I {heart} Hedghogs!

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New Feature

You may notice a new little feature in the right hand column! I've provided a list of links to my friends' blogs — and the cool thing is that Blogger tells you what their latest post is and when it was posted!

So you can feel free to visit their blogs as well. (Be sure to check out Charlie's Baby Tuesdays at Pull It Together for your weekly dose of adorable.)

Vacation Photos!

L&B at Fairy Caves.JPG
Originally uploaded by LacyLu42.

Finally got most of the vacation photos uploaded! You can view a slideshow or pick and choose which ones to look at!

Enjoy!

10 Things

Some random things:

1. Vacation was good. Colorado is a beautiful state. Husband was violently ill second night out. Husband also melted shoes on sand dunes. Good times.

2. Photos to follow (see below!).

3. Survived the second trip to the dentist. Tuesday was cleaning. I HATE the picky thing with a vengeance. It gives me the willies. So I listened to Dr. Who on my ipod and tried not to bite the hygienist because my jaw was clenched so tightly.

4. Next week is fillings. One new, replacing one old. Joy. (Although, that's pretty effing good for not having been in EIGHT YEARS. (And the old filling is well older than that.))

5. I have been a bottomless pit of hungry since getting back from vacation. (My theory is that I ate too much whilst on said vacation and stretched my stomach.) But I have been very good and "on plan" so far. I'm about to go wolf down a big bowl of popcorn, though, because it is very low points. And filling.

6. Some friends want us to go to a concert Sunday night of some blokey I've never heard of. He's playing at a Unitarian church, which worries me. According to friend, he has a gorgeous voice and is "very funny and very liberal." I'm not at all sure what to expect.

7. They're showing Shaun of the Dead at Red Rocks in two weeks and I totally want to go.

8. On vacation, we ate french fries drizzled with truffle oil and fresh grated Parmesan. Never has a more perfect dish been conceived, nor eaten.

9. One of my dad's idols died. RIP Stan Winston.

10. And now it's time to go watch disk three of season one of SGA. This show is highly cracktastical, in that sometimes it's a smidge incoherent, but mostly, it's just freaking addictive.

Fat Tire

Brandon and I went to the New Belgium brewery in Ft. Collins yesterday to unofficially start our vacation and we had a blast! For the price of the answer to a silly question, you can taste four of their beers, and then you can take a tour of the brewery (and taste MORE beer!).

The Benefit of $7 Gas?

The only reliable way to cut oil use — to reduce the flow of money to Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia, to reduce the odds that the planet just keeps getting hotter — is to make oil more expensive.

This, of course, is precisely the specter that has been raised by opponents of new carbon rules. Gas costs way too much already! Yet that argument gets cause and effect almost perfectly backward.

Oil has become so expensive mainly because the world is using so much of it. Yes, making it more expensive — about 40 cents a gallon more expensive by 2030, according to two analyses of the current bill — will bring some medium-term economic pain. But the pain can be greatly reduced through broad-based tax cuts, financed with the revenue raised by a good cap-and-trade system (or, as many economists prefer, a carbon tax).

More important, raising the cost of energy could bring enormous long-term benefits. It could make the country more secure, strategically and economically.

“The real concern,” said Nathaniel Keohane, the head of economic policy and analysis at the Environmental Defense Fund, “should be our vulnerability to $7-a-gallon gasoline that is a function of global demand and stagnant supply.” Goldman Sachs recently suggested that $7-a-gallon gas was conceivable.

The New York Times

Ha!

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For the Win!

Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama, St Paul, Minnesota, June 3, 2008

Social Revolution

This is a really interesting article about television, the internet, the ways we interact with media, and the next social revolution.

…the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today…

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. […] And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus [time spent watching TV instead of thinking or working] as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.