Around 3:30 T called me and asked me to come home as she was about to make a turn for the worse. I got home, played with B for a while and let T go bow down to the porcelain gods. I then took B to go pick up D from school while T lay on the couch feeling miserable. We got B, D and myself feed and off to bed successfully. Like normal, B started to wake up around 10pm which is when he comes down to sleep on us until his 11pm bottle. By this point, I was starting to feel “off.” I got B fed at 11 and put into his crib when I had to make a mad dash to the bathroom to do my own praying, which took many prayers over the next many hours.

Saturday was miserable but T felt good enough to pick up the slack. Then came Sunday morning at 3:30am when D started to call me and tell me his stomach hurt. Yup, he got it too. So what started out in B last Wed/Thurs  made it through all of us BUT the good news is we all got out the door this morning and went to school/work.

At least you can’t say we don’t do things together as a family!!

Have you heard about this “pink slime” that has been making the news?

Gerald Zirnstein grinds his own hamburger these days. Why? Because this former United States Department of Agriculture scientist and, now, whistleblower, knows that 70 percent of the ground beef we buy at the supermarket contains something he calls “pink slime.”

Zirnstein and his fellow USDA scientist, Carl Custer, both warned against using what the industry calls “lean finely textured beef,” widely known now as “pink slime,” but their government bosses overruled them.

According to Custer, the product is not really beef, but “a salvage product … fat that had been heated at a low temperature and the excess fat spun out.”

The “pink slime” is made by gathering waste trimmings, simmering them at low heat so the fat separates easily from the muscle, and spinning the trimmings using a centrifuge to complete the separation. Next, the mixture is sent through pipes where it is sprayed with ammonia gas to kill bacteria. The process is completed by packaging the meat into bricks. Then, it is frozen and shipped to grocery stores and meat packers, where it is added to most ground beef.

The “pink slime” does not have to appear on the label because, over objections of its own scientists, USDA officials with links to the beef industry labeled it meat.

“The under secretary said, ‘it’s pink, therefore it’s meat,’” Custer told ABC News.

Carl Custer, a retired microbiologist who spent 35 years in the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service, toured a BPI factory in 2002 while investigating salmonella in ground beef. “We originally called it soylent pink,” Custer told The Daily. “We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat.”

Custer’s former colleague Gerald Zirnstein coined the term “pink slime,” which was then popularized by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.

According to Custer, the USDA ruled that “pink slime” was safe, despite concerns, because a George H.W. Bush appointee who had been president of both the Florida Cattlemen’s Association and the of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association — undersecretary JoAnn Smith — pushed it through. Smith now serves on the board of directors of Tyson Foods, the largest chicken, beef and pork processing company in the world.

“It’s more like Jell-O than hamburger, plus it’s treated with ammonia, an additive that is not declared anywhere,” Custer said.

The US government is buying seven million pounds of the stuff with quite a bit directed at school kids.

So to summarize, we are eating something that might not actually be meat and laden with chemicals but it’s cheap and we have no problem giving it to our kids. Please tell me again why I’m not a vegetarian? Add to this the article in the Times yesterday that proclaimed “Eating red meat — any amount and any type — appears to significantly increase the risk of premature death, according to a long-range study that examined the eating habits and health of more than 110,000 adults for more than 20 years.”

* I’ve learned one thing this week…I need to win the lottery or find that money tree that I hear people talking about. There are so many projects on the house that I want to do that I just don’t have the funds for. Someday…..someday…..

* Wednesday morning, I awoke refreshed, happy, with a song in my heart and my beloved iPad at my side waiting for me to tap tap tap away. By Wednesday afternoon, my life was empty and devoid of meaning, this worthless piece of antediluvian technology mocking my lack of sophistication, its large non-retina display a pixelated neon sign alerting one and all of my inherent unhipness, and because there is no number after the word “iPad” it is obviously a crappy piece of useless technology that should be heaved into some garbage dump somewhere. You have to love Apple and their rebranding of the same device with a minor upgrade here and there. I know people that do it but don’t understand why they run out and get the next version every time it’s announced.

When we got home Friday night, the house stunk (think oil based stain and oil base polyurethane) but thankfully our family room downstairs which was closed off for the entire week didn’t really smell, especially after T opened the window down there all day. I got our room aired out pretty quickly Friday night so T slept with the kids in the family room and I went to our room. 7am on Saturday we woke up, opened all the windows in the house and used a huge fan in the front of the house to get some cross ventilation going and started getting the house put back together. We still have to get the curtains hung right.

Sunday brought B’s first time swimming and like most things, he just rolled with it. He’s such a good baby, never puts up much of a fuss. T said the water was really cold but it didn’t look like it was bothering B. D had his third ice skating lesson as he wants to play hockey in the fall so we have to get him skating by then. So far he’s doing well with it…

Busy week at work coming up and planning on taking a day off this week to clean the yard as spring is coming, mulch guy is coming and it’s supposed to be close to 70 on Thursday.

Bullying is everywhere and has been around for a very long time. I can remember kids I went to school getting bullied (of course we called it picked on back then) and I myself had run ins at times with a certain kid but back then, I don’t think we ever realized the ramifications of bullying someone could have. Sadly the trailer features an 11 year old boy who gets bullied for some time and feels that there is no way out other than to take his own life. This shouldn’t happen, EVER. This film is important to both sides, to show those kids that are being bullied that they aren’t alone and to show those doing the bullying how destructive their behavior is. Movies that are violent in nature often get a PG-13 rating yet a movie aimed at curbing violence gets an “R.” This makes no sense. If the MPAA thinks they are protecting children by doing this, they are completely wrong.

Just this week a kid in a rural town in Ohio walked into a school, not even his school, and shot up the cafeteria killing 3 people and injuring another 2. It’s been reported that he was the victim of bullying at one point, which is something that remains to be confirmed. The Columbine shootings always come up whenever this happens and they were always rumored to have been the subject of bullying although the book, which I highly recommend, paints an even bigger picture of that.

I invite you to watch the trailer and then go sign the petition, something I don’t normally do but felt it was a must in this case.

http://www.change.org/petitions/mpaa-dont-let-the-bullies-win-give-bully-a-pg-13-instead-of-an-r-rating

Even though I wasn’t a fan, it’s still sad to know that Davy Jones is gone. He IS the Monkees and therefore the Monkees die along with him. There are A LOT of egos in the music business, hell there were some pretty big egos in the Monkees alone but Davy Jones seemed like a genuinely nice guy. Any interview I saw with him, he was polite and well-mannered and you always heard how nice he was. The music business the world could use more people like him.

I figured I’d post two songs of Davey Jones. The first being Daydream Believer because it holds a special place in my heart because of the link between T and I. The second was a song I heard only a few short years ago and Dylan absolutely loved it when he was 2.

The first part of the project was to change the ugly tile in front of the fireplace and front door which we had done 2 weeks ago. Yesterday the floor guys showed up at 7:30 am, ripped out the carpet and the padding, sanded a small patch and put down some sample stain. Once we picked our color, off they went and off we went. We stopped by last night to have a look and it looked really nice but smelled REALLY awful.

So we are camping out in the hotel down the street, which D has been really excited about. So far, night 1 was too bad. It’s a suite so we have room but D was a little scared sleeping by himself so I climbed into bed with D and B and listened to the Devils/Rangers game on my iPhone as he fell asleep. T took a nice long bath in the Jacuzzi so I know she enjoyed the evening!!

Hopefully night 2 goes just as well. The picture at the top has been updated with a picture of our house, not a stock photo I found on the net!!

I’ll admit it, I had a closet full of flannel and a pair of Doc Martens (which I’ll admit, I really wish I had kept). The Seattle music scene really started to hit its stride my junior year of high school and at that time, I didn’t know how to play the guitar but once I started getting into Grunge, it was something I really wanted to learn.

While there were a lot of bands that helped propel the Grunge movement, none were bigger than Nirvana. Sadly, Kurt Cobain was a troubled guy whose book in life would have a tragic ending. He opened the doors for so many and introduced an entire generation to distortion, power chords and unfortunately, suicide.

Kurt would have been 45 yesterday….