100K Honda Civic

My 1998 Honda Civic hit 100,000 miles this morning! Hooray! It happened on my way to work, in front of a farm market on Route 322.

But if my meeting hadn't been canceled last night it would have happened on my way to or from the meeting, which is what I really wanted because that's a route I travel 3 times a week with my mom. It would have been a good spot close to my house, where I could point to it all the time with my friends and family in the car and announce the significance of that spot. But alas, it wasn't so.

I was kinda disappointed to be alone for this event, so I called my mom when I was a half-mile away from the big moment, and she celebrated with me. I was also a little bummed that it happened along a road that I'm usually traveling alone. I did watch for some other landmark that I could use as a frequently-traveled celebration spot, and I can use the Route 322 overpass whenever I'm on the highway and celebrate the 99999 mark, at least.

Life is all about attitude, after all -- when disappointed, look for a good part that can be celebrated. And hey, my car did make it to 100,000 miles! Let's drink to that!

New house needs a new dog

We're looking for a dog. We've been thinking about it for a long time, but we finally got serious about it a few months ago when my mom brought her dog for her visit at our new house. We really liked having her dog around, and we started to really want our own dog.

After considering our needs, we decided the best option was to adopt a retired Seeing Eye dog. We sent in an application and have been on the waiting list for about three months. They said the wait could be "extensive," but we were okay with that because that is really the dog we wanted to have. We found out later that an "extensive" wait is about one to four years.

Then last week the Westminster Kennel Club broadcast their annual dog show, and we watched the whole thing. Both nights. After that show, we saw that we had so many more options available. Our #1 dog became a Cavachon, and I started watching our area shelters to find an adoptable one. I'm still waiting for a Cavachon to show up, but I'm truly torn. I want to keep waiting for the Seeing Eye dog, but I also want to give a home to a shelter dog who really needs me. Especially if that could be a Cavachon or something close to it.

We went to our County animal shelter last night so that I could practice NOT taking a dog home with me. And so that I could practice some skills I saw on a recent episode of Dog Whisperer, where Cesar Millan goes to a shelter and explains why this family shouldn't adopt this dog or that dog, and he showed why this last dog was the most balanced dog in the facility. So I wanted to look for a balanced dog, and really I only found one yesterday. And he was too big for us, so it wasn't that hard to walk away. I did have to consciously avoid thinking about what would happen to those cuties if nobody took them, and it was not easy. I did want to help all of them.

After my mom moves into our house with her dog, perhaps we'll feel less urgency to get our own dog. It might be easier then to wait for the Seeing Eye dog to become available. But if mom's dog doesn't do it for us, and there's no suitable Cavachons around, and we just can't wait for the Seeing Eye dog any longer, then maybe we'll look for a breeder who can sell us a Cavachon puppy. But for now, I'm just trying to wait for my mom's dog to get here. I don't want to have to make any other dog decisions until then - the real trick is not to be swayed by my husband, who wants a doggie NOW.

New Feed URL

I know it's a pain, but I would appreciate if you would change the URL in your feed-readers to point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/singh. This change will make it easier to promote and deliver my content, and provides more audience engagement (such as digg and del.icio.us with each post).
Fortunately I have few subscribers (ummm, ONE I think) so this change should not cause a lot of agony.

Urban legend: water is less healthy than wine

Received this email from a friend today:
It has been scientifically proven that if we drink 1 liter of water each day, at the end of the year we would have absorbed more than 1Kg of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria found in feces. In other words, we are consuming 1 kilo of Poo. However, we do not run that risk when drinking wine (or rum, whiskey, beer or other liquors) because alcohol has to go through a distillation process of boiling, filtering and fermenting and alcohol kills E.coli
WATER = Poo
WINE = Health

As a microbiologist, I feel compelled to shoot down this blatant attack on drinking water quality.
The math doesn't add up.
1 bacteria = 10^-12 kg (very roughly)
1 kg of bacteria = 10¹² cells
1 liter of water per day = 365 liters
10¹² cells / 365 liters = 2.7 x 10⁹ cells per liter
Waaaaaaaaaaay higher than the bacterial load found in tap water even in the developing world, by many orders of magnitude. If a liter of water had this many bacteria in it, the water would be visibly cloudy. Even if you drank water with such a high bacterial load, you are surely drinking a mixed population and not a pure E. coli solution.

So there.

---
References:
Hypertextbook: Mass of a Bacterium: "A typical mass of a bacterium would be about 10^-12 g or one picogram (pm)."
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: "E-coli concentrations in unsanitary drinking water at various developing world sites are typically found to exceed thousands per 100 milliliters (e.g., 30,000 per 100 ml reported at a site near Pune, India). The WHO standard specifies less than 1 per 100 ml for good drinking water quality, which is also the standard used in the industrial world drinking water supply."
US EPA Drinking Water standards state that heterotrophic bacteria should not exceed 500 CFU per ml.
"Heterotrophic plate counts and drinking-water safety" from World Health Organization: "Exposure to general HPC microbiota is far greater through foodstuffs than through drinking-water."

How do you like the house?

Since we bought a house three months ago, my friends keep asking how I like it, I guess to make conversation, possibly because they're really interested in my answer. I can't imagine they're really interested, though, because I think I talk about my house too much. I've been making a conscious effort not to let it monopolize every conversation I have. Maybe I've been making so much of an effort NOT to talk about it lately, that I might not be talking about it anymore at all.

Anyway, the short answer: I love it. Especially the space.

Our two-bedroom apartment was pretty big by apartment standards: 1100 square feet. I don't know the measurements of the new house, but I can tell you it's huge. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, two-car garage, full basement, one acre of wooded land, and a one-bedroom in-law suite attached to the house. So half the rooms in the house are empty, and it will be a while before we have the cash to fill those rooms with furniture and window treatments and all.

My parents are moving in this spring, though, so they will be bringing lots of stuff we can use. They're downsizing from a three-bedroom house to a one-bedroom apartment, so I know they're grateful to bring along many of their things to our house. I'm concerned about getting overrun with their stuff, though, because I really value my open space and this is the first time I've had this much of it. I'll just have to stick to my decisions when I choose not to take some of Mom & Dad's things. It's hard to say no, though, especially if Mom pouts.

The house has absolutely no carpets. It's all hard flooring - vinyl tile, ceramic tile, and wood laminate. The previous owners once had a carpet cleaning business, so they know how dirty carpets are. It's very hard to keep them as clean as hard floors. A few months ago I bought a Scooba, one of those robots that mops the floors, and I love it. I haven't mopped once in the three months we've lived here. However, my Swiffer has never seen this much action. I've found that I have to sweep the hallways and bathrooms daily. And I haven't mastered the Pergo floor care yet; the Scooba seems like overkill because there's low traffic in that part of the house and it never seems to get very dirty. And the cleaning solution leaves streaks on the floor unless I fill the tank with dilute vinegar. I've been sweeping or vacuuming every couple of weeks and it's clean enough so far. Maybe I'll just pull out the mop once a month for that part of the house.

We also love having a garage. Today it snowed for the first time this season, and we didn't have to scrape our windshields or anything because the cars were protected inside the garage. Such a treat! I'm glad we didn't buy a snowblower yet because it would have been little more than decoration.

I've always been told that it's a lot of work to take care of a home. A big responsibility, you know. But this is one of those truths that you can never fully appreciate until you experience it yourself. And my parents never clued me in to the reality of all this maintenance. I thought taking care of a house was just a matter of keeping it clean. We've already had to replace the roof ($5700, ouch) and re-line the chimney (estimates still pending). Even something as "little" as changing all the locks ended up costing several hundred dollars, which was way more than I thought it should cost. I moved a big chunk of our savings into CD's in order to prevent me from accidentally draining all of our money on the house. Of course, we did HAVE to buy a plasma TV before the spending freeze, though. We're really glad about that decision, as irresponsible as it may seem.

We have some remodeling in mind.... the bathrooms were done with cheap materials, including the selection of tiny little stall showers. And the master bedroom has woefully inadequate closet space. The first project on my wish list is to open the wall between the master bedroom and one of the secondary bedrooms so that we can have his-and-hers walk-in closets. Then I want to install a doorless / walk-in / walk-behind shower, whatever you call it. The bathroom is big enough to put a separate tub enclosure, and a double sink, but that will have to wait a couple of years till the cash is there. We've finally clawed our way out of our most expensive debts so I'm determined never to borrow from credit cards. I'd rather cancel cable TV and shop at thrift stores than to get into debt again.

So that's the long answer.