I have a content-filled life.

[elfs]

Stormy Poses

What a lovely weekend.

Saturday was not beautiful. It was cold, and drizzled, and a little too cool. But my little home town of Burien was having its annual Strawberry Festival, to celebrate that once upon a time the now kitschy "Olde Burien" was the supply center for a community of strawberry farmers.

The Festival is what you'd expect from a small town with poor focus; a lot of kitschy folks selling folksy wares that they can obviously afford to indulge in their high-tech society, a lot of well-meaning government types encouraging people to exercise more, eat better. The cops encourage people to not do drugs; I'd respect their cheesy poster if they had alcohol on it more, and marijuana on it less. "Heroine, Cocaine, Ecstasy and Marijuana KILL YOUR BRAIN!" Phaugh.

The city allocate a quarter of the festival to bicycling. I approve, but really, you're not going to get more riding until gas prices are ridiculous, and Burien is a bit too spread out to be a successful bicycling community. It takes time for most people to "nip out to the grocer's" around here. Still, given how overweight Burien is (one of the heavier suburbs in the Puget Sound region), I cannot complain.

I can complain about pseudoscientific scammers promising shills insane promises. Look at the list in the photo at that link: his magic bracelet will help you manage Attention Deficit Disorder, Multiple Sclerosis, back pain, and migranes. Grief, don't these people realize that the manufacturer was forced to admit, "We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims"?

Stormy had a dance demonstration at the festival, which was our reason for attending. She was lovely and talented, as always, although there was some scrambling as the demo space was far smaller than their rehearsal space.

The rest of the day, I spent in my man-cave, working on software. Kouryou-chan had a dance practice of her own.

Sunday was Father's Day here in the US. The kids were adorable, and made me a necktie out of duct tape, since they know I don't wear neckties.

We went to see Thor a second time, having cleared that it was probably safe for both of them. They'll be quoting lines from it for a week.

I ran up to downtown Seattle to visit Ada's Books and bought myself Couch DB: The Definitive Guide. I'm trying an experiment. My very first programming experience, outside of some Basic tinkering on a TRS-80, was when I got my hands on a PDP11-38 back in 1981. We were getting a brand new Pascal compiler. It was two weeks out, so I bought the book and read it all the way through before the compiler arrived. Then I sat down and before anyone else had figured out how to compile something I was already writing video games. I'm trying that route again: I'm going to read the entire book all the way through before I start writing Couch apps and, gods forbid, long-poll Node.js parasites.

When I got home, I mowed the lawn, did a 6x6 plot of weeding, and generally spent time outdoors in the not-quite-sun.

For dinner, we went to the Keg, a decent steakhouse, and I had a decent steak. All in all, a wonderful father's day.

Comments

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to do the standard gripe about the anti-drugs stuff. THC and MDMA in fact do not 'kill your brain'. Now the tar that comes with marijuana and the crap that MDMA gets mixed with on the street (such as meth) IS cytotoxic but the one study that claimed MDMA was bad was from a right-wing guy who 'accidentally' confused his samples of MDMA and meth. (Oops! No one ever bothered to print the retraction but his work is pretty thoroughly discredited) It still has a weak abuse potential and you'd definitely want to avoid street versions but I dislike the deliberate choice of words to make chemicals that are reasonably safe sound 'evil'.

Cocaine is also surprisingly low on the cytotoxicity and more recent studies have shown it is less habit-forming than alcohol. I'd still stay far away from it. Anecdotally, freebased cocaine (crack) is allegedly more additive. Probably because Cocaine HCL has a harder time crossing the blood-brain barrier.

But the thing that really bothers me and why I said anything at all is... Where is Meth on that list? Or how about Ritalin? Meth is an incredibly addictive and toxic drug in it's purest form, let alone what people get on the street. Ritalin is only toxic at higher doses but it does have abuse potential and like most speeds, you build a tolerance to it so it can be one of those things that steers kids towards more dangerous drugs (like meth)

Actually, a lot of people who end up meth and crack addicts started from prescribed speeds and a lot of heroine addicts started out with prescription painkillers. I think those are were the real dangers lay. Well, and the fact that we blanket all drugs as being horrible evil addictive and destructive things but then they try something relatively innocuous like pot or mdma and think, "Well if i was lied to about this, perhaps I was lied to about everything else." I find it as stupid as abstinence-only sex education. They have brains. They may make bad decisions but it's a lot better for them to make bad decisions with good information than bad decisions with bad information.