Jordan has a big vocabulary. She’s passing it on to our two-year-old. In her defense, she says that the Winnie the Pooh Visits the Doctor book at the doctor’s office used the term othoscope.

Jordan’s last final was on Monday. Her final final, ever. At least until she decides to get a Ph.D. This class has been eating up a lot of her time, and lots of my time too, since I was devoting my evenings and weekends to taking care of Sylvia so she could study.

So what will I do with all this free time? Let’s see…

1. Catch up on my email. (Just did that.)

2. Blog.

3. Clean the house.

4. Do laundry. And more laundry. And more laundry. Last night we folded three loads of laundry.

5. Mow the lawn. I’d hoped that the Minnesota lawn-mowing season wouldn’t start for another month, but the neighbors on either side of my house have mowed already, and there were a few tall tufts. Fortunately, it only took half an hour after dinner tonight. And Sylvia loves watching people mow the lawn.

6. Prepare for the second kid. “Kicks” (so-named by Sylvia) is due in late August.

7. Watch TV, read magazines and newspapers. We’ve been doing the latter a lot, since it’s easier and quieter than the television when Sylvia is going to bed.

8. Potty training!

Okay, so that’s a pretty sad list. It makes it sound like parenting is all diapers and laundry. Here are a few more things I’ve been doing lately, and most of them don’t take enough time to have been deterred by Jordan’s busy schedule:

9. Watching the bunnies get fat under our bird feeder. When Sylvia is cranky, I point out the wildlife in our yard. She can go from crying to laughing in no time.

10. Hiding the raisins from the raisin monster. Sometimes you can convince a two-year old to eat with a creative ruse. The first time I did this, she launched into a long story about how the raisin monsters and flake monsters were going home, coming back on their skateboards, and playing with their kids in the living room. That was as much fun as her long story about Curious George and George Bush a few days later.

11. “Daddy, I want to jump way up high.” She’s small enough that I can loft her nearly to the ceiling. Ten jumps per rep, and many reps over the course of an evening. She’s my personal trainer.

12. Bicycling to the park. I did that last weekend while Jordan was studying.

13. Swim lessons. Learning to kick and blow bubbles.

14. Reading story books. I can recite quite a few Dr. Seuss books from memory. She can’t read, but she can correct you if you read a word wrong. (Those of you who think I’m a linguistic nitpicker should meet her.) Lately she’s been asking about all the pictures in the Harry Potter book Jordan has been reading. “What’s Dumbledore doing?” “Who is that next to Mad-Eye Moody?” It’s been three years, Sylvia, I don’t remember…

Some statistics, like the world population, give you instant perspective on complicated issues. It doesn’t take a lot of math to figure out what percentage of people live in China if there are 1.1 billion people there and 6 billion people in the world.

Miles per gallon sounds like it should be similarly intuitive. But it’s misleading. Consider the following, which was a Car Talk puzzler a little while ago:

You drive a car that gets 50 miles per gallon. Your spouse drives a big SUV that gets 10 MPG. You both drive the same amount. You have the chance to trade in your car for a new one which gets 100 MPG. As an alternative, your spouse can fix the tire pressure in the SUV so it will get 12 MPG. Which will save more gas, going from 50 to 100 MPG, or from 10 to 12 MPG?

The thing which makes this difficult is that MPG measures the inverse of what people want to know. You don’t decide how many miles to drive based on how many gallons are in your tank. You want to go somewhere in particular, and you need to know how many gallons you’ll need. So the useful statistic is gallons per mile, not miles per gallon.

Of course, every car out there gets more than a gallon per mile, so a more reasonable statistic is gallons per 100 miles. The puzzler can then be restated:

Which will save more gas, going from 2 gallons per 100 miles (GP100M) to 1 GP100M, or going from 10 to 8.3 GP100M?

MPG is just a “bigger is better” number. But presented as GP100M, it is clear just how little gas the more efficient one uses in comparison to the gas-guzzler. If the stickers at the car dealer showed GP100M, I’d be able to calculate in my head roughly how much gas I’d need for my weekly commute.

I work about 10 miles from home, so that’s 20 miles five days a week, or 100 miles. If gas is $2/gallon, the 10 GP100M SUV costs me $20/week, versus $4 for the efficient car. If prices go to $3/gallon, the cars cost $30 or $6 per week. (Admittedly, the math happens to be particularly easy in my case.)

My actual car (a 1996 Toyota Corolla) gets about 30-35 MPG. That’s 2.8-3.3 GP100M. So if gas gets up to $3/gallon, I’ll be paying about $9/week on gas.

Here are a few more examples of GP100M:

2006 Toyota Prius: 51/60 MPG; 2.0/1.7 GP100M
2006 Hummer H3: 16/20 MPG; 6.3/5 GP100M
2006 VW Beetle Hatchback 22/31 MPG; 4.5/3.2 GP100M

All last week Jordan has had a pain in her jaw on one side, like having braces adjusted. She’s also had bad headaches
and has generally been feeling icky. She was about ready to schedule a dantist appointment when she read a newspaper article that mentioned that those are the symptoms of mumps. And there’s been a mumps outbreak in parts of Minnesota and Iowa.

She hasn’t seen a doctor, and it’s starting to go away on its own. She did call the RN/midwife group which is doing her pernatal care, and they told her to call a regular doctor.
On the radio they say there have been 14 cases of people suspected of having the mumps. I wonder how many there really are, when you count people who haven’t seen a doctor.

(In case you’re wondering, she was vaccinated, but the vaccines only give you partial immunity, at least once you are an adult. Which is good enough to keep outbreaks under control.)

I had a discussion about nutrition with my brother yesterday. As often happens in a discussion about nutrition, he made reference to the scene in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper in which a character wakes up in the future and discovers that nutritionists think that steak and ice cream is good for you, while health food should be avoided.

I’ve never seen Sleeper but everyone who talks about nutrition seems to know about that scene. It’s usually brought up as an example of how today’s nutrition advice will probably be the opposite of tomorrow’s. I don’t buy it.

Consider the following nutrition advice that hasn’t changed for as long as nutrition has been studied scientifically:

• Too much or too little of any nutrient is dangerous. Too few calories and you starve, too many and you become obese. The same is true for salt, carbs, vitamins, water, oxygen… you name it. But in most cases it’s safe to give advice in one direction (“drink lots of water”) because the opposite is hard to do.
• Eat a balanced diet. Exactly what that means is up to debate, but if you eat the same foods every day, there’s a good chance that you’re missing some valuable nutrient.
• Don’t consume more calories than you use.
• Eat high-calorie foods in moderation. Which follows straight from the advice above, unless you happen to be trekking across Antarctica.
• Eat more fruits and veggies. It’s theoretically possible to eat too much, but it’s hard to do.

30 years after Sleeper, red meat and ice cream (high-calorie foods) are still bad for you. Fruits and vegetables are still good for you. And only the proponents of fad diets have ever said otherwise. Not just that, but nearly everyone can acheive their nutritional goals just by watching calories and eating lots of veggies.

The reason this is a pet peeve of mine is that it is indicative of people’s perceptions of science. The science hasn’t changed much in 50 years. We now know more about why veggies are good and we’ve discovered that some fats are better for you than others. But people seem to think it reverses every year. Why is that? I have some ideas:

• The media often can’t tell a wacky hypothesis from established science. I’ll probably get back to that in a later blog entry.
• Balance is too complicated. People want to hear that a certain food is good or bad, not hear about how much is too much or too little.
• Science is complicated. Is red wine good for you, or bad for you? Both: it’s been proven to do good things and bad things. And the right advice depends on how likely you are to suffer from anything from heart disease to alcoholism.
• People don’t want to hear the truth. If you think ice cream might turn out to be good for you tomorrow, you can allow yourself to eat it today.
• It’s a cat-and-mouse game between diets and food manufacturers. This is true for fad diets as well as real science. Low-fat diets worked because people switched from snacking on cookies and potato chips to carrots. The industry response? New Rolled Gold Pretzels are fat free! The low-carb fad started, and the food industry found ways to create technically low-carb snack foods. Both were secretly restricted-calorie diets, (even ice cream gets boring) until loopholes where discovered. The same thing is happening now with trans-fats: scientists knew that people were consuming too much saturated fat, so everyone switched from butter to margarine. Not that scientists knew that the trans-fats in margarine were any better…

My family has been making maple syrup since I was in grade school from the three maple trees in their suburban yard. Despite what people think, it’s easy to do, even in an urban environment, and any maple tree will do– including the giant silver maples which tower over many houses in Minneapolis.

I’ve never thought of making maple syrup as back breaking work until now. It’s mainly just boiling sap. My parents are out of town, and we’re house-sitting for them. We just started boiling today, and the sap has been collecting since Saturday. One of the trees has sap collecting into a big plastic tub. I’ve filled my (8-gallon?) bucket twice, and there’s at least another bucket’s worth still in there. Another tree had exactly one bucket’s worth, and the third tree had a full 10-gallon bucket under it, which I brought inside as is. The hardest part was lifting the tub to pour into the bucket.

Now I have to boil down the sap fast enough to keep ahead of the trees. We’ve been having perfect sap weather, and I’m guessing we are getting about ten gallons of sap per day. Since Jordan is pregnant (and has a bad back to begin with) I’ll be doing all the heavy lifting. But the payoff is sweet.

It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. But at this rate, that’s a lot of syrup.

I’ve finally done it. I’ve started a blog. Why? Because my news page is now a two years out of date. I’d sort of moved news to my daughter’s photo page– at least photogenic news. (Most of which is: look how cute my baby is!)

The theory is that with a blog it will be easy enough to post that I can write quick things as they come to mind, which is better than writing nothing at all.