something really creepy is going on

sometimes when obama talks, i actually hear the sound of a human being with a brain in there.

is anyone else getting this impression?

i don't even really know what to make of it.

i guess we'll see how long this bizarre phenomenon lasts. he's still new.

Dear 1337 HAX0rz,

292 has been uploaded! mwahahahahaha!

f a c e b o o k - - closing down!!!

ROFL... I've heard about this application. Does it really close down facebook? Where can I get it - I hate facebook! With three exclamation points, even!

Medical Marijuana: Might let the states decide on it - keep your fingers crossed.

Every time I see Patrick Swayze with his face sunken and gaunt, it hurts me to know that he is probably going to die soon. I didn't grow up having a 'crush' on Patrick Swayze as an actor, or anything like that. But I watched the movie 'Ghost' about a million times, because it was one of the few good movies we had on tape at my parents' house. Watching the movie over and over again made me become familiar with Patrick Swayze, where you feel like an actor is just somebody you know.

I imagine he is probably using medical marijuana, privately, to make it easier for him to eat while suffering from pancreatic cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. He might be, he might not be, I don't know.

I haven't used marijuana deliberately, but I can recall two or three incidents over the years where I inhaled a small amount secondhand from other people who were smoking it. To me, it seems similar to tobacco and to many other herbal drugs (like St. John's Wort) that are legal. And as far as I know it doesn't trigger homicides and suicides (although I don't know enough firsthand to be sure) the way prescription antidepressants do. If you smoke a lot of it, and maybe use other drugs at the same time, it can raise your blood pressure enough to cause a stroke, just like tobacco does. There are dangers to using it, but it shouldn't be illegal.

(It turns out that the woman who owned the rampaging chimp had given it Xanax just before it went out and attacked a bunch of people. That's a really good 'placebo controlled' test. The chimp couldn't have had a 'placebo effect' of 'expecting himself' to go crazy after taking Xanax. But don't get me started: I believe there is no such thing as the placebo effect, and the entire concept of it is wrong.)

Today's good news says that there is serious talk about letting the states decide individually (instead of the federal government universally forbidding everyone) whether or not to allow medical marijuana. And they say they will stop raiding the shops that sell it. I feel skeptical and distrusting: "I'll believe it when I see it." It seems like it might really be true. This is an exciting thing to read in the news.

If the federal government gives a more tolerant attitude, the states themselves might also develop a more tolerant attitude. It could be a 'de facto' legalization, when they all relax about it and stop enforcing it so severely. The states will tend to copycat the federal government's attitudes in a 'voluntary' way.

martin again... the parallel universe theory

i sometimes wonder about the parallel universe theory. that he is living in a parallel universe, a universe of disinformation. the internet servers he reads have been distorted, and he can't reach the other internet servers. like me, finding 'this blog has been deleted.' when it hasn't. and the emails don't get sent, and they don't get received. and i can't see the photos on his page. and he ripped up my note before finishing it, and was prevented from understanding. and he would be forced to avoid things he needed to know. and unable to find them on the internet. and he would have the wrong idea, that people were rejecting him, when actually, they tried desperately to reach him and tell him they cared. that he thought he was sexually rejected, when actually, people found him attractive and loved him. that he thought people were his enemies, when actually they were fellow sufferers and trying to reach him. and that he was being forcibly prevented from understanding. that he was in this parallel universe of disinformation.

it is a huge and ominous conspiracy theory. but his emotions sometimes make me think he's TOTALLY CLUELESS. i don't know. clueless, and i don't mean that i have contempt about that, but i mean, clueless about me, clueless because he can't understand and can't communicate anything to me, and we can't talk to each other. he had mentioned an email that was from a really, really long time ago, as if it were the last thing he read, and he hasn't seen any new information since then. clueless because he is being forced not to know anything.

i have to give a disclaimer, which is that i did the laundry, and put on some clothes that i hadn't worn in a while, and i think they had something on them like st. john's wort, because i was definitely in a strange mood the last couple days, and talking to people and interacting differently than usual. it seemed like a drug phenomenon from the contaminated house/clothing problem.

deep sigh. all right, i guess i will put it on retmeishka. i wanted to put it on the normal blog, because there are things i want to tell him, things i want him to know, and he hasn't been told about retmeishka unless he's hacked or gotten the hackers to tell him. i said i would give him a note, and if that's true, then i don't NEED to tell him this in the blog ahead of time, because it will all be covered, if we can open up a communication.

i really, really do sometimes think he is in the parallel universe of disinformation. that upsets me a lot.

they made a loud clicking noise the last time when i went to his blog and left the comment and sent an email. the loud click was trying to tell me something important. it tells me that psychotronics are INVOLVED in this - whether he himself is one of them, or else he is surrounded by them and affected by them.

his strange 'outbursts' of saying unexpected things and the one time when he 'zoned out' make me think he is a victim, which is the parallel universe theory.

i would like the drugs to wear off and i would be back to a more calm state of mind before talking to him. there is no need for a sense of urgency, franticness, or desperation. that feeling needs to go away, that intense anxiety, because there is no urgency. i said (to myself, that is) that i would prepare a note asking him to communicate with me in a calm, formal environment, with limits and restrictions, possibly with both of us having a friend come along. he could have a friend with him to make sure that i didn't 'say something weird.' i really don't want to say anything 'weird.' when i am ready to write the note, i will tell his friend about it ahead of time, and i would mention that it was a BRIEF note.

i hate not having control over when i use drugs and when i don't, because of their being on the clothing and around the house. the house needs to be cleaned and decontaminated. i don't even know which drug it is, if it is st. john's wort, or what. i don't want to use drugs when i don't choose to use them - i want to use them only by choice, when i want to. (they go through the skin... long story. i blogged about it a while ago.)

i have made OTHER FRIENDS over these past few years. i have made casual friends. i can easily see us being casual friends, and that would be okay.

'they' are the ones who made a big deal out of it, not me. i trust myself, but apparently, they don't trust me. to me it seems obvious that... i hate sentence stems. i hate when they stick the beginning of a sentence in your head, hoping you'll finish the sentence. anyway, i trust myself. i know that i am not going to do anything impulsive or harmful to him. the barriers and restrictions are THE CAUSE of the awkwardness and unnaturalness. they are THE REASON why i have distorted behavior and distorted emotions now. just like zimbabwe being under siege - just the other day, i thought of 'economic sanctions,' and noticed: that is a politically correct euphemism for 'under siege.' zimbabwe is under siege. they blame zimbabwe for its dictator's behavior, they make fun of its currency hyperinflating, but it is UNDER SIEGE. you can't expect it to behave in a healthy, natural way while it is UNDER SIEGE. i am in the same situation. there are unnatural restrictions and physical/mental attacks on me which have prevented me from communicating with him - especially the lost emails. this distorts everything and it CAUSES strange behavior.

all it takes is for people to openly, honestly confront each other face to face, and SO MANY THINGS suddenly become natural and simple and easy instead of all distorted. they just have to look at each other and see their real emotions on each other, instead of the imaginary assumptions and distorted delusions they've had all this time. all they have to see are the real emotions on each other, and it is clear and natural and obvious what everything is all about. and nothing is wrong, or evil, or dangerous. it is two normal human beings interacting. these artificial barriers are THE REASON for my distorted, exaggerated feelings and behavior.

Prisons in Greece are easy to get out of

Prison break repeat shocks Greece

The funny part about the story is that this guy escaped from prison using exactly the same method he used the first time - a helicopter came to pick him up.

I bet the second time the helicopter came, they were all like, 'Hahahah, remember that time when Vassilis escaped in a helicopter? Hey, they're coming back for you!' Vassilis: 'Haha, yeah, that was a great time. Well, I better go catch it before it leaves, see you guys later!' (still play-acting). 'Okay, time to go back to our cells. Hey, where's Vassilis and Alket?'

Community: When children grow up, their values and beliefs may differ drastically from their parents'.

I have wondered about the long term stability of intentional communities. I found a book in Google Books which documented several examples of communities that failed. It was very pessimistic. That's why I like the Diana Leafe Christian books - and yes, I know I keep advertising it - because they talk about both the failures and the successes, and it's not just vague and general, but instead, very specific in describing techniques used to create successful, long-lasting communities.

I've always thought that communities change over generations partly because new children grow up with different values and beliefs than their parents had. I wonder about a mechanism for keeping the community stable, without just suppressing new ideas. I imagine giving young adults a ceremony that asks them whether they really want to remain part of the community, now that they're old enough to have some idea what they want. (For instance, the Amish baptize people in adulthood, not childhood.) They can temporarily leave, and come back later on after seeing the world. Or they can leave permanently, and join the mainstream world. Or they can leave, but stay nearby and create another community of their own with slightly different values and goals, and that community will cooperate with the old community, yet still be free to do its own thing.

With the voting system, one group of people KIND OF gets what they want, while a whole other large group of people doesn't get what they want, or gets something they don't want. (In reality, even the 'winning' voters will see their plan changed as it moves through the bureaucracy and is eventually written into a law, and even then it might not be enforced or implemented the way they want.) Over and over again, laws and decisions are made which are disliked by a large group of people who don't agree with them. The laws apply to everybody. And you can't do anything about it because you were born here, and the whole society was already set up before you were born. Your only choice is to leave the country, because there are so many bad laws now that you personally have no chance of getting all of them fixed.

DLC's books describe other methods of making community decisions, not just majority voting.

I'd like to explicitly teach community-building knowledge to children as part of their basic education. It would make them feel more empowered to change the world, so that they don't just get frustrated and give up whenever they see how hopeless it is to try to vote for the government to do what you want it to do.

The communities exist like tiny landlocked countries surrounded by a larger, hostile nation. I call it hostile because they still force you to pay taxes and comply with zoning laws, and if anybody snitches or has a grievance against you or a community member, the IRS, Drug Enforcement Agency, secret agents (like the ones who infiltrated Ed and Elaine Brown's group of friends and captured them for tax evasion), helicopters, tanks, Child Protection Services, etc will eventually show up. Somebody interfaces with the hostile surrounding nation by dealing with government paperwork and bureaucracy, but the community can be set up so that members of the community are partially shielded from directly dealing with government all the time. They can talk to their internal community associations and get advice from them instead of talking directly with government agencies, at least for some types of issues.

All communities have a 'dropout rate,' the percentage of people who decide to leave. But in the mainstream community, it's harder to leave, it's not easy to really know or understand what you're trying to get away from or where you can go to find something better, and you don't know how to create a place that works the way you want it to work. It's possible to move around and find places that have slightly better conditions.

But it helps a lot to live in a community where they have a focused, specific, explicitly written statement of their shared values, beliefs, and goals. It's easily accessible to anyone, all of the time, because frequent community meetings require your participation, and you will always be focused on those shared rules and goals. In a small, focused community, you can't avoid being conscious of the community's rules. If you decide to leave, you'll know the reasons why you're leaving, what specifically you want to get away from, and you might have an idea of what specifically you want to see done instead. You might be less likely to just vaguely drift around not knowing what you want, like people do when they get 'lost' in the mainstream world. Living in a community and participating in its government gives you a better feeling for what you want done and how to do it.

I don't have a lot of time left to write...

Communities and cultures can get corrupted from within, which happened over a period of centuries in this country. Even an intentional community which starts out pretty focused can change over time. But you always know that you can start another one if you can't fix the first one. And again, DLC's books give examples of long-lasting communities that are working well. I'd like to see more examples of subcultures and subcommunities that lasted for hundreds of years - most of the examples are things that started maybe 30 years ago - but still, it's a mostly positive and optimistic constructive approach to the subject of building communities. Not just stories that reinforce the message 'All intentional communities fail, so don't even bother.'

I want community because I am preparing to start a family and raise children. I want my children to have a future. I see economic instability and collapse, and cultural corruption, and bad health, getting worse and worse in the mainstream's future. I see the mainstream world still has taboos on certain subjects like electronic mind control. I want a community that protects my children against those things, and protects their children as well, so that they have a safe world and can be happy and healthy.

one of these days i'll have to talk about julian simon and the ultimate resource again: it was another mostly optimistic book. i'm disagreeing with some parts of that book now, a few years after reading it, but its overall optimistic spirit is part of all of my assumptions about the future.

...have to go to work now.

can't wait for winter to be over.

I think that my recurring health problems, which seem to happen most in the wintertime, might be caused by closing the windows and breathing indoor air pollution from whatever is in the house. It's not merely 'Seasonal Affective Disorder,' or winter depression - and yes, I do get a little bit of that. But it was late autumn this year when everything just collapsed, and it happens year after year. I feel great in the spring and summer when the windows are open, and more and more awful in the autumn as it gets cold enough to keep the windows closed all the time. And eventually, by midwinter, I'm totally incapacitated and can barely make it to work every day, much less do any projects that require thinking or effort.

I had an incident with my landlord where I went to work, on a warm day sometime last week (or whenever it was pretty warm recently) and left my windows open and the fan on. When I came home, I had a voicemail from the landlord saying that he had gone up to my apartment and closed the windows because 'the temperature was dropping drastically,' and he didn't want the pipes to freeze. It wasn't dropping all that drastically, and also, I would be home from work before late night, when it would get really cold. The pipes wouldn't even come close to having time to freeze. It was like 50 degrees outside.

If this was merely the landlord expressing his annoyance and being worried about the pipes freezing, it wouldn't bother me so much. But I get scared when things like that happen because I could get evicted if my landlord and I have too many conflicts over things like that. I did get evicted once in the past for a variety of reasons - long story.

It's almost March, and soon I'll be able to have the windows open more often. Right now, my friend gave me an air filter, and I'm using it and observing the results. I'm not sure yet. There's been some improvement in here but every time I've thought that, it's gotten bad again.

I just hate the fact that a predictable, recurring event - a seasonal change - is ruining my health and disrupting my life, year after year after year. I am really serious when I say that I wouldn't mind living in a primitive mud hut with straw bales or whatever for insulation. After sleeping in my car, I know it's possible to keep warm with enough layers.

I read something in my book and I laughed yesterday:

From Diana Leafe Christian, 'Creating A Life Together,' a book about how to build intentional communities. I can't say enough great things about those Diana Leafe Christian books and I'd recommend them to everybody who calls themselves an anarchist or a libertarian. If you think the government needs to be completely shut down, then somebody somewhere must be responsible for doing all of the 'services' that government is supposed to do. These books are about how to build an intentional community - a community where you yourself are directly responsible for community decisions about how people will get along with each other, who is responsible for community maintenance (without government, who will clean the sewers?), where does our money come from, etc. As an anarchist I must ask myself, if government didn't exist, then what would I myself do to take its place?

Well anyhow I laughed at the phrase 'Sustainabler Than Thou,' in a section of the book talking about negative attitudes that community founders can develop. People can get into major arguments over relatively trivial things seen as ecologically unsustainable. She didn't give any examples but I understood right away.

Another attitude problem: When we were starting our community, WE slept in tents for three years without heat or running water. It was talking about how community founders had hard times in the beginning before their community was stabilized, and so, when new members come in after the place is built, they haven't suffered as much as the original members, and don't know what they went through. I used to have to walk to school uphill both ways barefoot in the snow.

Anyway reading about that reminded me of sleeping in my car. I actually feel stronger because of it: it's a primitive wilderness survival skill. I know how to sleep in the car in cold weather. I used to actually be planning a phase where I would live out of my car, but I hadn't gotten around to that yet. I was going to put all my stuff into a U-Stor shed or something. It would be a way to save money I would have spent on rent. I actually almost feel like I could do it now. But cooking would be really hard to do. I don't want to eat fast food all the time.

this site may harm your health, part... whatever

I cleaned up some parts of the floor, and also the top of the refrigerator where I had had the bottles of Clorox and other cleaning stuff. I moved some things around which I thought might have had spilled chemicals on them. A couple of things I set out on the porch.

Well, as a test, I've still been walking around and inhaling the air in different parts of the house to see if I can locate a source of the fumes. Now that I've eliminated some possible sources, it's easier to be sure that I know where it's coming from.

There is now a big 'DO NOT' on my list. Do not open the door of the electric water heater closet and inhale the air for a couple minutes to test and see if that's where the fumes are coming from. Because that is, indeed, where the fumes are coming from.

But it had a delayed effect. I felt relatively okay at first. There was some irritation in my throat. It was after I had shut the door, walked away, sat down, and tried to eat something.

I felt pain in my lungs that didn't go away. I expected it to fade quickly. I then gradually become more nauseated over the next few minutes and felt dizzy like I would pass out.

I called my landlord to ask him if he had sprayed anything in there at all when he came to check for frozen pipes a few weeks ago. He said no, he hadn't.

Here is my explanation. It might have been a couple of things happening at once. First, when he came in, I moved some junk out of the way, kicking over a bottle of household cleaner that was on the floor, which rolled over to another area where some other stuff had leaked/spilled. That might have set off some fumes. I cleaned that up as well as I could.

Next, the door to the water heater was open for a long time. And the cold winter winds are blowing through the cracks and holes in the walls, and I see there are holes in the places where the pipes go through, in the closet. So when the drafts blow, it blows anything that is in the closet out. I've done better when that door has been closed, but it was really bad when the door was open. So there might actually be two separate places where fumes seem to be coming from.

I cleaned up the only things that I had control over, but I can't do anything about the mystery fumes in the water heater closet. It seems to be what the heater itself is made of. Either that or something used to put it together. I smelled something from the top of the water heater itself. There were drops of melted metal solder, and some kind of dust that looked like it fell from above when somebody drilled something. I don't see any 'openly visible' chemicals that jump out at you. It seems to be coming from the material itself that something is made of. Maybe when it heats up, it releases some kind of fumes.

So having that door open for a couple days, and having drafty winds blowing through that closet, has made it worse. But that's not the whole explanation and I still don't understand.

Maybe it's a particulate dust instead of a gas. Then, it settled all over the house. Every time the wind blows, the dust is stirred up. It could be coming out of the walls through the holes, or coming off the water heater itself. I don't know. It seemed to get better after I vacuumed. Vacuuming was one of the things that I have done in working on the house myself.

I did actually get a few friends who responded to my request for help, but I haven't actually accepted their offers yet. I wanted to try to troubleshoot it myself a little more and do whatever I could.

Misinterpretation of the dead chimpanzee cartoon!

The New York Post cartoon shows a chimpanzee shot dead by the police (which really happened recently when a famous trained chimp escaped and attacked somebody). The joke said, 'They'll have to find somebody else to write the next stimulus bill.'

MISINTERPRETATION: People are freaking out because they say it means that Obama is being compared to a chimp, and it's an African-American related insult.

My interpretation: The stimulus bill is insane gibberish. Therefore, it must've been written by a chimp. Chimps are commonly perceived as wild, hyperactive, unpredictable, misbehaving, and childlike. The next time they need some more insane gibberish written, they'll have to find some other chimp to do it. I don't interpret it as having anything to do with Obama himself.

Plus, presidents don't write bills. They have all these other people who actually write the bills. It's a big group of people writing it, not just the president himself. When I picture that, I'd say the cartoon would be more accurate if it showed a whole room full of dead chimps (yes, that is offensive, but still) instead of merely one.

No Shampoo experiment

This is a somewhat incoherent blog, as I'm not really able to concentrate today. I'm having a problem with mysterious fumes in the house and I'm trying to fix it, but right now, it's still lingering. I've been so sick for the past few weeks that I can't even write blogs.

Well, I just read about using vinegar on your hair, and now I've decided NOT to try it. I did try it a long time ago when I had much shorter hair. I didn't dilute it, and it burned and irritated my face, so I had a bright red face for a couple days. (That was white vinegar, undiluted. They recommend using apple cider vinegar, diluted.) I am still going to use vinegar for housecleaning, since I'm not keeping any chemicals in the house anymore. (The definition of 'chemical' is anything dangerous and reactive, in a bottle, that's going to spill and fill the house with mysterious fumes for weeks.)

Anyway, the results of the experiment so far:

I've only rinsed my hair with hot water, and combed it out in the shower. Nothing else. Not even vinegar, baking soda, or the other things people are trying. (I didn't like the idea of baking soda, after reading somebody who said it was similar to getting a perm, and that it actually changed the structure of the hair. Since I'm in a hurry, I didn't research that any further to find out whether it was true. It might be wrong.)

After several weeks of using nothing at all except water: My hair has always been greasy, and I used to shampoo it daily. It is now classic length (hip length). The grease is building up on the hair, and has a sticky texture like chewing gum. My hair is now very hard to comb, especially being as long as it is. Lint is sticking to the grease on the hair. When I comb it, the lint sticks in the comb, and I can see the color of the sweater I was wearing that day.

I have a feeling that the goal of this experiment is to convince me to just let my long hair form natural dreadlocks. The un-combability of it suggests that to me. If I didn't comb it, it would start matting, but it wouldn't look the same as the dreadlocks of the afro-coily hair texture. The grease is so gummy and sticky, not oily, that it sticks the hair together and tangles it. I'm sure it would form dreadlocks, and I haven't yet firmly committed myself to accepting dreadlocks just yet.

However, dreadlocks wouldn't be the end of the world. I think that, with my straight hair, if I decided I didn't want the dreadlocks anymore, I could painstakingly comb them out. It would create a lot of loose, disconnected hairs that would detach whenever I combed out the dreadlocks. I have a feeling that the next step of my experiment will be to stop combing it, accept the tangling and matting, maybe just slightly detangle it with my fingers, and see what happens when gummy grease and tangles form dreadlocks in thin, straight hair.

My only concern about natural dreadlocks is that they will be irregular. I've seen some pictures of people with irregular dreadlocks. They can have some places with large mats, and other places with small strings. They aren't the perfectionistic dreadlocks that you see on people who are deliberately and carefully making dreadlocks on purpose.

I will create a way of pinning up my hair in a bun so that I can wear it in a 'tidy' style at work. It might end up being a rolled-up ponytail or something - I'm not sure yet - it will have to be something that is short and wrapped up and neat looking, which won't tangle in any moving parts of machinery, like the conveyor belt of the pizza oven. (Avoiding the pizza oven's conveyor belt has been one of my main concerns of the long braid.)

One of my coworkers was looking at a caucasian male customer who had waist-length blond dreadlocks. She looked revolted, horrified, and disapproving. "He'll have to CUT those out," she muttered quietly to me. That assumes that he merely 'wasn't aware' that he would 'need' to cut the hair to remove the dreadlocks, and it assumes that he WANTS to remove the dreadlocks, or that there is some reason why he should.

I'm not convinced that dreadlocks have to be cut out. A long time ago, my family had a Samoyed dog. Some parts of her long white fur tangled into mats. I used to get a fine toothed comb, and gently pluck apart the mats. If she could tolerate sitting patiently long enough while having her hair tugged and fooled with, then I was able to get them out. She had straight hair, not coily hair, so her texture would be similar to my own. It just takes patience. I could do that if I decided I didn't want my dreadlocks anymore. I would do a little bit at a time, and then braid the untangled portions so that they would stay untangled. Then I'd work on it a little at a time. In other words I don't have to be 'afraid' that the dreadlocks won't comb out or that they'll be permanent and irreversible. There would be a few tangles that would be too complicated to remove. I do occasionally have 'complex' tangles that I rip or cut out, but it's rare, and it's usually due to a lack of patience rather than the knot itself being unsolvable.

So I haven't decided yet. I might possibly stop combing, tolerate the sticky grease, endure the unwanted clothing lint, and see what happens. The grease makes my hair stay wet for a long time, which will make me freeze in the wintertime. That's the nice thing about combing - it helps the hair dry. So I have a feeling that with greasy dreadlocks, I am going to get wet hair that stays wet for four hours at a time or something. I guess I'll find out...

communication

this is for my own temporary peace of mind.

visited a blog which i hadn't seen in a while. one had said it was deleted, but on impulse, i went to look at it, and it was back again. left a comment on one. sent an email. (several months ago his friend had said he wasn't receiving emails from me, but i don't know how to interpret that without specifics.) a few minutes after i wrote the comment and the email, i received a loud snapping noise on one of the objects in my room (i haven't talked much about the phenomenon of snapping/clicking noises as part of electronic harassment). went back to the blog a couple days later, and both blogs had a message saying they had been deleted. no reply to email. have not had a chance to ask about it and don't know whether communication will be possible or not, because there is a lot of interference whenever i try to think about it.

irony

The irony of that last post is, that the reason I had enough courage/strength to ask for help in cleaning up, was because I was in the middle of having a reaction from some of the contamination. I slept on something that had St. John's Wort on it and as a result had more gall than usual (but was half-dead exhausted all day). I find that I can't ask for help when I'm really feeling like crap. I can only ask for help whenever I'm feeling slightly stronger than usual. When I need it most, I can't ask. That would require mental focus.

Volunteers?

I put an ad on Craigslist tonight.

http://pennstate.craigslist.org/dmg/1035144077.html

I'm also going to start contacting people I know and asking them if they can help.

Fridge: 45 degrees, coldest setting

fridge was left on all night, door shut, thermometer inside it, and when i opened it this morning, the thermometer STILL said 45 degrees. that's what it said when i checked it last night, too.

last night i had noticed that it didn't seem very cold inside, when i reached in there for something. so i put a 'house' thermometer in there. (not a medical thermometer.) 45 degrees.

googled it. supposed to be around 33 to 47. mine is on the COLDEST setting, so i would expect it to be around 33. they gave it plus or minus 6 degrees: it varies when the room temperature is higher or lower, and if you're opening the fridge door a lot. so at highest, mine should be maybe 39 degrees.

left alone all night long, it would reach the coldest, with nobody opening the door.

called a repair guy to ask questions. he thinks a leak is unlikely. i think so too: it seems like it would have all leaked away by now.

but he agreed with me that 45 degrees was unusually warm, especially on the coldest setting.

but maybe i'm so chemical-sensitive that only a few molecules are leaking, and that small amount is screwing me up really badly.

another *anecdote* found on the web said that a coolant leak gave somebody else symptoms of fatigue, sleepiness, mental confusion, and some other problems, i forget, which were similar to mine. it was inside a vehicle and it came from the air conditioner, if i recall, but i'm not sure. (I <3 Anecdotes. I don't normally use metaphors, but, the internet is a gold mine, and medical anecdotes are the gold.)

it would have to be very, very slowly leaking only a few molecules at a time. it really seems like it would be all leaked out by now, and totally not working anymore, if it's been going on for these weeks and weeks.

this is in the category of things that might or might not be my fault. i don't know how i would have punctured any part of the fridge... except that i did accidentally push it back against the wall, when i fell or leaned against it one day. it's on wheels, and it rolled easily and banged against the wall. all those metal bars on the back, which radiate heat, DO NOT contain any refrigerant: i asked the repair guy that question. i mistakenly believed that refrigerant circulated around inside those metal 'pipes' in the back, but it doesn't. however, it could still have sent a mechanical shock to the place where the metal bars attach to the stuff inside.

so, latest theory: refrigerant leak, very slow, only a few molecules, somehow slowly enough that it still barely has enough refrigerant left to keep almost functioning, but not very well.

will talk to landlord. the thermometer shows a visible number which can be seen by the eyes of non-chemical-sensitive people. so he can agree: it's unusual for the coldest setting to reach only 45 degrees. he has no symptoms from the fumes, and will never agree with me that there's anything wrong with the air at all.

i am afraid to be hopeful: i'm afraid i'll get the fridge fixed or replaced, and the problems will still continue. but i can only do one theory at a time and then see what happens...

if you notice any misspellings or typos, i am being very careful, but even staying in here a few minutes (unless i open the windows and air it out) screws up my brain. (i guess i could use a spellchecker, but i am not in the habit of using them and i usually forget they exist. *REAL* bloggers don't USE spellcheckers! lol) when i'm close to the fridge, my legs get weak and i actually stumble and become uncoordinated. i have to keep typing and erasing words to fix the typos. it's annoying.

i still can't believe this would be the source of the fumes. it seems like there was SO MUCH. it seems like the fridge would have leaked it all and it would be gone by now. but we'll see.

What can you do if you are being attacked by electronic weapons?

This isn't a complete list - it's only the beginning of a work in progress. So far I have four main categories: Psychological/Spiritual, Health, Logical, and Technical/Tactical. Technical/tactical countermeasures are my weakest area: I know almost nothing useful there, yet that is some of the most important and most badly needed information.

PSYCHOLOGICAL/SPIRITUAL
1. endure
2. wait - attacks can change gradually over months and years, and become less severe or less direct over time. sometimes "new people" seem to take over, and after they've gotten used to you, they are less abusive/hurtful than they were in the beginning
3. have something to hope for in the future
4. don't panic
5. talk about it to a close friend or write it online
6. let feelings, sensations, and emotions flow through your body, recognize that they are NOT your own, recognize that the feelings are being triggered by the attacks, accept that it is okay to feel angry/hurt/frustrated/enraged/violated, etc. It helps me to assume "During an attack, all emotions are fake." The feeling of Rage is often triggered artificially during an attack, when actually, the "real you" could just sit there silently feeling nothing at all. For me, Rage is always fake.
7. "Emotional Freedom Techniques" / "Thought Field Therapy": these techniques are similar to accupressure and you can read about them on the net. While being attacked, you can calm and soothe yourself, even though the attacks will continue. You tap and press on various parts of the torso, hands, and face, and it can greatly help you relax and focus.

HEALTH
1. observe how drugs affect the attacks and your experience of them. You might still need to use drugs, but just be mentally prepared for the results that you know will happen. When I've used my herbal antidepressant recently and I'm withdrawing from it, I notice a lot of "zinging" in my head, which usually isn't as noticeable. They do it in a sort of Morse Code pattern, with rhythmic, numeric taps. When I used Prozac for two weeks (it was horrible, and I won't touch Prozac with a ten-foot-pole ever again!) it made me hear voices EVEN MORE CLEARLY, with *perfect* audio quality! (And psychiatric drugs are supposed to "help" you?) My salvation, most of the time, is that I just can't HEAR what they're saying, because the audio quality is so bad. When I can hear them clearly, I'm able to be offended and disgusted by what they say. Usually it's more like a staticky crackle.
2. improve whatever you have direct control over: diet, drugs, walking outdoors, fresh air
3. avoid PRESCRIPTION drugs at all costs, if you can. Many of these drugs actually trigger people to commit suicide or homicide. They give you such an unbearable, intolerable feeling of discomfort that you can't bear to exist. Prescription psychiatric drugs *CAUSE PEOPLE TO COMMIT SUICIDE AND HOMICIDE.* If you use any drugs at all, use only a microdosage, a tiny fragment of the pill, not the whole thing. This also applies to herbal and alternative medicines.
4. Feingold Diet. I was born in the 1970s when the Feingold Diet was first popular, and my parents put me on the diet when I was a toddler - it made a huge difference immediately. You can become hyperactive, restless, and attention-deficit by eating foods that most people consider healthy, like fruits and vegetables, wheat, and milk. The Feingold Diet helps you observe which foods trigger hyperactivity for you. *Wheat* can cause people to behave in the way that is diagnosed as "Schizophrenia," which usually means that somebody has trouble thinking clearly and trouble communicating clearly. This ISN'T necessarily the result of psychotronic attacks, but instead, it's caused by foods. Psychotronic attacks are still real, and they still will cause confusion and other problems, but foods and drugs can do that too. Foods can explain why you're in a bad mood, anxious, or irritable all the time.

LOGICAL
1. innocent until proven guilty: always assume that you don't know for certain who's doing it. Why? because lying, framing people, and misleading someone to attack an innocent person are the center of their whole approach. If they convince you that some particular person is guilty, they could be lying and using you as a tool, and you could be accusing an innocent person or damaging that person's reputation wrongly. Do not retaliate.
2. assume people are puppets. assume they do not consciously intend to attack you. Instead of believing that "everybody's in on it," remember instead that "they" can make ordinary, innocent people "get an impulse" to say something, or do something, which harasses you or has a special symbolic meaning that only you can understand. They'll make innocent people seem like they "know" things about you, when actually that person doesn't know or understand anything about it at all. Gang stalking is real, but sometimes, it only LOOKS like a gang, when it's actually a bunch of innocent puppets who don't even know they're being controlled and forced to say or do harassing things to you.
3. observe and record incidents, if it helps you feel better to do this
4. distinguish random accidents from attacks. Random coincidences do still happen. Sometimes events are staged, sometimes the coincidences were made to happen by the attackers, but other times, things really do happen at random. (They don't control EVERYTHING! This is a reassuring thought.)

TECHNICAL/TACTICAL (this is where I have the LEAST useful information!)
1. drive off in your car
2. visit relatives and friends. When my attacks first began, I drove to visit my family in another state, several hundred miles away. The attacks completely stopped for the first two nights, and I slept peacefully. Then it began again on the third night after an unusual vehicle was driving around in the neighborhood. ("Unusual" means: somebody was screaming at the top of their lungs, out the window of the car, late at night, over and over again.)
3. metal objects and furniture may help. On some web page (I forget where) a guy described using metal file cabinets around his bed.
4. try visiting a cave
5. binaural beats on headphones can be downloaded from the internet (but when I used them, the high pitches made my ears ring, so I wore earplugs and listened through the earplugs) - these can affect or control your mental focus or relaxation while you try to do some tasks and activities
6. reduce the level of non-directed, unintentional, ambient electromagnetic and radio noise. You can go to a place with fewer radio stations and fewer cell phone towers. You can also build a low-tech junk shield made of ordinary aluminum foil taped over a cardboard box - it WON'T block the attacks! and of course you will feel ridiculous, but it will reduce the background radiation, and you can test a cell phone and see that the cell phone won't work behind the shield. This ambient radiation is somehow connected to certain types of attacks and surveillance - I hear more voices whenever I approach radio and cell towers.
7. videotape your house or apartment. I used to have a videotape running in my apartment at all times. I sold it back to the guy I bought it from, but now I wish I had it again. It was very reassuring. This will help you watch yourself and see if you do anything strange while sleeping - you can record the exact minute when somebody zapped you awake, for instance, by looking at the videotape and seeing when you moved. I used a VCR with time-lapse setting so that it recorded more slowly and didn't use as much tape. Hook it up to an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) if you want.

****

Again, this list isn't done yet. I haven't been able to focus on this problem very much because for a while now I've been dealing with health problems that were more of an emergency. For me personally, the psychotronic attacks are *mild* compared to some people's, and I am nowhere near the level of torture, abuse, and life-threatening attacks and physical injuries that other people experience.

horizon picture

Lately I've been learning how to write HTML and how to do simple things, like customize the picture above this blog. I used Jasc Paint Shop Pro to crop part of a photo that I took. I may change it later. I just wanted something pleasant and comforting to be up there. (I bought Paint Shop Pro years and years ago, back in the days when I could afford to just go out and buy software.) I used "progressive encoding," which makes the picture load as a bunch of blurry blocks instead of loading from the top down - just to be different, I guess. And I compressed it a lot, because I use dialup, so I want to make my pages dialup-friendly, so it should be a pretty small file.

I got rejected too!!!

Where's my sailor hat? I need to speak to someone who has authority!

US military base in Kyrgyzstan shutting down?

This is the best news I've heard all day. The US has a military base in one of the former Soviet Union states, Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan says they finally want us to get out of there, and when it shuts down, we will have six months to get out. If that happens, I will jump for joy, if somebody reminds me about it six months from now and if the troops and everything really are leaving from that place. Getting the US military out of other people's countries - this is a good start...

it's back

3 sweaters
3 pairs of socks
2 pairs of pants
2 sleeping bags
1 down coat
1 cell phone that rang twice but stopped ringing before i could find it and unzip it from the pocket it was in

don't ask

believe it or not, i was comfortably warm once i added the extra clothing.

***

it must be something in the house which is caused by bitter cold temperatures.

SOMEONE WITH AUTHORITY!!!

(***the story behind this: just for the heck of it, i looked at providers of free website hosting. something where you make your own html page from scratch. i didn't want one of the things where they give you a 'template' of any kind, and you just fill out an easy form where all the boring details have been taken care of. instead i wanted to learn how to handcraft my own html with a text editor, just for fun, and then see how to get it noticed by a search engine. i've practiced learning html-from-scratch a couple times in the past but never really done anything big, just 'hello world' type stuff.***)

okay. with free-space.net, or whatever it is, they have a facebook group for the webmasters. and there is this guy who's FREAKING OUT because his application for a free site was rejected. he's writing all these messages, asking for SOMEONE WITH AUTHORITY to talk about this with him. he has on this sailor hat, like a navy guy, and the name of his site is 'childminders.com' or something like that. and he's like 'WHY WAS MY APPLICATION REJECTED! I NEED TO TALK TO SOMEONE IN AUTHORITY! THEY'RE NOT ANSWERING ME!'

1. you get what you pay for. this is a free site. it's run by a couple of college students who are busy doing everything else in addition to hosting this free web site. that is what i gathered from reading the forums and just glancing around. it's not really a professional, official thing, just some half-assed project that they're doing on the side. you are not going to get instant responses or reliable service. i gathered this very quickly after they said they'd activate the account within twelve hours and more than a day has gone by, and i read about other people getting the same problem, and i just got this feeling that i don't really know when, or if, they will activate the account at all, or how many days i'll be waiting. i looked around at the forums and the support section, and it's very informal. a 'just something they do on the side' kind of thing. when they feel like it. that doesn't bother me, since i wasn't starting a life-or-death website where i'll starve and be unable to pay my rent if my free website isn't up and running right this very instant. i just wanted to look at it and start an informal practice website. but this sailor-hat guy is acting like THERE ARE NO OTHER FREE WEB HOSTS AVAILABLE ON EARTH! THIS IS THE ONLY ONE, AND, BY GOD, MY APPLICATION *MUST* BE APPROVED!!! WHY WAS IT REJECTED???

2. sailor hat. do not take a picture of yourself wearing a sailor hat, then go to a facebook forum and expect everyone to take you seriously when you are shouting about 'someone with authority.' there is something about people wearing sailor hats that makes me think of that singing group, what was their name, the guys singing the song 'YMCA,' and every time i see people in navy uniforms and sailor hats, i am going to think of them from now on.
3. childminders.com. anything with the word 'child' in the url, run by a guy with a sailor hat who is freaking out about 'someone with authority' just somehow doesn't work for me. the more you freak out, the guiltier you look. why not just go to some other free web host? why take it personally? why not just call them a couple of half-assed, unprofessional, busy, involved-in-other-projects, college students, who aren't getting paid to do this, and therefore aren't giving reliable service? but no, you have to DEMAND that something gets done about this terrible injustice of your free website application getting rejected. because if someone rejected your application, there must be a PERSONAL REASON why it was rejected... they must be *accusing* you of *doing something BAD*!

4. so, is this going to be a website about little boys wearing sailor uniforms while 'someone with authority' tells them to do things?

there really is such a thing as giving a *really* bad first impression to people, and communicating badly, and undermining yourself when you try more and more desperately to DEMAND that they give you what you want, RIGHT NOW! SOMEONE WITH AUTHORITY!

Fumes have been reduced

Well, the last day or two has been much better. I don't know if my own actions solved the problem, or if the problem solved itself due to factors beyond my control.

I decided to clean some areas of the bathroom, assuming that bleach and ammonia might have mixed with each other. It really did seem like the fumes started right after I sprayed the Windex.

I sprayed off the shower curtain with water. At some time in the past, I had probably sprayed the shower curtain with a bleach-containing cleaner because it was moldy. It might not have all been rinsed off. Then, just recently, I sprayed NEAR the shower curtain with a type of Windex cleaner, which might have contained ammonia. According to that theory, I would have to just wash off those locations thoroughly with water. So I did the best I could to spray them off, and I got hot water and wiped off parts of the floor around there also.

The fumes are much less today.

The other thing is not really resolved. The hot water heater area really does have something strange in the air. I just closed the closet door to the water heater without understanding what could be in the air or what I could do about it. It isn't carbon monoxide. I have a couple of theories about it, but right now, it seems to be reduced, not as bad as before. I can't tell if maybe it's just the bleach-ammonia collecting there because it's a small closed area without a breeze.

I am also wondering if this happens in the winter because of something freezing somewhere in the bitter cold. Or something electrical, overheating because of running the heat so much in the house. (It seemed to be happening when I had my space heater plugged in over on that wall.) But again, no real explanation. I only know that it's better today and that I can tolerate being in here. My throat burns less and less, and my heart isn't pounding like it was, and I'm nowhere near the about-to-pass-out feeling. I've been able to sleep in here.

So I have four days off this week. The first two days, I was still deathly sick and groggy and unable to think when I was in the house. I was trying to clean up the source of the fumes, while still being affected by the fumes. So I was very slow and confused and ineffective at first. But after doing the couple of things I did (or, after the mysterious unknown factors caused the problem to fade away on its own), it's getting better enough that I am starting to be able to think clearly again and function. I am not quite so miserable and exhausted.

I requested the three-day work week, which I had wanted for a while, but actually, I wasn't ready for it. I had wanted to get a second job first, and make the two jobs fit together on those three days. But I had to cut hours immediately because of how severe this problem was. I had been having severe fatigue for several weeks, maybe even months, getting worse without explanation, and it was affecting my ability to work.

So I got a couple of three-day weeks scheduled. And then, suddenly, I got a one-day week. So I looked and they hired somebody new in my department and cut my hours further, much more than I had asked them to.

My feeling about this? Hurt, unappreciated? Yes, kind of... But also, I am looking on the bright side. My life is a disaster, I am struggling just to barely get by, I have been so sick that I could hardly bring myself to work every day, so I'm not really complaining about a one-day week. I am asking myself, 'What am I going to do with all that free time?' I have specific answers to that question; I am going to do things to try to get better.

I think that if I get well enough to work again I will be able to get some hours back or maybe work in a different department. They have been cutting hours a lot anyway and I'm not the only person who had something like this happen.

I hate asking for money from my parents. I wish that they could understand how sick I am, how it's actually real that I have chemical sensitivity and chronic fatigue, and that I seem to get sick more often and worse than other people. I don't WANT to keep asking my parents to help me pay my bills, for the rest of my life! My self-respect is lower when I do that. I want to be self-reliant.

I observed that my life is a series of disasters and job losses, over and over, through this whole past decade. Various things happen again and again; there's not much stability; some of it has been caused by economic bubbles, loss of temp jobs, etc. Some of it has been caused by things that I didn't understand until later. Some of it has been caused by health problems and chemical sensitivity. There are lots of reasons.

The disasters piled up one after another and I decided I wasn't able to recover from them by myself anymore. They were piling up too quickly, and another disaster would occur before I had even finished recovering from the previous problems. So the focus this year has been on meeting people and making friends so that I have more options when I need to ask for help. This isn't a miracle happening all at once, but rather, it's been just more of a choice of saying 'yes' more often instead of 'no' whenever people are trying to be friends with me.

So, this week's goal is to get rid of the worst of the unexplained fumes, and HOPE that I really understand what caused them to happen. If I don't understand what caused them, they could happen again.

And I really did throw a huge number of old bottles of household cleaning chemicals away. I will have a very small, limited selection of things from now on, like dish soap, vinegar, some baking soda that somebody gave me ages ago to put in my refrigerator when something in there spoiled and smelled awful, and laundry soap. That's all I can think of right now. I've decided that I can't stand bleach, and even if it doesn't mix with anything, my experiences with bleach have almost always been terrible. I just want nothing to do with it. So I will probably just do without any bleach.

If I ever buy a bottle of something like that, it will be a very tiny bottle that will get used up quickly so it doesn't sit around in the house very long. No large bottles bought because you 'save money' buying in large bulk with a lower dollars-per-gallon type of thing. I know if you look at the different sizes, they have a lower price per gallon, or per unit, or per pound, if you buy a larger container of something. But I am going to buy small bottles anyway even if it's a higher price-per-gallon or whatever.

I don't feel sure if I really understand what caused the fumes or not. And I'm still not happy that I can kind of sense bad air in the closet of the water heater, but that it somehow just isn't as bad as it was a few days ago. I'm not sure this problem is solved yet, or that my actions had anything to do with the fact that the fumes got better. I guess I am just keeping my fingers crossed. It seems to be better.

Bleach and ammonia fumes???

Yes, I wrote about it on my other blog, but not here.

1. I had the Norovirus repeatedly for two weeks.

2. I had mild appendicitis, which got bad enough that I almost called the doctor, but right then, it started going away.

3. An unknown fume was in the area of the bathroom and I think that some window cleaner got sprayed on an area that might have had leftover bleach sprayed on it, the shower curtain.  The fumes were so toxic I could not stay indoors for several days.  That was all on my other blog.

How my employer can save thousands of dollars on soup; and, Antacids and stomach ulcers

I was going to put this on my regular blog. But as the writing went on, I became more and more grouchy and irritable - probably because I've had hardly anything to eat today, and was somewhat sick last night. So it was too hostile and angry to put it on my regular blog, if I didn't intend to be in open conflict against my employers.

I cut back my work hours to three days a week because of how sick I've been. I was planning to do that anyway, and was planning to get a second job, and work both jobs for three days, then have four days off. Now, it turns out that they cut my hours even more than I had wanted. So I have only one day of work next week.

Oddly enough, my response is to look on the bright side of this, and ask 'What will I do with all my free time?' There are dozens of urgent problems that I need to deal with, like the toxic house (which has improved, by the way, but I'll write about it later). So actually I am kind of glad to have extra free time. My money is going to run out very quickly and I am going to have to ask my parents to help. I would not have done this except that I really have been in a barely-livable situation for so long now. This was a life-or-death situation and I literally was almost passing out and fainting from the fumes in the house. I think it was bleach and ammonia.

Well, anyway, even as I'm glad to have some extra free time to deal with my emergencies, I am also 'disgruntled' about a lot of things at work, but I haven't been writing about them on this blog. But it seems safe enough to talk about the soup waste problem and how easy it would be to solve that problem. I can then tell myself that I'm a valuable, but unappreciated, employee with good ideas, even though I've been so sick that I could only move slowly and didn't feel like I could do as much work as I was supposed to.

So, what is the problem with soup?

We have three pots of soup at the salad bar every day. Behind the salad bar, there are usually three extra pots of backup soup warmed up, in case anything runs out. So we usually have six pots of soup warmed up at all times.

Backup soups are heated up ahead of time, because it's a large pot of soup, and it takes two hours to warm up. So you can't just quickly microwave a pot of soup in an emergency if it runs out. It has to be set up for at least two hours ahead of time. And you don't know for sure if anything will get used up or not. You just have to guess.

It all seems pretty straightforward so far.

But here is what happens. When soup, or any foods at all, are kept on heat for a long time, they deteriorate. The chemicals change. Oxidation of fats, denaturing of proteins, destruction of vitamins, and other chemical processes happen, and I'm not a chemist, so I don't know much of the details. But a lot of things change when a food is kept at high heat for hours upon hours upon hours.

Eventually, the quality of the food gets pretty bad. I know how it is: if you eat food that's been on heat for a very long time, it's so bad you can hardly swallow it. And it upsets your stomach, and causes reflux, and tries to come back up. If you have a sensitive stomach, like I do, it makes you feel like you're going to throw up.

I've had other customers complain about stomach problems after eating the hot foods, not just me alone. (The complaint was about the fried products, not the soup.) It isn't all that rare. But people hardly ever know what causes this problem, and instead of solving the problem (by switching to high-quality foods that aren't on heat all day long, but instead are freshly made new) they will go buy antacids and other over-the-counter drugs to fix the problem with their stomachs. And they tell stories of going to their doctor for recurring stomach problems and reflux, and their doctors never know what's causing it. They then prescribe (or give samples of) drugs like Prevacid. I know, because I have been there - in 1999 when I was sick, I was actually still going to doctors and hoping they could tell me something.

I am totally opposed to using antacids. I never, ever, ever use them. I also never use that pink liquid that I can't remember the name of.

One time, while working on a temp job, I mentioned to the lady beside me that my stomach was refluxing and I felt sick after eating. She gave me an antacid. I accepted it.

Shortly after taking the antacid, I felt as though a hole was burning in my stomach. I felt like I was getting an ulcer. This was worse than the original problem! The 'ulcer' lasted several days after taking only one antacid. I never took them again. And I never have any symptoms of ulcers. (The only other time I developed stomach ulcers was when I was selling blood plasma. They reassured everyone that donating plasma is totally harmless and safe, but I almost passed out several times after doing it, even though I was eating and drinking, and I developed stomach ulcers, which quickly healed by themselves after I stopped selling plasma. Plasma might have something to do with the immune system protecting you against stomach ulcers, but I don't know the details.)

Ulcers are caused by bacteria growing in the stomach, called helicobacter pylori. My theory is: when you use an antacid, you are shooting yourself in the foot - you get rid of stomach acid, which is your ONLY NATURAL DEFENSE against the growth of bacteria in the walls of the stomach! Stomach acid is good for you. It kills bacteria. When you get rid of acid, the bacteria are now safe and can grow easily without being destroyed. They then create ulcers.

Antacids cause ulcers. Don't use them. I'm pretty sure of it, especially after hearing stories about people who have ulcers and who use hundreds of antacids every day while they try to cope with the ulcers. It looks like they're making things worse, not better.

The point is that bad quality food can cause people to go to the doctor trying to solve the problem, or else they go buy over-the-counter drugs that make the problem even worse. To solve the problem, you only need to eat fresh foods. Avoid foods that are heated for a very long time, and avoid foods that are fried in old oxidized vegetable oils. Oxidized vegetable oils will give you 'charlie horses,' or severe leg muscle cramps that happen when you stretch or just move the wrong way, usually when you wake up in the morning. My nutrition teacher told us that, and I've observed it many times myself, from eating french fries at fast food places, but I can't find scientific papers talking about it and I don't know the technical words to describe this phenomenon. ('Charlie horse' isn't a scientific phrase that will help google take you to technical research papers.)

So I pay attention to bad quality food that's been heated for too long or reheated too many times.

But our soup isn't THAT bad. I've eaten it sometimes.

But here's the other problem:

After the soup has been heated for one day, we put it into the cooler and keep it. We are allowed to reheat the soup once. Then it has to be thrown away, after it's been reheated that one time. This is legitimate, because of everything that I said just now about the quality getting bad if it's heated too many times or too long.

So here is what happens.

The morning people heat up three freshly opened soups. After two hours, they put them on the salad bar, ready to serve. Then, they usually open three brand new freshly opened soups, and heat them for backup. This is typical.

They don't write anything about which soups are new, and which ones are reheats. I have no way of knowing this. It's supposed to be put in a book, and they make a big deal of writing the temperatures and all that, but they aren't following the instructions on the soup page. You are supposed to write an 'R' for reheat, and 'N' for new, and they totally ignore that. Meanwhile, I'm the one who puts them away at the end of the day, not knowing which ones need to be thrown out and which ones kept. But that's not the main part of the problem.

We hardly ever use much soup at all. Most of the time, the backups aren't needed. The soups on the bar will get a little bit taken out of them, almost nothing. At the end of the day, those soups are now tomorrow's reheats. So are all the backups. All six pots of soup are now 'reheats' instead of 'new.'

Tomorrow, all six soups will be thrown in the garbage after being reheated all day. Hardly anything will have been taken out of most of them. Only a few spoonfuls, most of the time. Some days are more busy. But it hardly ever runs out and you hardly ever need to go get out one of the backups.

Also, you don't just throw away reheats at the end of their second day. I am also required to throw away all soups that are LESS THAN HALF FULL, whether they are new or old! If a significant amount of soup has been taken out of the pot, I am supposed to dump it and weigh it, because it 'can't be put out that way,' half-full like that, because it doesn't look nice, and it's inconvenient, since you feel uncertain and insecure about whether maybe it will get used up, and you'd rather have it be low-maintenance and just not have to worry about it - you want to say it's full, it'll still be full hours from now.

Throwing away all six huge pots of soup: I have to dump them into a plastic container and weigh it to find out the cost of soup lost. This is always interesting. It'll often be, like, twenty or thirty pounds of soup. Over a week or so, we throw out hundreds of dollars worth of soup. Over a month or two, it's thousands of dollars.

This is not some trivial penny-pinching. This is THOUSANDS of dollars that can be drastically reduced instantly by doing a couple of small things differently. (In an irritable and disgruntled mood, I would call all of them morons and say they need to just use their brain cells once in a while.)

Here is how it should be done.

Day 1:

~Heat three fresh soups. Put on bar.
~Heat three backups if you feel like it. I wouldn't, but they insist. They won't get used, I know that.
~End of day: DON'T, I REPEAT, DON'T THROW AWAY any half-full soups!!! Keep them. They are tomorrow's BACKUPS.

Day 2:
~Put the FULLEST pots of soup on the bar (after warming them up of course). They are reheats. You are LIKELY to have at least three untouched pots of soup, because the backups are ALMOST NEVER used at all. If you ever used a backup the day before, it will only have one or two ladlefuls taken out.
~Put the EMPTIEST pots of reheated soup on BACKUP. These may be less than half full. These are the ones that 'can't be put out that way.' Normally, we'd have thrown them in the garbage, even if they were new that day, merely because they were no longer half full. So far, all of the soups warming up are yesterday's reheats. Nothing has been thrown away, unless you had a pot of soup so empty that you were practically scraping the bottom. I am telling you, they make you throw it away even if it is 1/3 full and there are still several pounds of perfectly good soup in the bottom. It is unthinkable to me, but this is what they do!
~It is very unlikely that any backup soups will even be put out on the bar. But if one of those on the bar does run out, you can put out a half-empty one, one of the 1/3 fulls that normally would be thrown in the garbage. You use those backups only if the ones on the bar are really scraping the bottom and can't get much out with the ladle.

Day 3:
~By now, some of the soups will have been mostly used up, and reheats are being thrown out. All six original soups are now second-day reheats and will all have to be thrown out.
~If you opened anything fresh on Day 2, put the freshest and fullest ones OUT ON THE BAR.
~Put the half-empty, or 1/3 fulls, or the REHEATS, on BACKUP. This includes anything which was 'new' yesterday, but half-full, and ones that 'you can't put it out there half full.'
~DON'T USE 'FIRST IN FIRST OUT!!!' First in first out means that you'll always be putting the lowest quality soups on the bar. Those are the reheats, first in, first out. Yesterday's half-ruined, bad-quality reheats will always end up on the bar. Don't do that. Keep the worst stuff on backup and avoid using it. Put freshest and fullest on the bar. Instead of 'first in, first out,' use the 'assume yesterday's reheats will probably get thrown in the garbage, and open as few new bags of soup as possible.' The goal is to always use the newest stuff on the bar, the oldest bad-quality stuff on backup, with half-full ones on backup also, regardless of 'first in first out.'

Argh, this is hard to explain. Yes, I'm not focused enough mentally to explain. The key concept is: DO NOT USE 'FIRST IN, FIRST OUT' ordering. Instead, always get the freshest stuff out on the bar, and the worst old half-full stuff on backup. Keep half-fulls and third-fulls on backup, and assume they'll never get used if the ones on the bar are full to the top. Don't even worry about whether they 'can't be put out 1/3 full.' You won't put them out, you'll put them on BACKUP.

I need to eat something. Maybe that's why I'm obsessing about food, while being too disorganized to explain myself clearly.

this is going to end up on retmeishka instead of my regular blog... it's too 'disgruntled and disorganized.'

I need to explain what it is that THEY do, and how it leads to thousands of dollars of wasted soup. I can tell that this is too disorganized to convince anyone. It needs to be described in step-by-step order, with both the 'good' method and the 'bad' method side by side to show what exactly is going on. I can only insist that I *KNOW* their way of doing it is totally idiotic and costing them THOUSANDS of dollars of soup being thrown out unnecessarily.

I'll write down the 'rules' for how to handle the soup. Then I'll write down my 'new rules' in contrast. (For instance, my rule says: DO NOT USE FIRST IN FIRST OUT.)

Couldn't we have heard a John Galt speech instead?

Supposedly the Superbowl was interrupted by some people who put a 30-second film clip of 'hardcore' porn in the middle of the game, in Arizona. I don't know how it was done.

If you had thirty seconds to interrupt the Superbowl with some message, what would you want to say?

groundhog day

Today's goal is to reach tomorrow morning without hearing "I got you babe." If that happens, I'll know my life is moving on.