laundry

...My laundry pile was empty. I mean, empty. Nothing more to wash. This unprecedented state of affairs (in a working farm household with 6 people, four of them attracted to mud like magnets) didn't last long - then Asher dumped his muddy socks on the floor and Eli took a bath and pushed the towel into the tub and then the kids got out of the clothes bearing the day's accumulated grime - but I did briefly have no laundry to do. None. Other people may think this is a weird thing to worry about, but you have to understand my life. There is ALWAYS laundry in the pile, there are ALWAYS…
I felt a sense of déjà vu Tuesday morning when I heard NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reporting on Senator Tom Coburn's attacks on National Science Foundation-funded research. I realized that the same thing happened last August, and I wrote about it in a post called "Scoring Political Points by Misunderstanding Science." Last year, the report mocked research into addiction and older adults' cognition (among many other projects) because the projects involved administering cocaine to monkeys and introducing senior citizens to Wii games. This year, the projects up for ridicule include research…
Sometimes I have to admit I'm completely outclassed, and people who can find this kind of stuff win hands down.
I'm doing the laundry! - The Tick A new reader, Karen, (yay, new readers!) writes: I really want to use less energy because my husband is out of work and I care about the planet - can you write about how you do it? We try and conserve, but our utility bills tell me we're not doing that great a job. I guess I care most about the everyday stuff - how you do the laundry, get to places, cook dinner, etc... Thank you, Karen, for the push, since I'm supposed to be writing a book on precisely this subject right now, and instead have mostly, well, not been. So I thought I'd do a series of…