Where do you bury the survivors? - Some worms in an experiment that was on the Columbia when it crashed have survived the ordeal!

The worms, which are about the size of the tip of a pencil, were part of an experiment testing a new synthetic nutrient solution. The worms, which have a life cycle of between seven and 10 days, were four or five generations old, Buckingham said.

Get me some of that nutrient solution!

Pift - Looking forward to the weekend. My daily schedule is a mess. I've gotten into a pattern where I seem to be rushing around constantly from event to event. If I were more organized, I think I'd be more relaxed. Bah. Feh.

Seen On my White Board - The following table:

Caws	Efect
open the window	I get cold
hungry	eat
eat	full
empty	tummy growuls

...A sure sign that my daughter Katherine has visited me in the office.

Parents' Bill of Rights - The infiltration of corporate marketing into our public schools is a quiet disease that threatens to turn our institutions of learning into feeding grounds where organizations free of conscience steal precious eyeball time from more worthy endeavors... such as actual learning.

In addition, as corporate foods are pushed over actual foods (processed junk in place of healthy foods) we're growing enormous fat-cell driven future consumers.

Commercial Alert: protecting children and communities from commercialism states the following mission on its website:

to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy.

Sounds to me like something not only worthy, but vital to the future of our children and our society.

Thanks for the tip, Julie.

"Cumby's" - You get used to a place being the way it is for practically your entire life and then it changes. Stupid little things.

People from around here will be familiar with Cumberland Farms convenience stores... or "Cumby's" as they are affectionately called. Before I ever saw a Store 24 or a 7-11, there was Cumby's.

Well, the one near my house is being sold and will no longer be part of the chain. The familiar people who work there are moving on.

It's probably silly, but it makes me feel a little agitated.

Weekend Roundup - Some random stuff from the weekend...

I assembled 3 desks, 2 office chairs, disassembled 1 really old desk, dismantled a home network with 4 workstations and assorted peripherals, restored them to working order and sorted through a mess of drawers. It was a productive weekend and it flew by. But finally we have a fairly organized office rather than a mish-mosh of tables and desks.

Maggie was sent a coupon code from Staples, and we used that to buy the chairs, but the first Staples (in Seekonk) we went to refused to take the coupon code because Maggie's email client didn't display HTML and so the graphics hadn't shown up. I argued with the guy for a while and didn't get anywhere (they claimed that the number alone didn't tell them what the discount was), so I went home to print it out with graphics. Turned out there was no way to recover the graphics, so I decided to try a different Staples. I walked into the one in Fall River and told them the whole story. The manager there said "I'll compare this code number to other coupons we've received to verify it." He did it, and I was out of there 10 minutes later with two chairs, some crates and floor mats. Fall River Staples (in the Harbor Mall plaza) has my future business!

Saw some kids in the back of a van, who waved to Kit and me in the car on Friday. Waved back.

On Sunday, Maggie and I skipped breakfast, and for lunch we took the kids to ice cream. Are we bad parents, or just really, really good parents?