Finally, a way to flush your money down the toilet without wasting water!

(Seriously… why would someone buy carbon credits? Do people need another way to feel like they can change the world from their couch? I would be happy to be proven wrong. I fear I am right.)

When I tried to delete my Twitter feed from Jaiku today, I got this message:

Did Jaiku always have a bird in their error messages?

I don’t care if Merriam-Webster says it is, this is NOT A WORD.

Damon and I are moving into a new house this week. This continues my life-long trend of never living in the same place for more than nine months, but it marks the first time in my adult life that I am moving within the same state. (In fact, the new house is a whopping 2.5 blocks away from the old one.)

I love moving. Few things make me happier. Being able to sort, purge, and reorganize my things is a wonderful, cleansing experience. A new house is bursting with untapped potential.

Normally, a move is also an emotional “reboot” of sorts for me. It’s a chance to identify some aspects of my personality/life that could use improvement and decide to change them for the better.

Committing to change while in the same environment is far more challenging than starting on the right foot in a new one. I am truly lucky and honored to have an amazing group of friends that have stuck with me through thick and thin for more than a decade now. They know my history, the experiences I’ve had, and the mistakes I’ve made, and can make educated guesses as to how I would react in future situations.

This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I reacted to a situation one way once, it may be assumed I will react to that situation the same way again. Since everyone’s expecting that reaction the second time around, it isn’t always clear that I in fact have free will and can choose to react in a completely different (and ideally better) way.

A silly example to make my point: Say your close friend was in love with a man who died in a sky-diving accident. Out of support for her, and because you care, you would probably alter your future interactions with her in a subtle way. If there is a feature film involving sky-diving, you would not invite her or mention it. You would hesitate to introduce her to your new friend who also happens to be an avid sky-diver. If a sky-diving report came on the news, you would hurriedly change the channel.

Perhaps she would really like that feature film. Perhaps she would fall in love with your sky-diving friend and have a great marriage. Perhaps the news segment following the sky-diving interview would be deeply meaningful to her in some way. Maybe, subtly, unintentionally, you are holding back her personal growth, even though you’re trying to protect her. Maybe what she really needs to do is go sky-diving!

In a new environment that is free of those assumptions, it’s a lot easier to make the better choice. Hence my love of new environments

That said, 2.5 blocks is more of a restart than a reboot. (Pause for laughter at my clever Apache joke.) It has surprised pretty much everyone that knows me that I really haven’t even considered leaving Seattle yet. (See above!) There are a combination of factors at play into this new feeling of settledness, including a number of significant mistakes that I made last year that I very actively never want to make again. However, a key factor not to be overlooked is: I think I rather like the current incarnation of Marina Martin. (Crazy!)

Still, some life-enhancing changes are in order:

• Going back to being vegan. I had quite the year off the vegan wagon, kicked off by a nice hunk of raw horse on a conveyor belt in Tokyo. I always self-identified as one willing to try almost anything once, and never having eaten a hamburger in my life somehow discredited me. I tried anything anyone put in front of me, and for the most part enjoyed the taste. (Exceptions: ostrich and goat.)
   
  I will miss salmon, mozzarella cheese, and Jack in the Box double-bacon cheeseburger ciabatta sandwiches. I will not miss the runny nose I get every time I eat animal products, cholesterol, the sky-high blood sugars that inexplicably followed a can of tuna fish, or the sluggishness that I never felt when I avoided animal products like the plague. (I will continue to make an exception for Guinness, which is filtered using an ingredient from fish bladders, because, well, it’s Guinness!)
• Getting back into exercising. I used to work with a trainer five days a week and do serious cardio seven days a week. Now I get winded going up the driveway. Not cool. This has a four-part action plan: buying a TreadDesk so I can walk all day long while working instead of sitting down; ramping my running back up with the Couch to 5K Running Program; hiring a trainer again; and incorporating some basic sit-ups/push-ups/etc. into my daily routine checklist.
• Natural cleaning products. Always meant to start doing this, never quite got around to it. Now that environmentally-friendly cleaning products are a requirement of our lease, it should be an easy switch.
• Composting. Another thing I always meant to do. The City of Seattle sells composting cones which look simple enough to use. Now let’s see if we actually use them.
• Hiring a cleaning person. I love to clean and have always found it too difficult to justify hiring someone else to do it, especially because it’s hard to live up to my impossible-to-live-up-to standards. However, I have no shortage of work right now, and those extra hours a week are more important than ever, so I’m going to see if I can give up some control in this area in exchange for a greater gain.

This video is hilarious and spot-on:

David Cook (on American Idol) literally rocks Eleanor Rigby:

If everyone took care to perform their job — garbage collector, parent, grocery store patron (return your damned cart!), efficiency consultant — to the best of their abilities, the world would be an infinitely better place.

If your job is to blog, I think you can take two fucking seconds to spellcheck your posts. One pro-blogger in particular seems to have a handful of egregious grammatical errors in every post. Cut it out. If I could find the Unsubscribe button in my German Firefox build, I’d click it!

Apparently it is illegal to own a dildo in the state of Texas unless it is for “a bona fide medical, psychiatric, judicial, legislative, or law enforcement purpose.”

Below is an episode of “Dildo Diaries” chronicling this legislative embarrassment. (This is not safe for work. Duh.)

This whole mind-boggling issue aside, I am most struck by the truly enviable level of professionalism displayed by the store clerk at the sex store. Wow. I would trust her with top-level government security work any day. Not just anyone can stand behind a glass case of dildos and tell you, completely seriously and with a completely straight face, that they do not sell dildos there.

Source: http://pandagon.blogsome.com/2008/03/05/its-about-life-babies-life-babies/

Doesn’t this just make you want to put birth control in the water supply?

A 16-year-old Argentine girl has given birth to female triplets - for the second time.

The girl, named only as Pamela, had her first set of female triplets aged 15, having first given birth to a son when she was just 14.

All seven children were born prematurely but without any kind of fertility treatment.

So, how do we discourage her continued procreation, and discourage her peers from repeating her mistakes? Why, build her a house, of course!

Pamela’s family already receives help from the provincial authorities, which donated land and built them a house when the first set of triplets was born.

Pamela’s mother, who cleans houses to support her daughter and rapidly increasing number of grandchildren, says they will now seek more assistance from the government for the new additions to the family.

Not common sense! Nooo! Not that!

Some Argentines are arguing that perhaps what Pamela needs is more advice on contraception.

Source: BBC News

I don’t get much traffic at this blog.* Google Analytics tells me that it has been found via search engines exactly once so far:

*I said this on the phone a few days about my collective new blogs. After all, they’ve only been live for a week and I have done next-to-nothing to promote them yet. No sooner had those words left my lips than I saw Guinness Globetrotter had received 10,000 unique visitors from StumbleUpon in its first 24 hours, and a couple hours later the official Twitter blog sent a good chunk of traffic to Oh, Twitter. I remain amused (and appreciative).