In a word, work. I won’t say its all consuming, as I do have personal time, and treasure it. But somehow, it seems to have cast a stain on everything. I enjoy my job, and my career, but I find it difficult to leave for more than a weekend. There are so many things requiring attention; I often liken it to herding cats. Perhaps a more apt description of how I view it would be spinning plates. Regardless of what I may think it is possible, if difficult, to set things so that I can go away for a break. And I think its past time for me to take one.

That’s not to say there have been no happenings in my life. I now have a nephew. I did have a brief, enjoyable, but sadly unsuccessful fling with romance over the summer. And I’ve rearranged my life (largely dietarily) and as a result have lost a substantial bit of weight.

Going forward, fall is as ever my favorite season. Something about the bite in the air quickens my pulse, and leaves me feeling alive. Let’s see if I can’t do something with that.

Cheers.

A lot of what was covered, I studied in college. That was ten years ago, it was convincing then, and the evidence has simply been mounting since I last looked at the research. I’d have to say, things are worse than I had thought, and I’m a famed pessimist among my friends.

On the positive side, there are lots of things you can do to reduce, or even eliminate, your own greenhouse gas emissions, or ‘carbon footprint’. I’ve had a subscription to Carbon Planet since July of 2005, where they allow individuals to purchase carbon credits. In short, they purchase ‘credits’ that are created by the New South Wales Government’s forestry agency when they plant trees. The trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and store it as carbon. So, you can eliminate the equivalent of your own CO2 output by purchasing these certificates.

Another interesting consumer option is called TerraPass, an organization that allows you to buy a ‘pass’ to offset your driving CO2 emissions. The money for the pass goes to sponsor projects that guarantee carbon reduction, “clean energy such as wind and biodiesel; biomass such as dairy farm methane; and industrial efficiency.” They include window decals and a bumpersticker to help spread the word. There’s even a TerraPass for Businesses program.

While the TerraPass is aimed specificly for consumers to offset their driving, there’s no reason you can’t purchase a larger pass, or more of them, to also offset other carbon emitting activities. Personally, I’m very fond of purchasing green electricity directly. In Massachusetts if you have Massachusetts Electric (a.k.a. National Grid) you can participate in the GreenUp program, to buy 50% or 100% of your electricity from clean, renewable sources for a few cents more per kilowatt-hour. Providers elsewhere offer these sort of things too, so it pays to check them out.

There’s the simple and expedient method of replacing your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones. “If every household in the U.S. replaced one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), it would prevent enough pollution to equal removing one million cars from the road.” Compact Fluorescent bulbs are not that expensive, save electric costs, and last a lot longer than regular bulbs. When I moved into my apartment a year ago, I replaced all the fixtures with compact fluorescent bulbs. I haven’t changed a single bulb since, and I don’t expect I’ll need to for some years to come.

The movie is good, and quite frightening. But it shouldn’t be a paralyzing fear: there are many things that everyone can do to help reduce carbon emissions. Go out, see the film, and make some changes. They’re not hard and the impact is well worth it.

Life has been fairly uninteresting, though I had a lovely encounter with a rather nasty cold the segued rather nicely into a case of Benign Positional Vertigo. In all, it left me bed-ridden for the better part of two weeks, and I still suffer some dizziness and balance issues. However, its no longer vertigo, and that is a promising change.

It seems I may have actually developed a facial tic in the past few weeks, as my right eyelid seems to go a bit twitchy, most often when I’m upset, which is far too frequently at work. Probably makes this a bad time to take up poker.

On the somewhat more interesting side, I’ve been taking Omega-3 fatty acids for a number of weeks now. I had a bit of a run-in with what seems to have been atopic dermatitis, which was a bit of a catalyst for taking them again. I personally prefer OmegaBrite, and I’ve been going through my accumulated stash pretty quickly.

I’ve taken Omega-3’s on and off over a number of years. I can’t say if they’re having an anti-inflammatory effect, helping with heart disease, or any other things. But from an anecdotal standpoint, I can pinpoint one interesting effect.

When I take Omega-3’s for a few weeks straight, I start to remember my dreams much more vividly. I can’t say if the dreams themselves change much, but I find myself remembering far more in the mornings, and remembering some vivid, unusual dreams. I haven’t come across anyone else reporting a similiar impact, so I’m fairly curious if anyone experiences any dream-related changes when taking them.

This morning I woke up and wondered about Robyn Murgio, someone I have fond memories of from school in New Jersey. Well, a quick google search, and it appears I have a pretty good idea of what she’s up to now.

Assuming its not someone else who shares the name, Robyn went to Dartmouth, then Columbia, and later started her own design company Murge Designs in LA. She has all sorts of textiles with bold patterns, and has done quite well with sales across the country.

It’s quite cool when its that easy to find out about an old acquaintance.

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Some very interesting stuff.

“I am no fan of Mr. Cheney because of several reasons,” Marble wrote. “For those who don’t know, Mr. Cheney is infamous for telling Senator [Pat] Leahy ‘go fu** yourself’ on the Senate floor. Also, I am not happy about the fact that thousands have died due to the slow action of FEMA, not to even mention the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, i.e. Iraq.”

…

As he stood about 10 feet away from Cheney and his friend and some camera operators from CNN and other media filmed the scene, Marble suddenly yelled, “Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney! Go fuck yourself, you asshole!”

Hey, at least Marble was polite. After all, he referred to Cheney as “Mr. Cheney.”

“I had no intention of harming anyone but merely wanted to echo Mr. Cheney’s infamous words back at him,” Marble wrote. “At that moment, I noticed the Secret Service guys with a panic-stricken look on their faces, like they were about to tackle me, so I calmly walked away back to my former house.”

His friend videotaped a little bit longer and then came back to Marble’s house. As they were salvaging a few things from Marble’s home, two military police waving M-16’s showed up and said they were looking for someone who fit Marble’s description who had cursed at Cheney.

“I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so they put me in handcuffs and ‘detained’ me for about 20 minutes or so,” Marble wrote. “My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I was free to go.”

On Sunday August 28 I woke up at 5 in the morning to go to my morning job at the Chateu Sonesta Hotel. The night before, we had been warned that Hurricane Katrina was preying her eyes upon us. In the history of New Orleans, there has NEVER been a direct hit by a hurricane. In everyone’s mind, this hurricane would follow the same path that hundreds of past storms had done before. However, because of the size of the storm and ferocity which it tore through South Florida, the citizens of the The Big Easy prepared themselves as best they could… this is my tale of the events…

The al Qaeda group in Iraq on Sunday hailed the hurricane deaths in “oppressor” America as the “wrath of God”, according to an Internet statement.

And the American Taliban, Columbia Christians for Life subchapter, is happy because the hurricane is God’s wrath against America for allowing abortions:

the antiabortion group Columbia Christians for Life claimed that Katrina is God’s punishment for America’s tolerance of abortion rights…“God is not mocked. We reap what we sow … The city of New Orleans has sown innocent bloodshed and violence in the womb for years and years and has now reaped bloodshed and violence on her streets. May the people in the city of New Orleans be broken by God’s Holy Law, receive, by God’s grace, his gift of faith … and receive his great salvation through Christ alone, repenting of their sins, and receiving Jesus Christ (Yahshua Messiah) as their Lord and Savior. Hallelu-Yah ! Then, may New Orleans be delivered from her many sins!”

As probably anyone who reads my musings could tell, I’m an athiest. I don’t believe in God. But I find it fascinating that so many people take any given event, and will interpret it as proof that God is on their side; perhaps its God punishing the wicked. I’ve noticed a lot of other supposedly loving Christian groups publicly celebrating the death in New Orleans as God’s punishment for the sinful homosexual parties there.

Of course, the vast majority of the people hurt by Katrina were practically impoverished before the hurricane. They weren’t the people who fly from all over the country to party in Mardi Gras. Many of them are good ‘god-fearing’ folks. But apparently all-knowing, all-powerful, and merciful God will blast their lives to smithereens to punish them for sins of other people. If that’s the God that people worship, then even if I believed in its existence, I certainly wouldn’t worship something like that.