On Second Thought....

I guess that wasn't all my news for today. I heard on NPR today about someplace that's trying to institute a fine for "text walking." Something like $20, I think. This woman in Galveston works at a hospital and some time ago she treated two patients, the girl who had been text-walking and stepped off a curb without seeing it, and the man in the car who overcorrected when trying to avoid her with his car and hit a lightpost because he was talking on his cell phone at the time. She said she was so amused at the time because she'd never heard of something happening for such a reason--and now she sees about one text-walking injury a week!!!! Can you believe it?!? I am SOOOOOO guilty of this and would be completely broke if Lafayette ever started fining for it.

I wanted to make a "shout out" to our insurance lady, Brenda, who evidently reads my blog! Last week Martin and I walked down to the insurance place (to settle a slightly annoying complication between NHS and our insurance that would've been much more annoying if Tara hadn't told us it had happened to her two days before) and Anja and I stayed down in the lobby while Martin went up to talk to Brenda. When he came back he said she reads my blog! How funny.

The other day on NPR in the morning I heard a story about the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, and how it's something like the most polluted city in the world. Now I realize that China has gone to great lengths to try to improve their pollution problem for years, specifically for the Olympics, but obviously it's still a huge problem. Why would we subject these incredible athletes to such horrible air quality?! "Yes, I hold the gold medal for the 2008 Olympics... but my price was lung cancer six years later..." I just don't understand. And I'm glad that such an effort has been put forth to try to remedy the problem, but the fact is, it didn't really work, and I don't think that any of these athletes should be asked to compete in such conditions. Evidently they have what are called "blue sky days" and everyone was excited because they had two in a row last week. But then it was made clear that a "blue sky day" doesn't actually mean you can see a blue sky... because apparently a blue sky over Beijing is unheard of... it just means that the air quality is decent. I feel so sorry for the Olympians this year.

We just got back from hanging out with Matt where Anja was happy as a clam the whole time and actually fell asleep without a peep on the way home! Hooray! Whenever she wakes up she will easily be settled into her bed for the night. Anyway, we went to Barnes & Noble with him and I got a Jones Soda juice that was orange, tangerine and lime and IT WAS AWESOME.

The other news from today is that last night Martin and I fed Anja some mashed up bananas in rice cereal. She loved it, but it's become SOOOOO much fun to feed her. She is hilarious! She's really good at opening her mouth, but not so good about shutting it once the food is in, so the mushed up food kind of hangs down from her toothless gums and we laugh, which makes her laugh, and then she just looks ridiculous! (And by ridiculous, I of course mean ridiculously cute!!) I took a few pictures: