The GirlAlive Blog

First order of business, I just noticed that people's legitimate comments on my blog are being thrown into the junk file by an over-enthusiastic spam filter in my blog software. If your comments have failed to show up that may be why. And I apologize. For all threads, the comment count will probably not change when you leave a comment until I put up a new post. It's a buggy system. But if you click on the comments link at the bottom of the post, your comment should appear pretty quickly. If it does not, please email me and let me know. I've also adjusted the filter level, and that should help.

Now, on the the real reason I'm posting. As you all know, my beloved hamster Binky passed away last week. We miss him terribly, and I missed having a hamster a lot. So we went to the pet store. I wanted another Syrian hamster, but my husband wanted a pair of dwarf hamsters. The Chinese dwarf hamsters were looking all cute, and he managed to convert me. We don't have pictures of them yet, but I'll work on that soon. We named them Carrot and Nobby. You see, Binky was named after Death's horse in the Discworld series, so we decided to continue the trend and named these two after two members of the Watch. Carrot is brown and Nobby has is brown with a bit more white on him. I think the pattern is called "dominant spot" in the terminology of hamster people.

They're very spastic little creatures. I'm used to larger and slower hamsters. Carrot already almost escaped once. Binky was lazy and never ran on his wheel. Nobby has been running on the wheel for about the last 3 hours. They're quite friendly little guys, but they're still a bit too skittish to really handle. We're hoping they calm down and slow down at some point.

We got them both from the "boy" cage at the pet store and so he hope like crazy that they're both boys. In a few months we'll know for sure. With Chinese hamster you'll be able to tell because the males have huge scrotums and the females are the ones giving birth in the corner.

In other news, I finally got the back pay that I have been owed for the last 8 months. Hopefully this means I can go back to the US for a visit soon. Also, there is some important girlalive.com news coming in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Alana

Posted by Alana at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The whole "obesity epidemic" trend is getting ridiculous. Let me give you a few examples from my work. I read maternity casenotes all day, and I've seen some interesting ones. But it never ceases to infuriate me how much some midwives fixate on a patient's weight.

I had a set of notes for a girl who had an uneventful pregnancy and an uneventful delivery. Normally, the obstetrician doesn't send a letter to the patient's GP when all goes well. This doctor sent a letter to the GP just to tell him that he needs to tell his patient to lose some weight before she gets pregnant again. She was only barely in the "obese" range. On top of that, she was 16 years old and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. She didn't plan that pregnancy, so it's unlikely she'd be planning the next one either. And it infuriates me that they write a letter that she should lose weight, without ever mentioning that she also shouldn't be having underage sex or smoking.

The next day, I had notes for two women. The first one was about 30 pounds overweight and a heavy smoker. The second one was a cocaine addicted prostitute who drank a two bottles of vodka a week. Of all those factors, the only thing that the midwives decided to comment on over and over and mention in the GP letter was the "raised BMI" of the first woman. Because according to the Church of Kate Moss, the second woman was living the ideal lifestyle, and the first one, who dared to have body fat, was clearly going to be a worse mother than the second.

The country of New Zealand recently refused entry to a woman from America because she was overweight and "would be a drain on the healthcare system." Do they reject smokers? Do they reject heavy drinkers and drug addicts? No. But they also rejected a child with a facial deformity. Apparently New Zealand is no longer a civilized nation; it is a small island nightclub that only accepts the beautiful and the wealthy.

Recent research has shown that people who are overweight to mildly obese live 8 months longer on average, and people who are underweight live 15 months less than average. To a point, putting on weight will make you live longer. But think of all the money they're saving on pensions and social security by convincing people to be thin.

Is there really an epidemic of obesity? Possibly not. They keep changing the definition of "obese". Millions of people who were previously classed as merely "overweight" are now being categorized as "obese" without gaining an ounce. I work in medical coding, which is statistical data gathering for the World Health Organization. In the UK, they changed the rules for co-morbidity coding this year. We can only code 6 diagnoses per episode for a patient. If they have 3 or 4 immediate problems, those get coded first, and the other spaces are filled with anything else they have, like diabetes or asthma or whatever. They've moved obesity way up in the ranking, so we have to list that before we list valvular heart disease, paraplegia, kidney disease, drug abuse, or high blood pressure. So we can guarantee that there will be more patients with obesity as a co-morbidity. There aren't any more obese patients, but now we have to ignore their alcoholism and hypertention in order to make sure that we mention that they're fat.

Basically, all the paranoia about obesity is a load of crap. To quote Stephen Fry, it is "Loose stool water. Ass gravy of the worst kind." It's all just scapegoating fat people because it's no longer acceptable to discriminate against anyone else.

Alana

Posted by Alana at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sadly this afternoon, our beloved hamster, Binkerton J. Hamster, known to his family as Binky, passed away. We hadn't seen him out of his house all day, so we took him out and he was still alive, but not well. He passed away peacefully wrapped in a flannel shirt, in a box with a hot water bottle.

Binky was a king among hamsters. He never bit anyone and in his two years of life he only peed on me once. He loved yogurt treats and banana chips. He never ran in his wheel, yet he still managed to break it. Twice. I will always remember Binkerton hanging from the wires on the top of his cage, begging for treats.

In the last few months of his life we had taken some pictures that I never got around to posting here.  So in memoriam, here is a photo tribute to Binky.  He remains my favorite hamster ever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Binky will be greatly missed.  The smell of boy hamster will not be missed so much.

Alana

 

Posted by Alana at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I haven't posted much here lately. Not much to say I guess. I haven't posted since my birthday. My birthday was depressing. My husband did his best to make it good, but there's just no getting around the fact that I've lived here for over two years and I still don't have any friends. This is my third birthday alone here. When I moved to Seattle, knowing no one there, I had a birthday party with half a dozen friends my first year there. People in Seattle were just easier to meet and get along with. People here are all friends with people they've known since school. I didn't go to school here, so I don't matter.

My rodents are all completely mental. The hamster Binky keeps trying to hibernate, so I've been picking him up and annoying him to keep him away. Homer is putting on weight, but has taken to standing on top of the house and putting his paws in the hay rack to eat. Spike keeps eating the fur on his chest. We don't know why. Elvis is developing some kind of complex because Fudge won't stop humping him. You don't even want to know what my husband had to wash out of their fur last week.

And that's the only news because my only friends are mentally disturbed rodents.

Alana

Posted by Alana at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)