What we do at 3AM. Yes, seriously.

Love the ocean, fear the waves

My husband's dream is to go on a cruise. The idea of never needing to cook or do anything for the entire vacation appeals to him. I don't know why not cooking is important to him, as the last time he cooked was 100 years ago.

Ever since the kids and I watched a DVD on rogue waves, we pretty much vetoed a cruise vacation. I'm glad the kids still agree to go to the beach once in a while. In retrospect that very educational DVD might not have been such a great idea.

I just emailed this video to my husband. A cruise ship losing its engine, but still getting to their destination port on time. The waves were pretty big. Like HUGE.

If my husband wants not to cook for a week, he can go on a cruise. Or he can stay home. Though I don't guarantee the same eat till you die selection.

I wish I wrote science fiction and drank arsenic

Who could have imagined arsenic as a building block of life?

When I was a child I was fascinated by arsenic. I must have read a mystery involving arsenic poisoning, and I liked how the word sounded in Russian (myshiak)--vaguely like mice, and like something sinister.

T-rex wasn't a fast runner, doh!

As I always suspected, just by looking at their little plastic shapes, T-rexes couldn't possible run without falling. After watching a DVD with the kids today, I found out that apparently most are found with fractured pelvises. One hypothesis is that they were slow scavengers with an extraordinary sense of olfaction. Just look at their nostrils.

My hunch was confirmed about 10 years ago by John Hutchinson of Stanford.
Nor sure if you find it as fascinating as I do, but you can find more here. 

Fake tree is better than a dead bonsai

Today I convinced the kids to buy a fake Christmas tree. Last year we tried a live one, the one with the roots. It was a little bonsai. This is when we learned that buying a bonsai in a grocery store wasn’t a good idea. They need to be properly winterised, can’t be kept inside (and will die if kept inside), and they are more like a pet than a plant—those who are serious about the art never leave on vacation.

We also found out that most bonsais sold in grocery stores and even nurseries, are already dead. Scratch the bark with your fingernail—if what you see is brown, the tree is already dead. The healthy color is green.  Ours was also mislabelled, and it meant hours of trying to identify it, posting photos on various bonsai forums, and finding out that the experts were simply unsure.

We ended up giving it away to a friend with an unheated sunroom. Maybe it did survive.

For my daughter a cut Christmas tree is not an option. What most people would call “live” is dead to her, and she doesn’t want a tree to die just for her. So the bonsai was out too, even she understood that after the last year’s desperate attempts to save it. The only logical choice was a fake tree.

It wasn’t easy to find a tree without lights already attached. We finally found one that looked just like a real one, even from up close.

While we were shopping, it started snowing. By the time we drove home, the snow turned into rain.