i just got back from the at&t store. instead of picking up the iphone i ordered a couple of weeks ago, i found out that while it was delivered by fedex today, it was actually stolen in transit and what they delivered was an EMPTY BOX.
which wouldn’t really bother me that much, but they’re also telling me because how apple and at&t have to do their fulfillment, they have to cancel my old order and then reorder my iphone, resulting in ANOTHER TWO WEEK WAIT.
you have GOT to be kidding me.
meanwhile, my pebl won’t charge off of anything except the bottom usb port on my laptop. and my 8125 has started intermittently going into a reboot loop.
bleah. can i duct tape a bloomberg terminal to a startac?
the other day i was busy doing something else for a second, and the next thing i know i look over and snapper has reached up to grab the bottle on the coffee table, and is now sitting on the floor drinking it all on her own!
yesterday driving home from the farmers’ market, i hear a slap slap slap. it turns out that snapper was back there, clapping! what else has she been teaching herself in secret?
during lunch, snapper was concentrating and making a funny face. i ask her, “are you eating, or are you pooping?” she says, “poop!” oh my. not only may i have taught her to say “poop,” but i may have also taught her to apply it in action.
what amazing things have you come up with in the last almost-two-months? well…
speaking - you’re clearly talking now, and have some favorite words. “up” is one, which you use when you want to, uh, get up. either from the crib, or out of the high chair, or out of the car seat or stroller. “up up up!” and then there’s your new favorite food, “peas,” which sometimes sounds more like “peace.”. plus you sometime say “cat”, “uh-oh”, and just wait until mommy comes back and finds that i’ve taught you to say “poop”!
eating - speaking of food, now that you’ve moved to solid food, eating has become much more complicated. there’s a whole litany of items we go through and try and make for you to ensure that you a. get a healthy meal and b. get enough to grow big big big! of course, to keep us on our toes, you favorite foods keep changing from day to day and week to week. first you loved yams and yogurt. and then yams were out. and avocados were out but now they’re a favorite. yet all of these were fine until you discovered BREAD! which is by far the new favorite. until cheerios came along. in the meantime, does anyone need, oh, a LOT of frozen yam cubes?
feeding - while it’s fun to watch you feed yourself, it certainly makes things much more messy. previously feeding you with a spoon was relatively containable, just scooping the food detritus that didn’t make it into your mouth. now you’re smearing food all over your face with your hands, and then over your arms. and nose. and ears. and eyebrows. it’s certainly fun to watch you pick up food and shove it in your mouth. what’s less fun is to watch you take the food in your mouth back out just so you can feed it to yourself. and what’s not really fun at all is when you take out the food from your mouth and drop it on the floor.
crawling and standing - you’ve been crawling for real for a while now, none of this commando crawling with just your arms. and while you’re zipping around the house, now it’s more just a means to get to something you can pull yourself up on and stand up. no steps yet, although you’re doing the furniture shuffle, and even stand by your self for seconds at a time. again, you’re so close to walking. and we are so close to being doomed.
hamminess - finally, it’s clear that you’re going to be the center of attention wherever you go, and you won’t have it any other way. whenever we go out you’re charming everyone who sees you, waving and smiling until everyone’s paying attention to you. mommy said that when you guys were out at buffalo waiting in the sale line, she turned around and you had all the other people smiling at you and playing the “tilt your head sideways” game. goodness.
no, we’re not going to paradise, on account i have to fly to austin on sunday. however instead this means we can go catch feist tomorrow at the greek. this makes me happy:
In the latest bout of food inflation, beef, pork, poultry and even eggs, cheese and milk are expected to get more expensive as livestock owners go out of business or are forced to slaughter more cattle, hogs, turkeys and chickens to cope with rocketing costs for corn-based animal feed.
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Rod Brenneman, president and chief executive of Seaboard Foods, a pork supplier in Sawnee Mission, Kan. that produces 4 million hogs a year, said high corn costs were already forcing producers in his industry to cut back on the number of animals they raise.
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Brenneman’s cost for feeding a single hog has shot up $30 in the past year because of record-high prices for corn and soybeans, the main ingredients in animal feed. Passing that increase on to consumers would tack an extra 15 cents per pound onto a pork chop.
It’s a similar story for U.S. beef producers, who now spend a whopping 60-70 percent of their production costs on animal feed and are seeing that number rise daily as corn prices hover near an unprecedented $8 a bushel, up from about $4 a year ago.
i’ve been reading (listening to) michael pollan’s the omnivore’s dilemma (it’s both fascinating and horrifying in the same way that “super size me” and “an inconvenient truth” were) and it’s helped me to understand the subtext behind why we’ve historically had these huge surpluses of grain, why the small farmers are going out of business, and why processed foods are so evil and making americans obese: the giant pile of corn.
the giant pile of corn (which is different from the giant pool of money, which if you haven’t listened to it, is brilliantly explained by this american life and shows how the housing crunch in america turned into a huge international credit crisis. highly recommended) is the huge surplus of grain produced by our current incredibly productive variant of maize that is propped up by cheap petroleum used for fertilizer by industrial farming. this has led to curious side effects like the flood of both processed foods and zillions of crazy corn by-products in said processed foods, and in turn rise of things like american obesity and type II diabetes from the spread of more corn by-products like high-fructose corn syrup. yet this has all been predicated by the cheap petroleum and in turn corn, which has been dropping from $2 a bushel down to $1.25 a bushel in recent years. yet now with corn up to $8 a bushel, you wonder how this will ripple through the industry. certainly our food chain built on unnaturally grain-fed beef is already seeing the effects, but how much further could this fundamentally change how our society feeds itself? could this turn people back to grass-fed cattle and poultry? local more sustainable farming and shopping? or is this just the first step towards soylent green?
“This is not sustainable. The cattle industry is going to have to get smaller,” said James Herring, president and CEO of Amarillo, Tex.-based Friona Industries, which buys 20 million bushels of corn each year to feed 550,000 cattle.
Corn’s prices were already rising before the floods, driven up 80 percent over the past year as developing countries like China and India scramble for grains to feed people and livestock. U.S. production of ethanol, an alternative fuel that can be made with corn, has also pushed prices higher, prompting livestock owners to lobby Washington to roll back ethanol mandates.
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If corn were to rise to $10 a bushel, Richard Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, said recouping costs through higher retail prices may not be possible.
speaking of which, i do have to say that’s one thing that troubles me about obama— his support for corn ethanol subsidies. compare this with mccain’s recent proposal for a new automobile battery prize and support for more efficient sugar cane-based ethanol (from cnet):
Presumed Republican presidential nominee John McCain on Monday proposed a $300 million prize to develop a car battery that will “leapfrog” today’s plug-in hybrids.
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His $300 million car battery prize is meant to spur creativity among automakers to make energy-efficient products.
“This is one dollar for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.—a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency—and should deliver a power source at 30 percent of the current costs,” he said.
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In the same speech, McCain repeated his opposition to policies that encourage corn-ethanol and said the U.S. should eliminate a tariff on ethanol from Brazil because it hinders free trade.
He said he would provide incentives to automakers to manufacture flex-fuel vehicles that can run on ethanol or gasoline. He said Brazil, which gets about half of its auto fuel from sugar cane ethanol, has shown that a country can change its fuel mix in just a few years.
of COURSE i’m not saying it’s enough to make me vote for him, but i’m just saying.
(it’s both fascinating and horrifying in the same way that “super size me” and “an inconvenient truth” were) and it’s helped me to understand the subtext behind why we’ve historically had these huge surpluses of grain, why the small farmers are going out of business, and why processed foods are so evil and making americans obese: the giant pile of corn.