Quoth the Raven

Spencer the cat

2009-07-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

Spencer gave me a little bit of a scare. I've been so busy getting up and running this quarter (notably organic chem and biochem, but also nutrition and A&P, all in an abbreviated summer quarter), that I've kind of been letting anything that can run on autopilot do so.

Cats are good at taking care of themselves, as long as everything's going right, so outside of opening the window for him to look out of, Spencer and I hadn't had a lot of interaction this week. So when he was lying on the floor in front of me, looking emaciated, I had an awful jolt of concern that he was sick, augmented by guilt that I hadn't been paying him much attention this week.

My concerns were dispelled when I picked him up, however, and it turned out just to be a trick of the angle he was lying at. Carl Sagan famously declared "We are star stuff"; by all indications, Spencer, the little mesomorph, is neutron-star stuff.

Review: A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

2009-06-22T22:22:00.000-07:00

I first encountered Michael Dorris's writing through his non-fiction many years ago when I read The Broken Cord, about his adopted son, who lived with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Dorris had a sad and controversial life; he was accused of misrepresenting himself as a Native American; later, he was accused of molesting one of his daughters. He and his wife, Louise Erdrich, were widely criticized in Native American intellectual and literacy circles for the way in which they advocated against FAS. His son, described in The Broken Cord, was hit by a car and killed at age 23; Dorris himself committed suicide in 1997. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water is a novel he wrote in 1987.

I liked the structure of the story being told backwards through time by the three narrators: Rayona, her mother Christine, and Christine's mother, Aunt Ida. On the surface, it's a story about Rayona and Christine going back from Seattle to live in Montana, but there is a lot of family backstory about why Christine stayed away for so long that emerges over the course of the book. Lots of things that seemed to be loose ends at first ended up coming together in the end. I didn't expect him to write female characters as vividly as he did; I was pleasantly surprised both by the characters and by his ear for dialogue.

Judgment Day(s)

2009-06-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

My last grade is in. I am happy with my grades this quarter. Not that I want to get all pre-med-competitive about it, but I am applying to very competitive programs. So I need to show that I take the pre-requisites seriously, and can do the work. I think I showed that this quarter.

I also was evaluated for practical skills in the hospital. I got "Satisfactory" on everything (on a Pass/Fail scale) except "Provides restorative care to residents" and "Applies critical thinking in clinical situations". My clinical teacher gave everyone in our cohort a grade that means essentially "Not enough information to answer the question", as it is her position that our practicum does not provide the opportunity to do either in the time we have available and under the responsibilities we are required to carry out. (UPDATE) The two specific things she said about me were that I am "eager" to take on new tasks, and that I "tend[s] to get anxious" about unfamiliar situations, a state that she expects will resolve itself with practice and experience. That sounds right; I remember visualizing all kinds of awful things, like accidentally dropping a patient, that never happened. Once I had done it successfully a couple of times, the anxiety disappeared. I got a mail today from a physician friend making the same point, "I had no doubt you will be excellent in your patient interactions. Only you doubt you, Ravensara!". Which means I need to get that experience, and sooner rather than later will be a good thing. So that's all good, too. All that remains now is passing the state certification practical exam.

Not only has this week been one of student evaluations, but the publisher of the textbook I'm writing on massage literacy got a batch of reviewers' comments back to me. Overall, they are very good (a lot of praise, which is nice, and even the not-praise is constructive and on-point), and while massage schools are unlikely to make critical thinking and massage literacy a curriculum requirement anytime soon, it looks like the book has the real potential to make a splash as the basis for an elective course. So I am happy. And sleepy. I worked very hard last quarter, and slept like 18 hours today, catching up.

On the 29th, it begins again, this time organic chemistry and biochemistry survey class, nutrition, and some intro medical classes that I need, not for the content, but housekeeping/bookkeeping/pre-requisites.

Until then, WOO-HOO! SPRING BREAK!

It is finished.

2009-06-19T19:03:00.000-07:00

Spring quarter, that is. Developmental psychology and chemistry are in the bag, and I finished my nursing assistant clinicals on Tuesday. The nursing assistant class held a potluck today to celebrate.

Since it's a state school, and has a number of restrictions on alcohol on the premises, I brought sparkling cider to raise a toast to our teachers, ourselves, and our support systems of family and friends.

I also brought special cups for the toast.

Overheard: "Claaaaaassy" and "This is so wrong!"

I think I'm going to make this my very own tradition as I go through nursing school; I started doing it when I got into grad school in the School of Medicine, and it's just so me, I think.

Here's a serving tip if you want to do the same thing--leave the cups in their intact sterile wrappers until you're actually pouring the drink, and let the guests remove the sterile wrapper for themselves. It seems to go over much better that way.

Ten more days, and then it begins again with organic chemistry/biochemistry and nutrition...

Old school

2009-06-11T19:42:00.000-07:00

Ok, I know this has a real risk of coming across as a "you kids get off of my lawn" post, but still...

At 51, I'm returning to school for nursing-school prerequisites as different as chemistry, developmental psychology, statistics, and nutrition. Today in chemistry, we learned the theoretical basis of pH, and the instructor started off by introducing the concept of logarithms. Yes, introducing.

For all my complaints about high school, I have to say they gave me a good pre-calculus grounding. Logarithms, trigonometry, Boolean algebra--all these things I take for granted, until I run into college students taking classes with me who haven't been exposed to them. And I mean pre-professional students to whom these are new concepts.

Thank you, Huffman High School, and Gary Harper of the math team. I really appreciate the foundation in mathematics you saw to it that I took away with me.

Thank you, Stephen Tyrone Johns

2009-06-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

I was originally going to make a post about how nurses and nursing assistants are not paid nearly enough for the essential and physically demanding work that they (someday, we!) do. I've always intellectually agreed with that point; now that CNA clinicals are 3/4 finished for me, that assertion is also sincerely felt in every single aching myofibril in my entire body. However, I will save that post for another time, because the point is also true for security guards at high-risk targets, and current events have made that aspect of it so much more immediate today.

I went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC once, skipping out on the spur of the moment while I was at a medical informatics conference there. Because it was an impulse visit, and I hadn't checked beforehand, it turned out to be closed when I got there; I forget why--a holiday, perhaps, or something of the sort--so I didn't get to go in, but I committed to going the next time I was in DC. On a normal day, like today, there may have been as many as a couple of thousands visitors inside, I heard on the press conference this morning.

Stephen Tyrone Johns died today when a white supremacist entered the Holocaust Museum with a rifle and shot him. Apparently he was stopped by security guards immediately upon entering; after he shot Mr. Johns, the other security guards shot him, critically injuring him.

I don't want this post to be about the crazies, though; although they certainly appear to be on the upswing (the Tiller murder, this shooting, the homophobic online libel of a good friend of mine in reaction to the announcement of his memorial) in response to Obama's election and his positive domestic and international actions. Orcinus and others are good sources of information on the rise of eliminationism on the right. I'll leave that coverage to them for now.

The point I want to make is that on a daily basis Mr. Johns protected as many as thousands of innocent people in a high-profile target, including children, as part of his job, and today that job cost him his life. He performed a very valuable service, one that our society does not value enough to pay well, at great personal risk. I am grateful that people such as Mr. Johns do this kind of work--living in my safe, sane, protected bubble, it is easy to forget just how many haters there are in the world, and how dangerous they are. I sincerely hope that his family finds some solace and consolation for their loss in the knowledge of his bravery and heroism in the lives he certainly saved today.

You win, Granny!

2009-06-09T22:49:00.000-07:00

(Background: it is well-known in certain circles that, of the two of us, Mr thalarctos is the domesticated one, while I am totally feral [h/t George]).

While I believe there is no afterlife, I'm certainly prepared to admit there is a possibility that I am wrong, and such a thing, however unlikely, could conceivably exist.

Should there be such a thing, and should my mother's mother be able to see me now, she is, no doubt, laughing her ass off at the rebellious 8-year-old who refused to learn to make a bed properly, and insisted that, when she grew up, she'd never make another bed in her life.

On the other hand, I'm making so many beds nowadays that my mitred corners have become something to absolutely die for (not literally, no!).

(Image from: http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2007/12/hospital-corners.html)

Paying it forward

2009-06-09T20:27:00.000-07:00

When I stepped out of the elevator onto the ward, suddenly it was 2002 again. All the sights, the sounds, the smells were just as I remembered them.

That year, I went to the doctor complaining of severe abdominal pain. She sent me to the ER, and the next thing I knew, I was hospitalized for what turned out to be a skosh over a month. The blood clot that took out three feet of my small intestine (and that is usually diagnosed "on autopsy", as my surgeon explained), followed by immobility-related fluid developing around my left lung, kept me there so long that I literally burst into tears when Mr thalarctos wheeled me out into the natural light on the way to the car to go home.

Now, almost 7 years later, I'm back on what may be the same ward (post-hospital-remodel and lots of pain-killing drugs, I'm kind of vague about logistics). Also, I have a memory of my instructor actually being my nurse at the time, but that may well be confabulated, given the way that memory operates and my confusion around that time.

If I can show the current patients even a fraction of the kindness, support, and competent care that the staff showed me over that month in 2002, then I will have taken a small step to repaying some of my karmic debt.

May 35, 1989

2009-06-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

I remember an early-morning summer flight into Honolulu Airport. On sabbatical from Microsoft, I was en route to studying Khmer at SEASSI at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.

The last news about the protests in China that I had heard when I left the mainland was that a brave young man had faced down the tanks at Tienanmen Square (photograph below by Jeff Widener), and there was some optimism that the situation could be resolved peacefully.

The headlines at the airport the next morning told a different story. The government cracked down on the protests, and an unknowable number of people were killed or injured. The young man in the photo was probably executed, although that too cannot be known with certainty.

It was a shock to see the headlines in the airport that morning. Now it has been 20 years, and the Chinese government is trying to bury history by suppressing all references to "June 4" on computers it can control, leading to the euphemism "May 35" to mark that day.

I remember.

They call me Mr. Tibia*

2009-06-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

(* shamelessly stolen from my friend George, whose lightning wit and linguistic facility I've always admired and envied.)

Or rather, I'm very, very grateful that they *don't*.

To back up a bit and explain, I'm currently teaching anatomy, physiology, and pathology at a massage school in Tacoma. Thursday a week ago, I had introduced the skeletal system, and since I've always preferred hands-on, experiential learning to just lecturing at the students, Mr thalarctos and I combined our efforts.

The night before class, he bought a whole chicken, and prepared it in his trademark way, but before cooking it, he surgically removed an entire leg, taking care to keep the joint and ligaments intact. He then removed the meat from the bones, leaving the periosteum for the students to see. It still flexed and extended in a perfectly functional way, if not under its own power.

I took it in the next day to class, and had everyone observe the bone, the hyaline cartilage, the joint, the ligaments, the periosteum. Then, once everyone had had a chance to see how it operated intact, I gave it a third-degree sprain so that we could all have a look inside.

So after we had finished observing, and after explaining how anatomy classes in medical schools often had ceremonies to show appreciation for those who donated their bodies so that others could learn [1-6], and how some native Americans thanked their prey before the hunt for the sacrifice it would make for their benefit, we expressed gratitude for the chicken whose death had provided not only a delicious meal, but also had helped the students gain knowledge, and then we gave the bones a "burial" in the garbage can. I moved on to prepare the notes for the next week's lesson on skeletal system pathologies.

When we met again next week, one of my students handed me a baggie with a dry, dusty bone in it. Smiling, she said she had brought it so I could do a little better than chicken bones for teaching---she had taken it away from her dog, who had dug it up in the woods near her home.

I was touched by her kindness, but as I took the baggie and looked at the bone, I started to feel just the least bit uneasy---it was clearly a tibia, and although it was a little thicker than I would expect, with a groove running down the front that I didn't remember from any tibia I had ever seen, I couldn't say with certainty that it wasn't human.

So what *is* the proper etiquette when you think you may have inadvertently received human remains as a gift from a well-meaning student? Never having considered that question before, I dropped by the police station on the way home to find out their thoughts on the matter.

At the small suburban police station I stopped at, there was an older male civilian volunteer at the information desk. He greeted me in a friendly way, but his interest really ramped up when he saw what I was carrying, and he went into the back to get an officer.

Officer McIvor was very reassuring and professional, and assured me--despite my concerns that maybe I just watched way too much Law & Order, that bringing it in was the right thing to do, even though it probably was not human---like me, he was not the person to do the rule-out, but their bone guy could help. He asked me if I wanted it back, which I did, as long as it wasn't evidence or something, so he took it and gave me his card. In passing, he observed that it had been quite chewed up by something or other.

He called early the next morning, and left a message---a doc at Overlake Hospital had verified that it was, indeed, a tibia, and it was not a human one, so my bone would be waiting for me to pick it up at City Hall. They don't have a comparative osteologist on staff---once it's ruled out as human, they lose interest in it---so I don't have a species, just a rule-out as a non-human mammalian tibia. Maybe the staff at the Burke Museum has someone who can get a little closer; right now, I'm guessing "bear", but it's just an uninformed guess.

It was a relief that someone's loved ones weren't about to undergo a horror, and that I had not dragged my student into a murder investigation (and she had not dragged me into one!) just because of a spontaneous gift. And now I have a tibia to pass around for future anatomy lectures on the skeletal system.

My friend Brian, an anthropologist specializing in human osteology by training, observes that it's almost never human (and he's got tons of stories, like how people call in to report the discovery of a child's hand, only to have it turn out to be a raccoon). But I had to check.

[1] Eze O, Horgan F, Nguyen K, Sadeghpour M, Smith AL. The 2008 anatomy ceremony: voices, letter, poems. Yale J Biol Med. 2009 Mar;82(1):41-6.

[2] Elansary M, Goldberg B, Qian T, Rizzolo LJ. The 2008 anatomy ceremony: essays. Yale J Biol Med. 2009 Mar;82(1):37-40.

[3] Yale University School of Medicine Students. The 2007 anatomy ceremony: a service of gratitude: I: collected experiences. Yale J Biol Med. 2007 Jun;80(2):83-90.

[4] Kim Y, Sandoval A. The 2005 Anatomy Ceremony: a Service of Gratitude. Yale J Biol Med. 2005 Jan;78(1):83-9. No abstract available.

[5] Morris K, Turell MB, Ahmed S, Ghazi A, Vora S, Lane M, Entigar LD. The 2003 anatomy ceremony: a service of gratitude. Yale J Biol Med. 2002 Sep-Dec;75(5-6):323-9.

[6] Weeks SE, Harris EE, Kinzey WG. Human gross anatomy: a crucial time to encourage respect and compassion in students. Clin Anat. 1995;8(1):69-79.

RIP, Dr. George Tiller

2009-05-31T22:10:00.001-07:00

One of my heroes was assassinated by a domestic terrorist today. Dr. George Tiller was shot as he attended church services.

Dr. Tiller knowingly risked his life to provide much-needed services to women who had anencephalic fetuses, conjoined twins with little or no chance of survival, life-threatening conditions such as pre-eclampsia and eclampsia, or cancer diagnoses during later pregnancy that required chemotherapy in order for them to survive.

He was a brave man who knew the risks he faced, and he faced them anyway in order to protect women's lives. Now that he is gone, I fear more women will die being forced to bear fetuses with no chance of survival, to go through the multiple organ failure of eclampsia, or to forego needed chemotherapy. I am very sorry that someone hated him and his mission enough to carry out such a cowardly act, and that now he is gone.

Thank you, Dr. Tiller, for caring so much about women's health and welfare that you would put your life on the line. I hope your family finds condolence and peace in the knowledge that you made a positive difference in so many women's lives.

UPDATE: Mothers' personal stories of why they had to seek out Dr. Tiller's services (h/t Sully)

Folie à trois

2009-05-02T20:37:00.000-07:00

To say the least, it's not often that I cry in school, but today was one time.

I've returned to school as a pre-nursing student, which means I'm working on pre-requisites, and will apply to nursing school when I'm done with them. One of the pre-requisites is certification as a nursing assistant (CNA or NA-C), one of my current classes along with chemistry and developmental psychology.

Today's class was the required Washington state training in HIV/AIDS, the 4-hour version of which I've actually taught in massage school. This was the 7-hour version that CNAs are required to take. One part of the class was watching the video And the Band Played On, based on the book by Randy Shilts.

By the end of the film, I was crying. I think people who didn't live through the 80s just don't remember all the things the film evoked, but some of my friends lived and died during that time, and I have some memory of it. While the film was far from perfect, it was certainly faithful, and it was two hours well-spent.

As the video ended, and the lights came back on, I remarked to another student at my table that it was funny to go from Ian McKellen as Bill Kraus in the morning to Dumbledore in Harry Potter this evening, and she agreed. Mr thalarctos also agreed when I made the same observation to him when we met up later this afternoon.

Except it simply isn't true! Ian McKellen was offered the role of Dumbledore, but turned it down as too similar to Gandalf; perhaps he was afraid of getting stereotyped. Yet all three of us remembered him as Dumbledore--too funny!

Mr thalarctos finds out the truth

2009-03-20T21:02:00.000-07:00

I'm only faking it, because I love him.

End of a long week; he took his final exams, and I had a ton of deadlines this week as well. We finally get home after all the running around, and settle in for "Battlestar Galactica: The Last Frakkin' Special", and we find out we've run out of just about everything this week, including stuff for dinner, and those Mexican Cokes, the ones with the real sugar rather than the high-fructose corn syrup, that he likes to drink while watching BSG.

I offer to run up to the store which has the Cokes and get stuff for dinner as well, and that's when the truth came out.

He said, "But I don't want you to miss 'The Last Frakkin Special'! I know you really want to watch it."

Nope, not really. I just haven't really gotten into BSG, and I barely know who anyone is, or what their story consists of. I know I'm throwing away my geek cred by admitting it, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it; I've just been hoarding my time for other things. I think once the entire series is out on DVD, I'll probably get it and do a BSG-a-thon. And that will be the time when I get hooked, and I go online to follow the discussions, and debate the intricacies of plot and character. But usually now, when Mr thalarctos has it on, I fall asleep halfway through, anyway, because I just don't have the bandwidth at the moment.

He barely notices, as rapt as he is. But the truth will out, eventually, and it did this evening. I'm saving BSG for a near future in which I have time to get involved in a quality show, but--for now--it's just background noise for me.

Candle in the wind

2009-03-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

Image source: http://www.johnhendow.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/lucy.jpg

From the blog post here.

The New York Times is reporting that the Lucy exhibition was a bust.

I'm sorry that is true. Among other factors, the days of snowfall that brought a large part of the region to a halt, and the expense--almost $21.00 for an adult ticket--at a time when the economy was crashing are two things that are blamed. There may be other things as well; I don't know.

It is a shame, though. It was absolutely amazing; I had tears streaming down my face as I saw her bones, and I'm not normally a particularly sentimental person. The concept of our shared humanity reaching across almost 3.5 million years was much more moving than I had intellectually expected it to be.

I did have an idea for encouraging people in the local massage community to go see her in the final weeks. Having worked with Ethiopian clients at the Refugee Clinic years ago, I developed a continuing education class--I prepared a couple of massage case reports, and supplemented them with information on Ethiopian medicinal plants, comparative anatomy and its import for conditions such as low back pain, foot pain, and sciatica in modern humans.

I agreed to waive the CE class fee if participants could show their ticket stubs from Lucy, and we met at a local Ethiopian restaurant near Seattle University, Kokeb. We had a delicious dinner, the owner was extremely attentive and shared facts about Ethiopian culture with us, and all in all, it was a very nice time. We had the doro tibs (chicken sauteed with homemade awaze [spice paste, including peppers, garlic, ginger], peppers, and onions), bueg alecha (mild lamb stew), timatim firfir (injera [Ethiopian flatbread, very soft, light, and spongy] chopped with tomato and onions), and yetekemem ergo (yogurt), and lots of injera on the side. We ate Ethiopian-style, scooping up the food onto the injera with our fingers, although logistically, that made taking notes just a little bit harder.

I would whole-heartedly recommend Kokeb to anyone in the Seattle area looking for tasty Ethiopian food. We had a very nice time, we learned from each other, and four more people saw Lucy while she was here.

I'll keep the list, just in case...

2009-03-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been over two weeks since Isadora bit me, and subsequently died. The vet invoked the rabies protocol, as she should have. However, King County did not feel it necessary to test Izzy for rabies, since she was current on her shots, had no signs of rabies, and there was a perfectly plausible explanation for her unexpected death. So we proceeded on the assumption that the risk did not justify the extreme measures, and so far, that operating assumption appears to be borne out.

I'm not showing any sign of rabies, and this far out from the bite, I probably will never do so, but--just in case--I'll won't recycle that list of people to bite quite yet</oldjoke-again>.

A thing of beauty

2009-03-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

As a friend observed, "Shocking that this is new policy? The transparency part I can see as new, but shocking that the rest needed to be said."

Yup. And yet, it did.

I'm going to reprint the memorandum in full here, just because it's so beautiful.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary
_________________________________________
For Immediate Release March 9, 2009

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: Scientific Integrity

Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security.

The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking. The selection of scientists and technology professionals for positions in the executive branch should be based on their scientific and technological knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity.

By this memorandum, I assign to the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (Director) the responsibility for ensuring the highest level of integrity in all aspects of the executive branch's involvement with scientific and technological processes. The Director shall confer, as appropriate, with the heads of executive departments and agencies, including the Office of Management and Budget and offices and agencies within the Executive Office of the President (collectively, the "agencies"), and recommend a plan to achieve that goal throughout the executive branch.

Specifically, I direct the following:

1. Within 120 days from the date of this memorandum, the Director shall develop recommendations for Presidential action designed to guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch, based on the following principles:

(a) The selection and retention of candidates for science and technology positions in the executive branch should be based on the candidate's knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity;

(b) Each agency should have appropriate rules and procedures to ensure the integrity of the scientific process within the agency;

(c) When scientific or technological information is considered in policy decisions, the information should be subject to well-established scientific processes, including peer review where appropriate, and each agency should appropriately and accurately reflect that information in complying with and applying relevant statutory standards;

(d) Except for information that is properly restricted from disclosure under procedures established in accordance with statute, regulation, Executive Order, or Presidential Memorandum, each agency should make available to the public the scientific or technological findings or conclusions considered or relied on in policy decisions;

(e) Each agency should have in place procedures to identify and address instances in which the scientific process or the integrity of scientific and technological information may be compromised; and

(f) Each agency should adopt such additional procedures, including any appropriate whistleblower protections, as are necessary to ensure the integrity of scientific and technological information and processes on which the agency relies in its decisionmaking or otherwise uses or prepares.

2. Each agency shall make available any and all information deemed by the Director to be necessary to inform the Director in making recommendations to the President as requested by this memorandum. Each agency shall coordinate with the Director in the development of any interim procedures deemed necessary to ensure the integrity of scientific decisionmaking pending the Director's recommendations called for by this memorandum.

3. (a) Executive departments and agencies shall carry out the provisions of this memorandum to the extent permitted by law and consistent with their statutory and regulatory authorities and their enforcement mechanisms.

(b) Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) authority granted by law to an executive department, agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(c) This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity, by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

4. The Director is hereby authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

This sounds promising

2009-03-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

I've been working on something lately that I deliberately haven't blogged about, because the rules about public disclosure are not clear in this case--they haven't caught up to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.--and so I'm in contact with the state of Washington about what's ok to talk about on the blog and what's not. It's still in flux, to put it mildly, and since I have no interest in being the test case in my own Scopes monkey trial, I'm not going to push the limits on this. Let someone else be the guinea pig is my motto in this situation.

It is a simple fact, however, that I am currently working on putting together a Small Corporate Offering Registration (SCOR) to capitalize an organization in development, the Massage Informatics and Research Institute (MIRI). I am merely stating that fact, and that is all I am saying about it now; I am most definitely not trying to solicit funds here. The federal government and the state of Washington are very clear on what kinds of solicitations are permitted under the law; until Washington state tells me it's ok to solicit investors through blogs, I will absolutely not be doing so. There are other ways that it will be ok to approach investors to discuss it, and I will be pursuing those avenues whole-heartedly.

I mention that fact here in passing, only so you see the context in which I listened to Barack Obama's SBA speech this morning. He referred to the economic stimulus cutting capital gains taxes for investors who purchase stock in small businesses. Naturally, I support this initiative.

According to Yahoo, Geithner has ordered the Internal Revenue Service to issue new rules for tax breaks for small businesses, including 75 percent of capital gains excluded for those who invest in small businesses.

CNN Money explains it accordingly:

Capital gains: Individuals who invest in small businesses over the next few years will get a nice break on their capital-gains taxes. If you buy stock in a small business, hold it for at least five years, and then sell it, current tax law allows you to exclude 50% of your gains (within certain limits). The stimulus bill increases that exclusion to 75% - but only for stock issued after the bill is enacted.

Another reason why I'm glad I voted for Obama. I think he genuinely takes the concerns of small businesses seriously.

Of course, he's not perfect--I've got some issues with him, and I don't mind saying so publicly. But it's certainly welcome to have substantive debates over principled issues, instead of the perverse stupidity/anti-human-rights feedback loop of the last 8 years! And this initiative, after all of the huge corporate breaks which went before is, to me, a very promising sign that small business is invited to the table to help participate in our civic and economic rebuilding.

Facultative rabies

2009-02-28T14:34:00.000-08:00

(Facultative: capable of adapting to different environmental conditions)

Well, this past week can be taken out back and shot, as far as I'm concerned.

Isadora had been sick with kidney disease and an upper-respiratory infection for a little while, but we thought we had it under control. She was getting fluids intravenously, and we had a plan for when she resumed eating, and how we would manage her kidney disease--the prognosis seemed good.

Since our vet clinic is not an emergency facility, and no doctor is present on the weekend, I got a call from the vet Friday a week ago, suggesting I take her home and provide hands-on care Saturday and Sunday--syringe feeding and subcutaneous fluids--and then bring her in Monday to restart the IV. Sounded like a plan--I was going to attend the Western Washington Wildlife Rehabilitators conference at the UW Saturday, but I could be a little late to that, np--so that's how we proceeded. I picked up Izzy, subq-fluided her, and then left for the conference. When I got back that evening, we did the same routine plus a syringe feeding.

Sunday, same deal. That's when she decided she'd had enough of this crap, and bit me in the right index finger knuckle, HARD! I think I'm going to have a scar from it.

By Monday morning, it was red, hot, and so swollen it had that Botox look: no natural wrinkles anymore; half of the back of my hand was almost perfectly flat and fluid-filled. And it hurt like a bastard! We're uninsured at the moment, due to unemployment, so I don't routinely go to the doctor, but I wasn't about to let this infection go systemic, either, so it was off to the emergency room for me.

I dropped Izzy off at the vet's on the way to the ER, and warned them about her biting me. We actually have observed this behavior, called "The Cobra", in the past: when she feels bad and over-interfered with, she bites swiftly and hard, without warning, compared to the absolute lovecat she always is when she feels better. Since she gives no warning, I didn't want anyone else taken by surprise.

The visit to the Overlake ER was the best it could be, given the circumstances--it's an ER, after all, nobody's idea of a good time (I hope!). But the staff was competent and kind, and since no gunshot wounds or anything like that were coming in, I was able to be seen right away. The nurse practitioner who saw me was friendly and patient, and willing to answer questions. She thought it was a Bordetella infection, and although penicillin is the first line against that infection, the almost-fact that I am allergic to penicillin made doxycycline the recommended way to go.

Figure 1: Image of Bordetella bronchiseptica from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1d/Bordetella_bronchiseptica_02.jpg/240px-Bordetella_bronchiseptica_02.jpg

Figure 2: Doxycycline, related to tetracycline

With a sling to immobilize my dominant hand (to remind me not to use it anymore than necessary), and a container of antibiotics, I headed home. I had just gotten settled in when the phone rang. It was the vet, and she asked me some questions about the bite. Then she said she had some bad news, and I knew before she told me that Isadora had died.

We're all shocked--we thought she was getting over this upper respiratory thing, and would go on to have her kidney disease successfully managed. She thought so, I thought so, Iain thought so--but whatever it was she had, it was too much for her.

Well, that was bad enough. But wait, there's more!

It turns out that King County has a "rabies protocol" that automatically kicks in when an animal bites a human, and then dies shortly after. She had to report it to the public health department, and was waiting to hear back from them whether they needed to get Izzy's head to test the brain for rabies.

She did the right thing in invoking the protocol, even though I'm (almost) sure we're in the clear. I'm just neurotic enough to worry about the tiny possibility of it, even though we agree she showed no signs of rabies either here or at the clinic, and her staggering was plausibly due to her weakness in not eating for so long, rather than the neurological degeneration of rabies. Her "flu-like symptoms" are more consistent with an upper-respiratory-tract infection than the symptoms Wikipedia's entry on rabies describes, and the bite was far from unprovoked. I was bugging her with syringes and needles, and "The Cobra" goes back for years now.

It looks like the public health department is going to agree with us, and not insist on testing. So that's that, except for the next couple of years, in my more paranoid moments, I guess I'll be interpreting every little sneeze or shiver as the onset of my own personal rabies case.

I told a conservationist friend, and said that, just in case, I was preparing a list of people to bite </oldjoke>. "Facultative rabies", she proposed. I like that.

Good kitty Isadora

2009-02-23T17:34:00.000-08:00

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville

(by Paul Verlaine)

3 rules for infection control, applied

2009-02-22T19:58:00.000-08:00

Son of a bitch, Isadora, that hurt! Twice--once when I was on the receiving end of a deep bite after fluids/feeding, and again when I poured alcohol over it.

Fortunately, I'm current on my tetanus booster shots, given how often I get bitten, scratched, or otherwise punctured around here.

Yesterday, I saw Dr. John Huckabee's talk on infection control at the WARA conference; I thought, though, I'd have a few more days before actually applying them.

Rule 1--Don't be a fomite! Fomites are inanimate objects that can transmit infection, so reusing needles or gloves that can carry germs, or not cleaning telephones, keyboards, or doorknobs that are handled frequently can pass on infection. By "don't be a fomite", he means take care to clean and disinfect your clothing, instruments, and environment in such a way that their potential for passing on infection is minimized.

Rule 2--Wash your hands! I'm pretty good on this one, actually; I wash my hands frequently, especially after handling the cats, or going to the bathroom, and before handling food.

Rule 3--Clean first, then disinfect. This is the one that I've been the sloppiest about in the past, partly because I've never thought too much about the difference between cleaning and disinfection. As Huckabee clarified yesterday, cleaning uses friction to remove microbes from the environment, while disinfection is the use of agents that actually kill microbes (I am deliberately not linking to Wikipedia in this instance because their article confuses the two; I am not the expert who needs to clean it up, but they conflate cleaning and disinfection).

What I've done in the past is pour alcohol over the bite, thinking I was cleaning and disinfecting simultaneously. Wrong! The presence of organic material reduces disinfectant activity; that's what Huckabee means by "clean first, then disinfect". So this time, I washed the wound well, scrubbing and rinsing for an entire minute, before pouring alcohol on it, and then drying it, applying Neosporin, and bandaging.

UPDATE: Ooops, hit "Post" too fast--I meant to say that I hope the fact that Isadora has the strength to deliver a bite like that means she's feeling better, at least a little...

Mood: impish

2009-02-22T10:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended the Washington Wildlife Rehabilitation Association's Fifth Annual Washington Wildlife Rehabilitation Conference. While not an wildlife rehabber myself, I am very interested in the community--they have a wealth of good experience and knowledge, and they are definitely on the side of the angels in their work to help wildlife. I want to direct a significant part of my future anatomy informatics research toward developing tools for them to be able to share, organize, and find that information as seamlessly as possible.

The program was crammed full of good information, and I have a lot of biomedical and behavioral information to process into usable form, and many new contacts to follow up on. They ended on a fun and useful note, with a workshop on raptor imping, or feather repair for Washington birds of prey, such as hawks and owls. It's kind of like a hair transplant for avians, but it's much more practical than cosmetic--it can make a lot of difference in flight stability, which itself can be a decisive factor in deciding whether or not a bird is ready for re-release into the wild.

I hasten to reassure Washington hawks, owls, pelagic birds, and others that I have no intention of actually practicing on real birds any time in the near future! For me, it was an opportunity to learn some non-mammalian anatomy, and--more important--to get a hands-on opportunity to see how wildlife rehabbers gain, process, and share new information with applied (clinical) relevance, in order to incorporate those observations into some future way of information-sharing. I appreciate Mike's (the instructor) taking his time and materials to provide the instruction and practice, and WWRA for providing the venue and opportunity to take the workshop.

In real life, of course, you'd be carrying out this procedure on a live bird in rehabilitation; we practiced on isolated feathers instead. As good an idea as that sounds in theory, you'll also see its wisdom borne out in practice as the workshop unfolded. Below, in the bottom right quadrant of the photo, you see my broken feather (a left #10 primary from a barred owl, to be precise) on the left, and a replacement left #10 primary feather from a different barred owl on the right.

By the time I had taken this photo, I had already separated the calamus of the broken feather (left) from its vane (center). If this were a real-life situation, the calamus would still be attached in the follicle of the feather in the bird, who would be restrained or anesthetized, lying there while the procedure is carried out. The replacement feather (right) has not yet had the calamus separated from the vane, which will be the next step.

That's where the tea candles you see in the picture come in--if you take the time to heat the scalpel blades thoroughly in the flame, then there's no slicing or sawing through the shaft. The warm blade cuts through the quill like butter.

Fortunately, Mike stepped us through it patiently, because at a conceptual level, I was not sure I understood what had to happen to what in what order. There seemed to be a similar concern elsewhere in the room--I heard people doubting whether they could do this. After all, the animal's welfare is the primary concern, and they (and I) do not want to screw that up. But the people in the room, other than me, carry out other difficult procedures to help injured and recovering wildlife every day, and I had no doubt that the rehabbers who want to go on in imping will do so successfully, after some practice.

Below the calamus has been separated from the vane in both feathers, and in the left of the field, the calamus of the broken feather (still embedded in the follicle of the live bird, remember!) is roughly lined up with the vane of the replacement feather. Notice how I've been moving the calamus around in the photos to get a comfortable alignment for me--in real life, that poor bird would not need to be rotated so much and so often; part of this skill, I think, must be learning where things need to be, and setting them up that way at the start.

The calamus of the replacement feather and the vane of the broken feather are at right, and can be discarded, except I am going to try to use the shaft of the broken feather as the bridge for my imping.

Success! Or, at least, half-success; I still have to do the same thing for the calamus.

The bridge slides in to the shaft of the vane, and fits snugly--there is no looseness or rattling around, which will have an adverse effect on the success of the imping.

At this point, I am feeling rather pleased with myself, although I am concerned about how long it is taking me, with my "patient" either restrained or under anesthetic. Birds, after all, stress out very easily; I think that developing skillful speed must be an important component of this.

Other people in the room are having similar concerns; from somewhere, I hear the following exchange:

"Oh, no; we took too long--the patient just died!"

"Well, check and see whether he's a feather donor."

My bridge to the calamus was not quite as successful as to the vane; it was a little floppy. But the workshop was winding up, so I didn't have time to start a whole new bridge. For the sake of practice, I went with this one, and now that the bridges were in place, it was time to bind them permanently.

We had had a discussion at the beginning of properties of glue; epoxy actually seems to be the best choice, although sea water can cause some kinds to lose their integrity. The choice of glue is a non-trivial question, in other words, but for the sake of a practice workshop, Mike chose SuperGlue because it's cheap and fast.

I already had a certain amount of doubt about the safety of birds, blades, and flames around my motor skills; accidentally SuperGluing a bird's wing together seemed to me like a real risk to be avoided, and I promptly proved the point by SuperGluing my right ring finger and pinky into kind of a mirror-image "OK" sign (or "Arschloch" sign, if you're a German-speaker.) Ironically, if I were a pterosaur, I would have just totally subverted the entire imping procedure, since while bats fly on their fingers, and birds fly on their arms, in pterosaurs, "the ring finger is the wing finger" (I'll attribute that quote if I can find where I heard it), so I had just taken out my entire wing.

"Help", I said softly to Mike, who sized up the situation, pulled my hand up over my head like the referee does a boxing champ, and announced, "Can I have everyone's attention, please? Don't do this." (waving my hand). Fortunately, one of the rehabbers was also an experienced mom, who has obviously lived the SuperGluing fingers together scenario before. With warm water, a pen to gradually work the fingers apart, and a minimum of drama, we got it under control.

My results, while not perfect, were actually not bad for a first attempt, although as said above, it took a very long time. Below are pictures of my imped feather.

I did not get to keep my imped feather, as this is an area where Federal law, tribal law, endangered species, and freedom of religion all intersect, sometimes quite contentiously, and there is a lot of paperwork involved to make sure that everyone is cleaner than Caesar's wife about the use of raptor feathers. Mike and WWRA have the required permits, and can put on the workshop, but to transfer the feathers to us, who do not all have those permits, is a ton of effort, accounting, and documentation that we did not go to.

I totally had a blast, I learned something about avian anatomy, and more about the rehab community and how they gain, share, and use clinical information. All in all, a day very well-spent.

These are very good people, and they do important work to help animals. I invite you to support your local wildlife rehabber, as well as local and national wildlife rehab organizations: the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association and the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council. Locally, I am going to donate my time and money to WWRA, and I invite my readers (both of you! :) to do likewise.

Cat nurse

2009-02-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

Isadora is doing a little better. She came home for the weekend, since our vet is not a 24/7 emergency clinic, and the vet wanted her to get hands-on care Saturday and Sunday. She's been receiving intravenous fluids, which I'm not qualified to administer, but I can give her subcutaneous fluids twice a day for two days, as well as syringe-feeding her, before I take her back in Monday.

Yesterday, she was quite passive; today, as big a pain in the ass as it it, I'm glad to see her resisting the fluids and syringe, as it means she has more strength than she did have. I got 15cc of cat food slurry (warm A/D dissolved in water) down her yesterday, and 20cc this morning. Additionally, she had 300mL Ringer's lactate yesterday, 150mL this morning, and I'm planning another 150ml tonight and once again early in the morning before taking her back in to resume the IV.

Her creatinine, while still sucky, is trending the right direction (down--it's now 3 times what it should be instead of 6 times); we think the BUN is probably doing so as well, but it's still so high it's out of range of the clinic's machine, so we can't know for sure. The vet thinks that if she can shake this upper-respiratory infection, then she's got a good prognosis for managing her kidney disease. We've got to get her through this crisis first, though, and while I do see a little progress, Isadora's still got a long way to go.

One foot in front of the other

2009-02-18T21:16:00.000-08:00

I'm kind of numb right now.

I need to go back and check the dates, but since about June 2008, we've been through the following feline emergencies:

Isadora had her external ear (pinna or auricle) amputated, due to chronic infections.
Cleo almost starved to death due to inability to eat; removing half her teeth gave her her life back.
Simon (aka Caspian) got really skinny, which turned out to be due to kidney disease; we gained a few months by treating him, but lost him in November.
Cleo lost her appetite again in January; this time, it turned out to be liver disease of some kind. Putting her through a liver biopsy to determine exactly what disease she had didn't seem indicated, given that she's such a poor surgical risk that we wouldn't operate anyway, so we treated her conservatively. I syringe-fed her, forced pills down her throat, and administered fluids subcutaneously through the skin on the back of her neck. That bought us a little time, but it ultimately wasn't enough; we lost her at the end of January.
Isadora's had a cold for about a week now, but until yesterday, seemed pretty much herself, just sneezier. Yesterday morning, though, she was totally sacked out when we left in the morning, and when we returned in the afternoon, she hadn't moved. That's kind of odd for Isadora, who likes to strut around like she owns the place, and I picked her up to see if she's ok. While not skinny (and certainly no longer Isadora the Hutt of old), she definitely seems to have lost weight. We thought it might be due to our changing their kibble, so I got out some canned food as a treat to get her to eat. She was very interested in the food, but somehow couldn't or wouldn't manage to eat it, and as she walked away from it, she staggered. It looked very much like Cleo toward the end of her liver disease, so I got her into the vet first thing this morning.

We lost a human friend (a real mensch) very recently, too, but I don't feel ready to talk about that, and mixing it with a discussion of cat emergencies doesn't feel productive right now, so we can just stipulate that I've pretty much been mainlining cortisol for a few months now and leave it there.

Anyway, the vet called me, and I thought we were going to talk about the cold. It turns out Isadora is a lot sicker than I realized--it's her kidney disease, which has been kind of low-grade since March 2007, flaring up again with a vengeance. We don't know why--maybe the cold, or something else, got her to stop drinking water for a while, she got dehydrated, and then the other symptoms spiked up, hard and fast.

The good news is, she's not as sick as Simon was, and the doctor thinks she can be successfully treated for some time to come. What surprised me was that she asked me if I wanted to do so, having just gone through it with Simon (who, to be fair, HATED his treatment, and made it clear it was an ordeal to get fluids or pills).

I dread going through this routine again. But of course, I am going to do so; there is no question about it. The fact that Simon just went through it doesn't change anything; it's not like there's just one chance at life for a kidney cat in our household and it's Izzy's bad luck that Simon got there first.

I do appreciate her asking me that; it was considerate, and I know she loves Izzy and is an advocate for her. At the same time, I am sure that if Izzy had only a poor chance at some quality time, or were likely to suffer from treatment as much as Simon did, she would tell me so honestly. She's a good vet, and having access to her to care for our cats makes this, if not exactly good, way less sucky than it *could* be.

But at the same time, it is stressful as well. I was feeling like a real Angel of Death there for a while, and when Izzy got yesterday this morning, I was beating myself up about changing her food, about what in our house could, unbeknownst to us, be poisoning all our cats one by one, and so forth. As the vet and I talked, though, it became clear that this is just the statistical cluster from Hell, though--our cats are stratifying into two groups, the older/sick ones and the younger/robust ones.

None of the younger ones have been to the vet in at least two years, and none are showing any signs of any illness. We've just got two broad groups of cats, and the circle of life is being played out. The clustering, though, is stressing me out; I'm sure that if they did a CAT scan of my head right now, they'd see the outline of the skull, lined by a thin layer of gray and white matter, and most of the image would be one huge cortisol-induced ventricle right in the middle.

Of course I am going to give Isadora her chance, and treat her kidney disease. But as to how to carry it out, I think it's not going to be conscious thought so much as just keeping going: one foot after the other....

Soapmaking and cedar II: Progress and evaluation

2008-12-27T13:25:00.000-08:00

So I'd have to give my efforts with the glycerine soap and cedar oil a C at best--it was a creative idea to try to apply the lesson in making cedar oil, but it was very lazy not to look up whether glycerine was hydrophilic or hydrophobic, so that kinds of cancels out the creativity.

It wasn't a total loss, however--very little cedar oil actually got lost, and Mr thalarctos actually likes the pure-glycerine-and-nothing-else soap. I have lots of varieties of scented and colored soap in the shower that I like to combine for a different experience each time, while he's a pure Ivory-soap type of guy. Unfortunately, he has a number of allergies--he phoned me from the allergist's office after taking a series of tests to announce that, really, he was only allergic to two things: "food" and "nature". So soap with no scent or color suits him just fine, and he's already burned through the dolphin, starfish, and seashells I made.

Clearly, the results of the first batch showed that a change of course was called for. Learning that glycerine was indeed hydrophilic implied that a water-based herbal infusion would work better, so instead of dropping the lavender I had chopped up into the oil I was planning to infuse it in, I brewed a lavender tisane instead.

"Tisane" is nothing more than the strictly correct word for what is often called "herbal tea". Since herbal teas usually don't contain any Camellia sinensis, or tea plant, "tea" is, strictly speaking, a misnomer. But they're marketed as "herbal teas", and I did have some "peppermint tea" lying around, so I made a peppermint tisane as well to continue making glycerine soap with water-based herbal infusions.

These worked out much better!

The peppermint tisane was much more effective than the lavender one at imparting color to the soap--below is the first batch of peppermint soap, and you can see that it is definitely more yellow-green than was the pure glycerine.

Which totally makes sense--the tisane dissolved in the glycerine, and so the color and scent was evenly distributed in the resulting soap.

By contrast, the lavender soap (the embossed designs, while the peppermint is plain flat surfaces), came out much paler in color.

So this batch was definitely more of a success. There is room for improvement, however--while the color is pretty even, the herbal material itself is fairly unevenly distributed--it settled out, as you can see in the following photo.

So, goals for next time--a cedar tisane, in order to make my cedar soap successfully, and a solution to the problem of the herbal material settling out unevenly.

Soapmaking and cedar I: Adventures in organic chemistry

2008-12-26T20:50:00.000-08:00

In connection with the multidisciplinary and multi-institutional initiative with Northwest Indian College to incorporate the use of traditional native plants and foods into addressing diabetes, the Seattle Art Museum hosted a tour of the exhibit S'abadeb ("Radiant Gifts" from artists of the Salish peoples of the Northwest Coast and Puget Sound area), and a tour of the native plants at the garden at the Olympic Sculpture Park.

One of the activities when we got back to the building was making cedar oil. The instructor had already harvested small cedar branches, and she put us to work cutting the needles into small pieces--the smaller the better, since that exposes more surface area. That was pretty much all we had time for at the end of a full day of activities, so she sent us home with instructions for making an infusion of cedar oil from cut needles.

I went out and got some cedar needles of my own and cut them into small pieces for simmering. However, my cedar was very young, and smelled more astringent than the cedar she had provided, so I was not sure how this was going to work.

As she had described, I covered the cedar needles with about 1/2" of extra-virgin olive oil, and turned it to "low" to simmer. "Low" turned out to be too low to keep it warm enough, so later on, it spent most of the time on "medium-low", which provided a nice steady simmer.

The house smelled nice and cedary for the next week, as I kept it on simmer whenever I was home in the evening. I had asked previously if I needed to do anything special when I turned it off to go to work in the daytime. Obviously, traditional ways of cooking and creating oils didn't use to have to accommodate the 9-5 (or later); in fact, long ago in Navajo class, our teacher mentioned the effect that had on people's ability to attend days-long ceremonies, and how it was modifying traditional practice. But there was no need to do anything more than cover it and leave it on the stove; it wasn't going to go rancid as a result.

Oil goes rancid when it oxidizes; the point of simmering it for a week is to get all the water in the plant material to evaporate, so that it can't promote oxidization of the long hydrocarbon chains in the oil. After a week of simmering, a good deal of the astringent smell of the young cedar had disappeared, so I'm guessing that a large part of that quality was water-borne as well.

After the week was up, I strained the needles out of the infusion, and had about a cupful of strongly cedar-scented oil:

It was nice, but I wanted to craft more than just oil, so I decided to break out the soapmaking supplies I had recently gotten. There are several ways of making soap; the traditional and most labor-intensive way involves a chemical reaction between a strong base (usually lye) and fats, releasing a lot of heat and corrosiveness (we actually melted a thermometer at Terry's house making soap once!), so until I have a better workspace, I'm going with the less dramatic melted-glycerine method.

Melted glycerine soapmaking is pretty much what it sounds like--glycerine is a white solid; you melt it, add colors and scents that you want for the soap, and pour it into a mold to set. I decided cedar oil soap would be a nice thing to make, and set about mixing my fresh cedar oil into the melted glycerine.

This is how the first batch of soap came out.

Can you see my mistake yet?

It's basic organic chemistry--I had not bothered to look up glycerine to see whether it was hydrophilic or hydrophobic; I just assumed that--like the olive oil--it was hydrophobic.

Hydrophilic and hydrophobic (as in "rabies" :) are physical properties of molecules, referring to their distribution of electrical charge. Very briefly, and probably criminally oversimplified, if a molecule has a positive charge at one end and a negative charge at the other, it tends to dissolve in other polar solvents, such as water, and is said to be "hydrophilic". Similarly, if a molecule does not have charged ends in that way, such as the long hydrocarbon chains in oils, then it tends to dissolve in non-polar solvents such as oils, but not in water, and is said to be "hydrophobic". This is, by the way, why oil and vinegar don't mix; vinegar is polar (hydrophilic) and oil is hydrophobic.

You see how the oil in my soap pieces is collected in spots, with lots of white glycerine in between? That means that the oil did not dissolve in the glycerine, as I had planned/hoped/expected it would.

Sure enough, wiki-ing "glycerine" yielded the following information, dammit:

Glycerol has three hydrophilic hydroxyl groups that are responsible for its solubility in water and its hygroscopic nature.

Had I bothered to look that up before just plunging in, I would not have wasted some of my cedar oil. And the soap came out pure glycerine, as all the cedar oil floated to the top and washed away (you can also see where I overfilled one of the seashells, and it ran over, erasing the boundary--note to self: even if I have a little left over, don't try to cram it all in, because that doesn't work). Oh, well, lesson learned.

Knowing belatedly that glycerine is hydrophilic, I switched to water-based herbal infusions, which worked out a lot better. I'll show how those turned out in the next post, as this one is getting quite long.