I know I promised pictures of the Oklahoma History Museum and they’re coming; I promise. The problem is that I started knitting mittens last week and I’ve turned into Shelley. I’m on my third try with the first mitten and getting it right consumes me. It consumes me so much that I haven’t had the energy to nag Chris into doing the magic voodoo he does to pictures before posting them. Instead I have a little story about how stupid Chris and I really are.

We’re talking about buying the crap-shack we are currently living in (that’s not the stupid part; that comes later). Talk of purchasing said shack inevitably leads to talk of remodeling and trust me this house needs a lot of remodeling. We talk about remodeling projects all the time and not just to each other, but to complete strangers as well. It always comes down to how cheaply the remodel can be done and still look good.

Well, this woman in my yoga class told me we should go check out Renovation Station. She said it’s a big warehouse that sells left over building material. “It’s on Broadway, somewhere around 15th. I think� she told me. So, Saturday Chris and I went in search of this Renovation Station.

Now, I’m not originally from Oklahoma City and the only Broadway I know about is in Edmond and apparently it’s also the only one Chris knows about too (even though he grew up in this town). We spent two hours driving up and down the Broadway in Edmond looking for Renovation Station before Chris finally just called them.

Turns out we knew where Renovation Station was all along. In fact we had been in there several times all ready. We just called it Habitat For Humanity ‘cause that’s what it is! Habitat For Humanity Renovation Station. Also, there’s a Broadway street downtown.

I don’t have much for Friday Science this week mostly because I’ve been lazy (food coma). Friday Science is more of a rant than any thing useful. When people talk of colonizing the moon, I get more than a little irritated. It comes down to the inability of people to clean up after themselves. We’ve trashed this planet, why not move on and trash another planet? The Earth is still at a good clean up point. If we all did our part and cleaned up after ourselves, Earth wouldn’t be so trashy.

Yet even though we haven’t colonized the moon, space has become cluttered with garbage. Currently there are 9,000 pieces weighing over 5,000 tons of manmade stuff orbiting earth. 5,000 tons of garbage! The figure encompasses discarded rocket bodies and defunct satellites. Eventually this stuff will fall into the atmosphere and burn up, but it’s not happening fast enough. The garbage is a serious collision risk for commercial satellites and research missions (like NASA’s mission to Pluto). Even if we don’t launch anything new into space, fragments of space garbage that break off from periodic collisions will increase the amount of debris floating around up there.

NASA is currently looking into ways to clean up the mess. So far one of the proposed options includes zapping the garbage out of orbit with ground-based lasers.

Apparently thirtieth birthdays are to be celebrated by gluttony for three straight days, or maybe it was four. I have a hard time remembering because of the food coma I’ve been slipping in and out of these last few days.

It started Thursday evening with Indian food and just went down hill from there. The girls at work took me out for lunch on Friday where I had fried rice, fried egg-roll, sesame chicken (battered with crack) that was also fried. That night I ate an entire chili-cheese hamburger by myself and slice of carrot cake from La Baguette’s. Saturday I met my family for brunch at VZDs before heading off to the Oklahoma History Museum (pictures coming soon). Chris and I finished the day with dinner at the Olive Garden.

And then today, I broke my “thou shall not eat buffets when starving” rule and stuffed myself silly at the Chinese buffet. I’ll probably have a piece of cake for dinner tonight.

I think I’ll go on a fast this week.

Thanks to all for the Happy Birthday wishes!

Well something’s going right for NASA; mission Stardust is a success. The Stardust spaceship was launched in 1999 and rendezvoused with the comet Wild 2 in January 2004. During that time it not only collected samples from the comet tail, but picked up dust streaming into our solar system from Sagittarius.

Samples were collected onto a substance called aerogel. It’s a silica-based substance that is inserted into a grid, kind of like a large tennis racket. The collector capsule parachuted down in the Utah desert early Saturday and was opened Tuesday at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Scientists are very excited over the initial findings. There were a number of things that could have gone wrong like the explosion of the collector capsule on contact with the comet dust or the destruction of the capsule on impact with Earth. Let’s face it; NASA hasn’t had a very good tract record lately. All of that and more could have happened to Stardust.

One of the cool things about the analysis part is that NASA is letting the public help. The Stardust@home project will allow volunteers to scan enlarged photos of the aerogel for tracks left by interstellar particles as they plunged into the gel. If you find a particle you get to name it!

via Chris, via Shelley:

Elephant Soap was too long and I didn’t really like the results I got for Cindy, so I went with my legal name. Yes, I know my legal name is stupid, but I had nothing to do with it.

Frog extinction linked to global warming not only made Nature’s news, but National Geographic and NPR as well. Frogs are disappearing fast and it’s all because of a deadly fungus that is spreading like wild fire.

There are 110 species of Harlequin frogs and many of these are dying out. Some are already considered extinct. Frogs have very thin skin that makes them super sensitive to environmental changes and also very susceptible to chytrid fungus. Frogs are our environmental barometers. When things start going wacky with the environment, frogs are the first to feel it. A study by the World Conservation Union, Conservation International, and NatureServe in 2004 reported a one-third decline in all amphibian species.

The culprit for most of this decline is a chytrid fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Temperature extremes in the tropics used to keep this fungus in check, but new climate cycles brought on by global warming has turned the tropics into a fungus breading ground.

It’s long been predicted that global warming would bring on mass extinction by triggering lethal epidemics and now it looks like those predictions are coming true.

The other night I had a dream that I was taking Pink Dog’s colonic stuff. I kept drinking it and drinking it, but nothing was happening. Then I was afraid that something would happen and it would happen at work. I can’t poop at work! It was an incredibly horrifying dream. I woke up all sweaty and winded. It gives me shivers just thinking about it.

Okay, I promised to blog about the Colorado trip, so here goes. I went with my mom and sister to take my niece to her dad’s house in Colorado the week after Christmas. It was basically a drive-up-drive-back kind of trip, though I did get to take in a few sites like the dinosaur tracks and the outlet mall in Castle Rock (Down in Castle Rock!).

We’ve driven past the dino tracks once before, but it was only because we were lost and we didn’t stop. I remember driving by and seeing all these people out hiking around and then we turned a corner and there were all these giant footprints headed up the side of the mountain, but we just kept movin’ on. Well, this time we stopped and took pictures.

The strangest thing was not seeing prehistoric tracks on the side of a mountain, but the fact that we were able to walk up there without a coat. It was 60 degrees in Denver and no snow! In December! Freaky.

The outlet mall in Castle Rock is the best outlet mall I’ve ever seen in my life. The only thing I needed were new gym shoes, but I walked away with a new hat and t-shirt from the Gap, wine bottle stoppers, and a purse from the Fossil store (I got it for $8!). Must go back with more money. I stopped going into stores after I bought my shoes because I just couldn’t spend any more money and I knew I would if I went into the shops. Every thing was 50-70% off the original tag. The deals were unbelievable.

On the way home, we spent the night in this really creepy Motel in Raton, New Mexico. The rooms had two double beds (as opposed to queens) and the mattresses were covered in hospital-white plastic, and the “fitted” sheets refused to stay put. At one point in the night I woke up with my face stuck to the plastic mattress and thought I was going to vomit. There was one wall where you could see all four layers of wallpaper pealing away. It was great.

All in all, it was a good bonding trip with my mom and sister. Janell and I don’t get to spend much time with each other, so it was nice to go on this trip with her.

I’m sure there’s going to be another one just like it (but with more money), because I wasn’t the only one smitten with that outlet mall.

Last week I went along with my mom and sister to take my niece to her dad’s in Colorado (I’ll blog more on the trip later, promise). On the way back we were coming across the Oklahoma panhandle and my mom noticed a field where someone had pulled up all the cedar trees. My mom was outraged that someone would just rip trees out of the ground like that. My sister and I had to tell her that pulling up the cedar trees is the best thing for the land, and here’s why.

Cedar trees are an invasive blight. The Oklahoma Natural Resources Conservation Service (ONRCS) estimates that the number of the eastern red cedar (really a juniper) is increasing at a rate of about 762 acres a day. That’s right my friends, I said “A DAY�. The trees that were once scarce are now wrecking havoc on our prairies. The spread of the cedar came with the early settlers which introduced land management practices and the encouragement of using them as windbreaks for homesteads.

The cedar trees are causing extensive damage to the landscape by reducing productivity of the land and destroying wildlife habitats not to mention that they go up like tinder boxes. The pollen production of the trees, which tripled from 1988 to 1995, cause serious problems for allergy sufferers (like me) and they are threatening the water supply. One acre of cedar trees can use up to 55,000 gallons of water a year.

The Arbuckle Restoration Project has been organized to help educate and provide resources for landowners in dealing with the cedar invasion, but prescribed fire (managed fire under favorable weather conditions) is the best way to remove cedar trees, which are fueling many of the wildfires throughout Oklahoma and Texas.

Chris and I went to Duncan to hang out with some friends we only get to see about twice a year. While we were there I noticed that Amy has a lot of house plants, and then she and Deborah went on and on about their house plants. I have one house plant and we have a tentative relationship, so last night at the last minute I resolved to have more house plants. Today I bought two at Wal-Mart and I replanted one of them in a yellow elephant planter, which has been sitting in the kitchen window with nothing but dried-out nutrient-starved dirt in it for three years. I will keep these new plants alive, dammit!

And because I’ve been tagged by Shelley…

Four Jobs You’ve Had in Your Life: Firework stand cashier, Resident Assistant for the girls’ dorm at USAO, switchboard operator (also at USAO), DNA sequencer

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over: While You Were Sleeping, Poseidon Adventure, Mulan, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Four Places You’ve Lived: Collinsville, Chickasha, Stillwater, and Oklahoma City (all in Oklahoma).

Four TV Shows You Love to Watch: Lost, Gilmore Girls, My Name is Earl, NOVA

Four Places You’ve Been on Vacation: Hawaii, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Colorado

Four Websites You Visit Daily: Dooce, and all my friends’ blogs

Four of Your Favorite Foods: Fried oysters, pizza, Indian food, grapefruit

Four Places You’d Rather Be: Hawaii, France, Italy, Greece

Four Albums You Can’t Live Without: Pretty much anything by Sting, Liz Phair’s Whitechocolatespaceegg, Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head, Frou Frou’s Details.