Interior of a dead saguaro cactus, or maybe it was a prickly pear cactus—I can’t remember. Taken in Sagauro National Park in Tucson, Arizona.
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I am completely fascinated by these foreign flora, the cactus. I’ve never experienced them except as small houseplants or exotic greenhouse plants in Minnesota. This is Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona. The saguaro is the (stereotypical?) cactus with the arms sticking up. It is completely alien to me that these should simply grow out of the ground and even tower high above me. I also find them biologically bizarre.
It’s not very often that you’re asked, “Are you wearing deodorant?” and then handed a wipe to remove it. (Deodorant shows up on the x-rays as calcification.) The mammogram wasn’t for especially urgent matters, just luck of the draw.
I had heard that it was painful if you had small breasts, so I was ready for pain. It was an ordeal, but I’ve experienced much worse. The tech helped shoved me forward into the machine. The procedure involved much shoving and maneuvering my torso forward while a glass plate flattened my boobs in a way I didn’t know was possible—a type of magic trick/medieval torture technique, I believe?
It only really hurt for my right side, but the discomfort was tolerable otherwise.
Last month I was lucky enough to get a “friends and family” discount code last month for $50 off of 23andMe, a consumer genetics company offering very basic genotyping (thanks, Anthony!). What they look at are called SNPs, or snips—your genotypes, information at certain locations on your chromosomes you’ve received from your parents.
What is most valuable is the raw data, which is available for download in a non-proprietary format. Through using 3rd-party software with the raw data, I’ve been able to learn more than 23andMe reveals. (The raw data also comes in very handy if you’re not 100% European because 23andMe has a self-acknowledged Eurocentric model.)
Summer has been terrible. It isn’t only the heat/humidity that I can’t handle—it’s the wildlife.
A total of three centipedes have drowned themselves in my cats’ water dish. This did not appear to affect the quality of water as far as the cats were concerned. It may have added flavor and vitamins. Once, there were two centipedes in the water dish. It was likely the aftermath of one centipede forgetting it couldn’t swim as it dove to save another centipede from drowning.
I encountered a centipede in the kitchen sink that was so large, I stood there for a moment to ponder how I was going to kill it. The centipede looked positively tropical in size. The body was almost as long as my pinkie and nearly half as wide. I can’t squash it; the guts will fly everywhere and then I’ll need to do extensive crime-scene clean-up. I didn’t want to touch it, so I decided to scald it to death.
I don’t even want to get into the centipede that touched my bare thigh while I was lying on my bed or the centipede that scurried over my bare foot. I am usually not squeamish, but there’s something about the centipede. I can’t pinpoint exactly what is so frightening. I think millipedes are pretty cute, so it can’t really be the number of legs on a centipede that are scaring me.
