I just added this quirky little Valentine to my Etsy shop.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Spring Planting
We've got our garden all spruced up and ready for the spring! We cleared out all the winter casualties, tilled the soil, and added compost.
We also added two trellises and a couple tomato cages. The trellises are made from lattice that we removed from our patio. You can see it here in this picture taken before we moved in:
We felt like it closed in the patio too much, so down it came. (As you can tell this was during our sprinkler project)
Zach cut the lattice down to size with the table saw and I attached it to the back of the garden bed with screws.
I also made garden markers for all the new veggies we'll be planting over the next few months, including lettuce, spinach, broccoli, bell peppers, peas, and tomatoes. Here's what we've got planned for our garden:
We also added two trellises and a couple tomato cages. The trellises are made from lattice that we removed from our patio. You can see it here in this picture taken before we moved in:
I also made garden markers for all the new veggies we'll be planting over the next few months, including lettuce, spinach, broccoli, bell peppers, peas, and tomatoes. Here's what we've got planned for our garden:
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Sprinkler System: Part 1
Remember way back in September when we shared this lovely photo?
What was supposed to be a weekend project to put in a stone walkway turned into a 4 month (and counting) long campaign to fix our old, abused, and nonworking sprinkler system.
Our house was built in 1984, and judging by the rotary dial in the sprinkler control box, we assume the sprinkler system was installed that year or shortly after. We learned from the former owners that the sprinkler system was broken when they moved in, and our next door neighbor, who has lived there for over 25 years, says he has never known our house to have a working sprinkler system. Needless to say, we had given up on it like all the previous homeowners. Until the day we began working on the stone walkway.
Then we rented a truck from Home Depot, drove to a local stone supply yard, and filled up with several tons of gravel and flagstone. Once back at home, we shoveled the gravel from the bed of the truck into the driveway. With half our driveway filled with gravel, and half our yard excavated, Zach looks at me and says something like, "You know, if we ever want to try and fix the sprinkler system, now is the time, before we lay all the stone..."
I should mention that about a year before, we had an irrigation company come out and give us a quote as to how much it would cost to fix the sprinkler system. He walked around our yard for about 45 minutes then delivered the news that he could not find the backflow box (where the main water line ties into the sprinkler system). Essentially, he couldn't turn the water on.
Cut back to me standing there, covered in sweat and dirt, as Zach proposes we fix the sprinkler system. I knew he was right. That it was now or never. For a second I pictured a lush green lawn, without the effort of dragging a sprinkler around the yard. But then I snapped back to reality, and the giant pile of gravel at my feet. I tried to talk Zach out of it, but his logic prevailed, and we spent the rest of the weekend digging...
Our house was built in 1984, and judging by the rotary dial in the sprinkler control box, we assume the sprinkler system was installed that year or shortly after. We learned from the former owners that the sprinkler system was broken when they moved in, and our next door neighbor, who has lived there for over 25 years, says he has never known our house to have a working sprinkler system. Needless to say, we had given up on it like all the previous homeowners. Until the day we began working on the stone walkway.
We started by clearing out a pathway along the side of the house, digging out a few inches of dirt and putting in a border.
I should mention that about a year before, we had an irrigation company come out and give us a quote as to how much it would cost to fix the sprinkler system. He walked around our yard for about 45 minutes then delivered the news that he could not find the backflow box (where the main water line ties into the sprinkler system). Essentially, he couldn't turn the water on.
Cut back to me standing there, covered in sweat and dirt, as Zach proposes we fix the sprinkler system. I knew he was right. That it was now or never. For a second I pictured a lush green lawn, without the effort of dragging a sprinkler around the yard. But then I snapped back to reality, and the giant pile of gravel at my feet. I tried to talk Zach out of it, but his logic prevailed, and we spent the rest of the weekend digging...
Monday, January 17, 2011
Hoop Dreams
Last week I shared about the pedestal table I found at my local resale shop. While there I also scored an entire bag of wooden embroidery hoops (6 round and 1 oval) for just a few dollars! I've got them hanging in my craft room; they look almost sculptural hanging there, like a work of art. Maybe I should install a series of these in a museum...
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Journal Publication
I've got another publication to share with you! The article, Disparities in health care utilization among Latino children suffering from asthma in California, came out yesterday in the Journal of Pediatric Health, Medicine and Therapeutics.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Junk Science Isn't a Victimless Crime
Taking a break from my regular trivial postings to share this bit of news with you...
Junk Science Isn't a Victimless Crime
January 11, 2011
Vaccines don't cause autism—and there was never any proof that they do. Too bad kids had to die while we figured that out.
By PAUL A. OFFIT
In 1998, a British surgeon named Andrew Wakefield published a paper claiming that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism. To support his case, Dr. Wakefield reported the stories of eight children who had developed symptoms of autism within one month of receiving MMR. He proposed that measles vaccine virus travels to the intestine, causes intestinal damage, and allows for brain-damaging proteins to enter children's blood streams.
The problem with Dr. Wakefield's study—published in the Lancet, a leading medical journal—was that it didn't study the question. To prove his hypothesis, he should have examined the incidence of autism in hundreds of thousands of children who had or hadn't received MMR. This kind of study has now been performed 14 times on several continents by many investigators. The studies have shown that MMR doesn't cause autism.
As several different investigations—summed up in a British Medical Journal (BMJ) editorial this month—have shown, not a single aspect of Dr. Wakefield's notion of how MMR causes autism has proven correct. He wasn't just wrong, he was spectacularly wrong. Moreover, some of the children in his report had developed symptoms of autism before they had received the vaccine—and others never actually had autism.
In addition, as journalist Brian Deer found, Dr. Wakefield received tens of thousands of pounds from a personal-injury lawyer in the midst of suing pharmaceutical companies over MMR. (After Mr. Deer's discovery, Dr. Wakefield admitted to receiving the money.) Last year, when the Lancet found out about the money, it retracted his paper. But it was far too late.
Dr. Wakefield's paper created a firestorm. Thousands of parents in the United Kingdom and Ireland chose not to vaccinate their children. Hundreds of children were hospitalized and four killed by measles. In 2008, for the first time in 14 years, measles was declared endemic in England and Wales.
Dr. Wakefield's claim sparked a general distrust of vaccines. In recent years—as more parents chose not to vaccinate their children—epidemics of measles, mumps, bacterial meningitis and whooping cough swept across the United States. The whooping cough epidemic currently raging in California is larger than any since 1955.
Although it's easy to blame Andrew Wakefield, he's not the only one with dirty hands. The editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, sent Dr. Wakefield's paper to six reviewers, four of whom rejected it. That should have been enough to preclude publication. But Mr. Horton thought the paper was provocative and published it anyway.
Many others in the media showed similar poor judgment, proclaiming Dr. Wakefield's paper an important study even though it was merely a report of eight children that, at best, raised an untested hypothesis.
Meanwhile, public-health officials and scientists were slow to explain in clear, emphatic terms that Dr. Wakefield's hypothesis didn't make a bit of sense.
Even today, important voices aren't drawing the right conclusions. The BMJ, for example, wrote in its editorial that "clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare." But it's not Dr. Wakefield's lapses that matter—it's that his hypothesis was so wrong.
Even if Dr. Wakefield hadn't been fraudulent, his hypothesis would have been no less incorrect or damaging. Indeed, by continuing to focus on Dr. Wakefield's indiscretions rather than on the serious studies that have proved him wrong, we only elevate his status among antivaccine groups as a countercultural hero.
The American astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan once wrote that, "Extraordinary claims should be backed by extraordinary evidence." Dr. Wakefield made an extraordinary claim backed by scant evidence. Undoubtedly, bad science will continue to be submitted for publication. Next time, one can only hope that journal editors and the media will be far more circumspect.
Dr. Offit, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, is the author of "Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All" (Basic Books, 2011).
Junk Science Isn't a Victimless Crime
January 11, 2011
Vaccines don't cause autism—and there was never any proof that they do. Too bad kids had to die while we figured that out.
By PAUL A. OFFIT
In 1998, a British surgeon named Andrew Wakefield published a paper claiming that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism. To support his case, Dr. Wakefield reported the stories of eight children who had developed symptoms of autism within one month of receiving MMR. He proposed that measles vaccine virus travels to the intestine, causes intestinal damage, and allows for brain-damaging proteins to enter children's blood streams.
The problem with Dr. Wakefield's study—published in the Lancet, a leading medical journal—was that it didn't study the question. To prove his hypothesis, he should have examined the incidence of autism in hundreds of thousands of children who had or hadn't received MMR. This kind of study has now been performed 14 times on several continents by many investigators. The studies have shown that MMR doesn't cause autism.
As several different investigations—summed up in a British Medical Journal (BMJ) editorial this month—have shown, not a single aspect of Dr. Wakefield's notion of how MMR causes autism has proven correct. He wasn't just wrong, he was spectacularly wrong. Moreover, some of the children in his report had developed symptoms of autism before they had received the vaccine—and others never actually had autism.
In addition, as journalist Brian Deer found, Dr. Wakefield received tens of thousands of pounds from a personal-injury lawyer in the midst of suing pharmaceutical companies over MMR. (After Mr. Deer's discovery, Dr. Wakefield admitted to receiving the money.) Last year, when the Lancet found out about the money, it retracted his paper. But it was far too late.
Dr. Wakefield's paper created a firestorm. Thousands of parents in the United Kingdom and Ireland chose not to vaccinate their children. Hundreds of children were hospitalized and four killed by measles. In 2008, for the first time in 14 years, measles was declared endemic in England and Wales.
Dr. Wakefield's claim sparked a general distrust of vaccines. In recent years—as more parents chose not to vaccinate their children—epidemics of measles, mumps, bacterial meningitis and whooping cough swept across the United States. The whooping cough epidemic currently raging in California is larger than any since 1955.
Although it's easy to blame Andrew Wakefield, he's not the only one with dirty hands. The editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, sent Dr. Wakefield's paper to six reviewers, four of whom rejected it. That should have been enough to preclude publication. But Mr. Horton thought the paper was provocative and published it anyway.
Many others in the media showed similar poor judgment, proclaiming Dr. Wakefield's paper an important study even though it was merely a report of eight children that, at best, raised an untested hypothesis.
Meanwhile, public-health officials and scientists were slow to explain in clear, emphatic terms that Dr. Wakefield's hypothesis didn't make a bit of sense.
Even today, important voices aren't drawing the right conclusions. The BMJ, for example, wrote in its editorial that "clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare." But it's not Dr. Wakefield's lapses that matter—it's that his hypothesis was so wrong.
Even if Dr. Wakefield hadn't been fraudulent, his hypothesis would have been no less incorrect or damaging. Indeed, by continuing to focus on Dr. Wakefield's indiscretions rather than on the serious studies that have proved him wrong, we only elevate his status among antivaccine groups as a countercultural hero.
The American astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan once wrote that, "Extraordinary claims should be backed by extraordinary evidence." Dr. Wakefield made an extraordinary claim backed by scant evidence. Undoubtedly, bad science will continue to be submitted for publication. Next time, one can only hope that journal editors and the media will be far more circumspect.
Dr. Offit, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, is the author of "Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All" (Basic Books, 2011).
Saturday, January 8, 2011
On a Pedestal
We have an area in our living room with a bay window. It sits empty most of the year with the exception of a Christmas tree in December. I've had an image in my mind of a nice little sitting area, with two upholstered armchairs, and a round glass-topped pedestal table tucked between them. Perfect for playing Scrabble on.
Picture something like this (sans prairie grass)
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| Image source |
or this set from Young House Love, minus the modern chairs
As with most of my design or craft ideas, I had a pretty specific image in mind. Let's just say I'm stubborn about my artistic visions. I searched online, on Craigslist, and at Goodwill, but never had any luck. Then, a few months ago, I found the exact table I was looking for in a catalog! Isn't it pretty?
Unfortunately, it was $200, not including the cost of shipping. And buying a glass top would add even more to the cost. So I just stored it in my mental catalog of decor ideas and kept looking.
Fast forward to last week when I went into my local resale shop looking for a cake dome. I got out of the car and there it was in front of the store. I went straight to the counter and told them very politely "I would like to buy that round pedestal table, please," all the while looking over my shoulder to make sure no other shoppers were eyeing MY table. And did I mention that it came with a glass top? For $25, I was pretty darn excited about my find! I will probably paint it white but haven't quite decided yet.
Now to find two armchairs...
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