The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by RP:

I've had a few concussions, which sort of amazes me considering what a sedentary person I am.

The one that still makes me angry was the one at a day camp when I was eight or so. We were in a hayloft at a farm, and I didn't hear the warning not to slide off the hay in one part of the barn. I slid down the hay, through a hatch, onto the concrete floor of the barn. I was knocked out for at least a minute. The "treatment" administered by the camp was that they let me sit on a couch rather than do the next camp activity (only after my initial protests) and eventually let me call my mother to pick me up early (which she didn't like). No one besides me really seemed concerned that I fell 8-10 feet onto concrete.

I did learn, though, and when I had my next big concussion (while in grad school, I ran full speed into a pipe in the dark) I insisted on a trip to the ER. It was a nice boring trip, fortunately, although I wish they could have given me some advice on how to treat the following week of unending nausea. And yes, I still got my Ph.D., so my brain must not have sloshed too badly.

Abi @57: Ah, but now you have put the idea of an axe in my head. Why chose a beard when you can wield a weapon? Since I am now in IT (thus lacking the occasions for regalia), co-workers are already scared of me so it is not a huge leap. It would also forestall the giggling at the velvet hat, etc.

Ah, now I'm regretting that I've rarely worn my academic regalia since getting my PhD. I was very excited to get it: the velvet cap, the lined hood, etc. But once I put it on, I realized that these were definitely designed for tall thin men. Being short and female meant I looked a little too much like Henry VIII sans beard. Maybe I just need to take it out and wear it at home in a mirrorless place....

Sumana, #19: Thanks for the links - they're lovely! Lisa and Beth Shapiro are under a chuppa, a Jewish wedding canopy.

Half of my dad's (and my childhood) backyard is in the 500-year floodplain in Des Moines, and half of it is about 25 feet up. He says there are no evacuations in his neighborhood - just downtown. The Des Moines Register (www.desmoinesregister.com) has pictures, videos, and lots of updates for expats like me.

What's freaking me out in view of my planned trip out there is that I-80 is closed east of Iowa City, and the detour goes through Dubuque. Just a smidge out of the the way, huh?

I laughed at the huge floodgates and levees around the Des Moines water treatment plant that were installed after 1993. I'm apologizing now.

I tried to read Lessing's SF as a teenager, and I couldn't get into it. Just recently, I read "A Proper Marriage" - wow! Really fantastic stuff, so I'm now working my way through the rest of her Children of Violence series. Maybe I'm now old enough to tackle Canopus in Argos....

Thanks to this discussion, I'm never lowering the passenger seat for a nap again, and neither will my passengers.

re untethered children and unsafe police officers: Yep, yep, yep. My husband had seen loads of unsafe driving in a fairly short time (including a woman nursing a baby while driving), and thus yelled at a guy driving on a major road in Chicago at twilight with his unrestrained son on his lap "learning how to drive". The driver was in a late model car that certainly had airbags. Turns out the guy was an off-duty Chicago cop, and thus got my husband arrested for felony assault for yelling across 2 lanes of traffic. (The guy never showed up in court - he just wanted my husband to spend 6 hours in jail.)

Ailsa (#149), I feel your pain (although I'm not the cook in the household). I have IBS (no red meat, no dairy, low fat) and my husband was recently diagnosed with Type II diabetes. We actually do pretty well by having fish/chicken plus veggies plus grains available at dinner - he concentrates on the veggies, I concentrate on the grains. But there's a surprising number of restaurants that serve only starch + grease and thus are permanently off limits.

I think you have to work cheats into living with diabetes. So long as you're testing your glucose levels, you can see what an ice cream sundae does for you. My husband saw a marked improvement by going on NutriSystem for a couple of months, mainly because that taught him to have a cup of vegetables or fruit with every meal and to eat every 3 hours or so. He continues to eat that way, and has an A1C below 6 (even with the occasional ice cream sundae).

I'm another (half-)Lithuanian here, brought out of lurkery by this discussion. My paternal grandfather came over around 1900, my paternal grandmother around 1920. My grandmother's father was in the Russo-Japanese war and got gassed.

On my mom's side, there's some nineteenth-century Dutch immigration but all the rest has turned out to be English immigration in the 1600s (no boat names that I remember - have to bug my mom about that). I was sort of surprised about how much immigration took place very early on, since I had never thought any of that was relevant to my ancestry.

We made a family pilgrimage to Lithuania back in '02. It was interesting to see just how different we look from ethnic Lithuanians. Obviously there wasn't much mixing going on, and emigration and the Nazis eliminated all the folks there who look like us.

You know, I did a little copy-editing in high school, but none since then. The Onion article didn't make me laugh so much as evoke a sigh and a daydream of the day when I might possibly pick up a little copy-editing work. I do surreptitiously do some in my current job, but computer programmers tend not to appreciate such behavior from their colleagues. You would not believe the amount of effort it took me to convince my previous employer that there is a difference between "principal" and "principle", and that the latter does not apply to loans.

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