Your prey is one of the dumbest birds on earth. As dumb as a rock, and therefore aptly named: Rock Dove. More commonly known as a pigeon. Sitting atop a building at the crest of the hill on 19th street, a particularly fat and naive one wobbles into view, mid-street. You see red, smell victory. Your lovely flight-ready feathers are nearly silent as you dive bomb and - SUCCESS! - clasp your unwittingly witless prey in your steely grip. You take a moment to savor the idiocy of the foul fattie beneath your claws -- and hear a noise. Human voices. Two of them emerge from the front gate of a house nearby and head towards you. "What is that?" you hear, and they continue to approach. You can't risk it -- as they stop in awe, you release your voluptuous victim and escape to the top of the nearest building. "That was a HAWK!" they screech, as the portly pigeon flees to the shadows of a nearby truck, unscathed and barely aware of its brush with death. HAWK?? Come on. You're small, your tail is small, your beak is small, your coloring smooth, and your tail is most certainly not red. They advance on the site of your attack, but alas, you had not even shed blood yet -- nothing but a handful of scattered feathers marks the spot. They look up at you, the female puts on her glasses, the male suggests red-tailed hawk, the female insists on later research, noting your small beak. As they walk away, you hear the male say, "in all my years of living here I've NEVER seen that before..." Your pudgey prey is at this point well-hidden, and escapes unpunished...for now...

(editor's note...to see the birds you actually probably were, go here for theory 1 and here for theory 2 (female).)

You might find this a little hard to swallow -- but it's good to have this approached in moderation for once. I found this on snopes.com:

Claim: 75% of Americans are "chronically dehydrated" because they fail to drink eight glasses of water per day.
Status: False.

The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/toxins/water.htm
Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2004 by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson

I wanted to reproduce the whole article here, but it's copyrighted, so I daren't. Please visit it, at my request. ;o)

Hi All. S'been a while since I blogged, and I'm up in the middle of the night on Saturday and feeling responsible for your information withdrawal. My visit with Mom and Steve was a success; a low key weekend of walking around and eating and them getting to know my Steve, and vice versa. From what I've heard there was approval all around. My life collects snow and starts to roll down hill...hits a mogul and experiences a moment of anti-gravity where everything is suspended, only to land with a whoomp and keep accelerating. I'm in the anti-gravity right now, or you wouldn't be hearing from me. And yet all the stuff of living floating around me as I rise upward in a spray of snowflakes is just out of grasp; this is all you're getting, folks. A moment in Elise's metaphorical brain where she looks around and says, "Oh."

But it's a good "oh." I'll be blogging again when the momentum resumes.

The house warming party was a success. We bought WAY too much food and drink but that's cool, because should a nuclear incident occur we can live off sausage and tostitos for at least a week, and we can bathe in vodka should the water source be contaminated.

Don't ask me where that came from...

...in any case, I'd say we had about 25 people show up, but between 5-10 people actually there at any given time, from 4pm to 11pmish. Steve and I were able to indulge in a very satisfied collapse on the couch at about midnight, with minimal clean up the next day. Thanks to consumption being primarily beer and wine on top of every carby snack you can think of, sausage dogs, garden burgers, and Steve's famous carpet-bag steaks, no one got too drunk or too tired; people seemed to wander through and camp out in all the space instead of clumping; nothing got stolen, broken, or burnt, and generally, from what I can tell, everyone had a pleasant time.

Next big test: a visit from Mom this weekend. ;)

Some pretty amazing news from the world of transplants:

Woman infertile after chemotherapy, becomes world's first ovarian transplant recipient to give birth
A 32-year-old woman, who was infertile after she
underwent chemotherapy due to Hodgkin’s lymphoma
in 1997, has become the world’s first ovarian transplant
recipient to give birth to a baby.
Ouarda Touirat gave birth on September 23 to a
healthy 8-pound, 3 ounce baby, Tamara, at Cliniques
Universitaires Saint-Luc hospital in Brussels, Belgium.
Professor Jacques Donnez, head of the Department
of Gynecology and Andrology at the hospital, removed
the ovarian tissue from Touirat before she underwent
the chemotherapy and froze it in liquid nitrogen. Five
years after she was free of cancer, the tissue was grafted
onto her fallopian tubes. Five months later her menstrual
cycle was restored and in January 2004 she conceived
naturally with her husband, a fellow Algerian, Malike,
according to press reports.
"This is the first time that the tissue was cryopreserved,
removed before chemotherapy and was
successfully implanted, Donnez said. "It is a big
message of hope for all women with cancer who have
to go and have chemotherapy."
Donnez said 146 women were undergoing the
procedure but Touirat was one of the first in 1997 who
underwent cryopreservation.
In addition to providing cancer patients with hope
of giving birth, physicians said the ground breaking
procedure one day could allow women to delay
motherhood beyond menopause, which could raise
serious ethical issues.
Donnez strongly opposed allowing the delay, saying
"the technique must be reserved for young women
with cancer." He went even farther, saying health
authorities should make it "a medical legal obligation"
to offer women who have to undergo chemotherapy
the option for fertility preservation because "more and
more women [are] surviving cancer."

--From the September 30, 2004 issue of Transplant News.