, is that the pill is quite safe." But the results of his study are disquieting enough that if the pill were just coming out today, the findings would be enough for the Food and Drug Administration to keep it off the market, he said."


Here's the complete article (which does not have a link to the study - does anybody know where to look for it? Steph?)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped1203byrnedec03,0,3672465.story

Update: found the link. http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2006-rst/3722.html