We are planning guerrilla attacks on hetero weddings. When the priest type person asks if anyone objects, we will stand up and say that “until gays can marry too, we object to all weddings”.

One of the nice things about living in Seattle is that we are a medical research hub.

We also have several large international charities based here (Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, PATH, Mercy Core).

So I saw this article and immediately sent off an email telling them I want to volunteer. Part of it is the money (I’m not gonna sneeze at 2000 to stay in a hotel and get the what amounts to a bad case of the flu). But also, malaria is a major killer of children under 5. It’s not a sexy disease. It’s not a disease of wealthy countries. Without big charities like the Gates Foundation, there would be no research into a vaccine.

So if suffering with a weeks worth of chills, fever and aches means that little kids in Africa and Asia and South America will have a better shot at living to be grown ups, I’m down.

After watching this commercial

I mused out loud “I wonder why boys are more likely to get struck by lighting than girls?”

To which the Kid replied “Maybe the penis acts like a lightning rod”

That, my friends, is definitive proof that the child is mine.

when his supporters act like bullying thugs and lock Clinton supporters out of the building.

This is not Pakistan sir. This is not some third world backwater where bullying and thuggery are part and parcel of the voting process.

Any candidate who would condone that kind of behavior cannot be trusted to restore democracy and the rule of law to our country after 8 years of a Bush theocracy.

Adventus: Haven’t we met before?

Has the UCC contacted any of those freedom of religion defense funds? I’d love to see some fundy $ going to help them

From a conversation with my favorite aunt yesterday

Favorite Aunt: But you’ve been to Paris before?

Me: No, I’ve been to the south of France. I’ve been to Cannes and Nice and Monaco and Montpellier, but I’ve never been to Paris.

FA: How is that possible, it’s a very small country? Nobody goes to France and misses Paris.

Except for me, that is.

Have I told you peeps my favorite France story so far?

I was in Montpellier. We had rented a small studio apartment with a kitchen near the university. I was tired and starving and the bastard Russian didn’t want to go out. So on my own I wandered around till I found a tiny market that was open on a Sunday and normally served the visiting college students. It was run by a little old man who was ancient enough to have been around during the Roman conquest.

I looked around and most of the stuff that I wanted, like produce and meat were all behind the counter while chips and soda (college student foods) were readily accessible.

I know exactly 2 words in French, hello and thank you. I had just come from Italy where I managed to get by mostly because Italian and Spanish are so similar and because I had poured over my tiny Langenscheidt dictionary for days before going. But French scared me. It’s difficult for me to figure out how it’s pronounced with all the silent letters and mushing together of sounds. Spanish and Italian are fairly straight forward once you know the sounds each letter makes (there is this weird thing in Italian with c’s. One C is pronounced like ch, two C’c- cc is pronounced like a hard c, but I have never figured out how to pronounce cch).
Being that Montpellier is fairly close to the Spanish border and that several of the meat products I wanted were Spanish (Jamon Serrano, oh how yummy you are. Better than prosciutto) I tried all the Spanish and English words I could think of for onions, carrots, potatoes, eggs and garlic. I also tried pointing, which was useless.

Finally, the ancient old man just let me come back behind the counter and pick what I wanted. He was very kind and charming. Once I finally had the makings of a Spanish style omlette/tortilla dinner and had paid, the old man pointed to a jar of candy on the counter and gesturedd for me to take one. So I did take exactly one. He shook his head, gently grabbed my hand and proceeded to stuff it full of candy. I think he might have been happy to have someone buy something other than chips and soda. (Though I did get some peanut flavored chips while I was there and OMG- they were awesome).

For all the scary talk you hear about how the French are rude and horrible, I didn’t find that at all. Every single person I dealt with was kind and patient, including the overrun pharmacist when I was trying to buy Advil for a migraine. She must have had a dozen people waiting in line, but she perfectly understood my gestures for headache and ibuprophen. I am sure that the symbols for migraine are universal.

Some of you may have read about the insanely stupid piece by Charlotte Allen published in the Washington Post. If you haven’t, here is a snippet

Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal. Those statistics were reinforced by a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving.

Ah yes, women are bad drivers, so all women must be stupid. Except women are more careful drivers and their accidents tend to be less fatal. But wev, we know there are idiots out there and we know that some of those idiots are women. What blows me away is that some editor at the Post thought this was worthy of publication. So I wrote the Post’s Ombudsman a little letter

Dear Sir (or Madam, but I am sure you must be a sir because judging by the pieces your newspaper chooses to publish, women are to dumb to serve as ombudsman):

Over the last few years whenever your newspaper has come up in conversation, it has become common practice to dismiss it because judging by the number of misogynist articles you choose to publish, you have already dismissed half the population. The recent piece by Charlotte Allen, while astonishing in the breadth of it’s stupidity, just takes away any thin veneer of reason that might have served to mislead unsuspecting readers.

Perhaps you thought to publish the piece so as to drive up readership on sheer controversy alone. While that might have succeeded in the very short term, you have shot yourself in the foot by alienating half your potential readership. Anyone that stupid does not deserve my attention or the attention of anyone with a reading comprehension level. This article might have been interesting (but still completely asinine) 100 years ago, but for a serious newspaper to publish it today makes it the literary equivalent of a fart joke. Are you 10? Do you wear footy pajamas? Do you think “ewe, girls are gross and have cooties” whenever you have to deal with them?

Cheer up though, you have managed one major thing with this article. This essay makes the tits and giggles girls of Fox news look positively brilliant when compared to Ms. Allen. I’m sure they will appreciate it.

Before I am in Paris!

Last night some friends and I watched The Darjeeling Limited, and my running comment through the whole thing was “Those boys should have let me pack for them, that is way to much crap” (Ok, the other running comment was about the naughty things I would do to Adrien Brody and his gorgeous nose) Things you should know about me dear readers. I am completely OCD about packing. Not about anything else, but when I pack it is a sight to be seen. I know down to the ounce how much shampoo, conditioner, face soap, body wash, lotion, hair goop, perfume, etc. that I will use for a week, two weeks or three weeks. I test it out with sample bottles at home. I hate that I might have to skip some part of my normal beauty regime (I have really good skin mostly because I take really good care of it) so I refuse to skip something because I am traveling.

So I have been working really hard to whittle everything down into small enough containers so that I can fit it all into a quart sized ziplock.

I also like to play bathroom chemist. I hate having to use 3 products when one would do fine. So I took my normal face moisturizer with anti-zit medication and mixed it with some foundation. It works really well as a sheer tinted moisturizer. I also mixed my moisturizing body wash with my drying face wash and came out with a really awesome bottle of stuff that works all over my body. And I have switched all my normal makeup products for things that come in pencil form. I don’t wear a lot of makeup to begin with, just eyeliner and lip gloss but I have a problem with EVERY SINGLE LIP COLOR I wear making my lips into some horrible candy pink color. Think teen hooker Barbie. I found an awesome lip gloss pencil in bronze that doesn’t make me look like a streetwalker in candy land. YAY.

Now that toiletries are done (and mostly packed- I just have to throw my bag of makeup pencils in) I am working on clothes.

The clothes part for Paris is daunting.

This handy little backpack from ebags is what I take for trips from weekend length to 3 weeks long. (Mine is in a now discontinued pink color- HA). It is barely bigger than my school backpack, weighs less than 3 pounds and is awesome.

I don’t want to look like garrish American tourist but I also don’t want to look like a boring middle aged traveler with a wardrobe of black pants, black skirt, ugly blouses. This trip we won’t be there long enough to do laundry (one of my favorite things about traveling is sending the laundry out to be washed by someone else). So I have to either bring things that can be worn more than once without looking wrinkled and lame (like jeans) and/or pack a particular outfit for each day. I’ve been making lists, trying things on, remaking lists. It’s sad really.

My one best hints for packing clothes is using a couple of 2 gallon sized ziplock bags instead of spending money on compression bags or folders. You just roll the air out of them like you would a compression bag.

I also have a large microfiber towel that is awesome (packs tiny, sucks up mountains of water, dries fast and doubles as a blanket) and a silk bathrobe that always go with me. And I have a tote bag that folds into itself so it’s no bigger than a key chain. This is very handy for carting food from the grocery store or laundry to the cleaners and as an overflow bag when I come home loaded with goodies (the Kid always gets a t-shirt from wherever I go and I am bringing back wine for the two darlings who have agreed to watch the Kid while I galavant around the world).

Can you all still respect me knowing that I am packing freak of nature?