The "Tipping Point"

Scary article in the Washington Post about how climate change might be happening so quickly that "within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend."

Here is an excerpt:
One of the greatest dangers lies in the disintegration of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold about 20 percent of the fresh water on the planet. If either of the two sheets disintegrates, sea level could rise nearly 20 feet in the course of a couple of centuries, swamping the southern third of Florida and Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village...'The effects of the collapse of either ice sheet would be 'huge'....once you lost one of these ice sheets, there's really no putting it back for thousands of years, if ever.'"

We've all heard these scenarios before, but the scariest part, I thought, was that scientists are admitting now that maybe they underestimated the amount of time it would take for this disastrous siuation to occur. It all seemed like a hundreds and hundreds of years in the future type of thing. But now they're saying it could happen within Azalea and Desi's lifetime, which is FREAKY! And that within 10 years, we may be at the point where we can't do anything about it.

Now, if there was ever a good reason to get the current U.S. administration out of office, this is it!

We need Al Gore and his powerpoint presentation!

I actually want to see that documentary -- I forget the name -- it's about Al Gore travelling around the world giving powerpoint presentations on how important it is to stop global warming immediately, before it's too late. It supposedly got a standing ovation at the Sundance film festival a few weeks ago, which makes me think that the director is one heck of a filmmaker to make Al Gore giving powerpoint presentations worthy of a standing O!

Hodgepodge of more pics from Azalea's birthday...

No good photos of everyone at once. I guess there are some positives to the painfully staged photographs my mother used to orchestrate at our childhood birthday parties. "Okay, now everyone get together...Tula put your hand on your hip and smile...Elaine, pretend you're kissing the dolly...both of you sit there surrounded by all of your stuffed animals and SMILE...no, wait! Somebody wipe Aristea's face! Okay, we're ready now. Say cheeeeeese! No! Rita, stop hitting Thalia! "

Pics from Isabel's 40th Birthday Brunch

Here are some more pics from the weekend -- Isabel's 40th birthday brunch at the Latin American Folk Institute! Starring Ms. Gigi! Sadly, no pics of the birthday girl herself, or of gorgeous 7 year old Marina, who is so tall and 'grown-up'. Scott told us that she even has a crush on a boy at her school. Is it my delusional thinking (or revisionist view of childhood), or do kids start this stuff younger these days?

This Blows

So here is proof that Azalea was obsessed with blowing out birthday candles during the week before her birthday. In the pics, she is blowing out Meli's birthday candles (Meli turned 21 on Jan. 17) and then making us light birthday candles on her dessert the day after that. But then who ended up blowing out her birthday candles on her actual birthday (see previous post)? Mama and Desi.

Wallflower and Her Birthday Cake

It was Azalea's birthday on Sunday, and she is now THREE years old. Lordy, it seems longer than that. We had a few neighbors over for chili and birthday cake, and shockingly Azalea would not blow out her birthday candles. This floored me, because she has been begging to blow out candles all week now, and then when her big moment came, all she could do was hide her face. At least when no one was looking at her, she managed to break out of her shyness-paralysis and have fun... She also really liked her pink kittykat kake, especially because she helped to make it/decorate/frost it.

I'll have to post more photos later, because there are a few of all the kids playing that are pretty funny.

Avian influenza, my new best friend

So I have a new job within AED, at least for the next two months. I'm working on various activities for USAID on avian influenza. So I've been doing quite a bit of thinking about how people can keep their chickens away from their ducks -- a very effective way to keep avian flu at bay, if you can believe it. Now farmers just have to keep their kids from playing with bloody chicken heads and we'd all be a lot better off.

Anyway, I came across this article "The bug bloggers: A brigade of self-made bird flu experts is turning the outbreak rumor mill into an online information factory"
about the power of blogs in getting information out when it's needed, mostly because they feel they can't rely on their governments to give them the straight story in a timely fashion. Man, it's a miracle we all survived before this Internets thing came along. Here is the link to the story: http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf06harris

It quotes this guy, Paul Revere (that's his blogging pseudonym) who runs a blog called Effect Measure. I met him at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting last December in Philly at a session on how the public health field can use blogs, wikis, etc. to improve the public health. It was pretty inspirational that all these people were trying to start a movement from the ground up -- all these people who had day jobs and wives and kids who were spending countless hours blogging during the wee hours to create a new public health infrastructure (online) to make it easier to mobilize in the event of a pandemic or a bioterrorist event.

I hope it's all worth it. You always hear these stories of people like this who do so much, and then you hear about how they are divorced or how they don't know their kids' names. So maybe I'm exaggerating, but I feel like it's so hard to strike a balance, especially when you are serious about your career and your volunteer work/extracurriculars AND you are raising a family.

I wonder whether all of these impressive people I work with now -- people who have done amazing things in tons of developing countries over the past 25 years -- have done all this while juggling family life, and if so, HOW IN THE WORLD THEY DID IT? (I mean, even as I'm typing this blog post, I've been singing to Azalea and pretending that I'm writing a letter to the dentist -- part of her pretend play right now. She's really into dentists. Go figure. Hopefully she'll still be into them after her first dentist visit at the beginning of February.) I did a lot of stuff too -- when I was single. Not anymore.

Okay, so I know this post is all over the place, but that is the state of my brain these days. I really only wanted to post that bird flu blog article. Now I have to go get dinner out of the oven and get ready to go to a Habitat for Humanity meeting at the church. And then come back home, get the kids to bed, do some housecleaning and work on some avian flu stuff. How do people do this long-term?

Cute pic

Due to several complaints, I am posting a relatively recent pic of Azalea and Desi. There are also some fun photos from our Christmas celebration and New Year's, but that will come later.