I remember seeing graffiti in Irkutsk, which translated as ‘what’s more valuable — Baikal or oil?’ and visiting a local environmental agency, to hear about the difficulties they have had in operating. Being an environmentalist in Russia is almost as much fun as being a dark-skinned foreigner.

I didn’t have any problems myself, being pale-skinned, but I certainly remember feeling quite uncomfortable and hurrying home faster from the metro on the evening of September 10th after vaguely overhearing two men behind me on the street say something about America and 9/11.

p.s. on a brighter note: cool photos, and briefly fascinating widget from yandex

Timbuk2 is teaming up with a company called RootPhi to make bags out of, well, bags. Messenger bags out of discarded plastic shopping bags, that is. They call it Lamitron. I’m so totally signed up for the product update/tester wannabe list. As a Seattle bike-commuter, what could possibly be a better sounding option for carrying stuff around my own dear green-and-soggy city?

Also, I’m surprised I found this on my own, and that it hasn’t popped up on grist yet. Although I’m behind on my grist reading, so maybe it has.

Today I got the campus news from my alma mater with this story. It reminded me of an article I read last fall in the NY Times, under the headline “Numbers Are Male, Said Pythagoras, and the Idea Persists“. The campus news story is a short story, and a link to a longer NPR interview with Earth & Environmental Sciences professor Suzanne O’Connell, who I had an email exchange with after reading a book called ‘Sea Legs: Tales of a Woman Oceanographer,‘ and feeling more solidly that I want to go to science. (O’Connell, of course, is a friend of Kathy Crane, the author.)

The theme in all these? In the upper echelons of the “hard sciences” you don’t find many women. And you find men who’ve been doing it their way, without feminine input, for a good long time, and they’re having a hard time of it, adapting, which makes it less likely for women to stick around to work with/near them.

I have a scrap of paper pasted in a book that I think has its origins in the teacher I had for gifted classes in middle school, who taught boys and girls alike grammar, greek mythology, and how to properly set a table. It says:

HOW TO BE A WOMEN AND HAVE A SUCCESSFUL CAREER
Be the first-born in an all-girl family
Have an adoring father and a working mother
Enter school early and accelerate whenever possible
Stay a tomboy until late teens
Idolize Katharine Hepburn or a reasonable facsimile
Take every math course possible
Decide not to marry–or not to have children
Marry late after your career is in place
Start a career before a family
Be rich enough to afford live-in help
Have a role-reversal with spouse
Share a position
Work in a setting with childcare facilities
Live close to adoring grandparents who babysit
Stay at home for awhile and write feverishly

So as kittens get bigger, certain procedures are required to prevent having more kittens. Today I called a few vets to see what this might cost. The first place I called said $115, which I found exorbitant, until subsequent clinics quoted numbers from $270 to 438! One clinic broke it out as a $57 first visit fee (to check for complications), $70 bloodwork, and $145 for the actual surgery. One place wouldn’t even give me an estimate, because they need to see your critter first and determine what sort of complications might arise. I wonder if nice docile animals are cheaper than ones that bite and scratch…

One place did explain that private clinics cost a lot, and there are two places that just do spay & neuter, and gave me their numbers. Which was awfully nice, and would incline me towards them if Pippa has non-reproductive issues that need caring for. The city’s spay & neuter clinic is booked through the end of August, and will take appointments for September starting August 15. And their automated voice system said that to spay a female cat will be $45.

Quite the range of prices!

By-the-by, if you’re living in Seattle, the two phone numbers, given to me by the Cat Clinic of Seattle, were 362-0505 (which had a lovely British accented man on the message explaining they were closed this week) and 386-7387 (the City).

Today, Pippa ate a spider.

I’m not sure what the karmical ethics of getting your cat to eat bugs so you don’t have to deal with them are, but I’m glad.

Hopefully the spider was not in any way poisonous.