Thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks.

I'm out of New York for the next few days, visiting my parents in Vermont, and right now I'm enjoying some pre-dinner ice cream while John and my folks watch some sort of James Bond movie. (Which one? I have no idea. Carly Simon sings the theme song.)

My original VT plan of completing the Astronomy badge seems to have fallen to pieces thanks to days of rain and cloud, save for a few gorgeous hours this afternoon when we took a walk around the lake. However, given that those gorgeous hours were, well, this afternoon, using them to observe the stars might not have been entirely successful. And, in fact, it wasn't. So there. We did, however, see a monument to Lord Jeffery Amherst, best known for Amherst, MA (and, later, Amherst College) and for early germ warfare via the distribution of smallpox-infested blankets.

Instead, though, I do have something of a Thanksgiving post for you. I guess it's pretty unsurprising that a document like the Handbook, which so admires and idolizes hardiness, manliness, and woodland endurance might find the Pilgrims of particular interest. And, in fact, it does.

We only hear a little bit about the Pilgrims, mostly about their place within American mythology. "When the Pilgrim Fathers founded the American colonies, the work of Arthur and Alfred and the other great men of ancient days was renewed and extended and fitted to the new conditions and times." Wow. Plymouth Rock as Camelot, and how. The Handbook goes on to compare Jamestown (not Pilgrims, I know, but still) to the foundation of "a new race of men" and "a new kind of knight."

Both Thanksgiving and the Boy Scouts themselves are really about this kind of popular legend -- the idea of the iron-constitution'd woodsman tromping through the forest with an axe in one hand and a blunderbuss in the other, creating his own kingdom in the wilds of the frontier (though, of course, the frontier had moved considerably from 1621 to 1911). It's a superhero story, when you get down to it, and it's perfectly suited to the Boy Scouts. (You can argue, of course, that we always get the superheroes we want or need, whether the Axis-battling Captain America, Spiderman and radiation in the '60s, or the Dark Knight of the late '80s. Hell, there's Jack Hinks, Newfoundland's fisherman superhero.)

I'm not going to spend time right now discussing Thanksgiving as a political entity, or any of the messy analogies between the settling of the Americas and genocides (hi, Lord Jeff, 150 years post-Pilgrim!). Instead, I'll leave it with this: The Handbook portrays the Pilgrims as the kind of superhero a Boy Scout really needs. Can you really blame them for it?

Houseflies

Public health requirement #2: Draw a diagram showing how the house-fly carries disease.

I knew the Natural History Museum had an exhibit on frogs, so I was hopeful that there may be a certain housefly component as well. (After all, it would be like having an exhibit on me without a section on the Snickers bar I just ate, or an exhibit on Charlie the cat without featuring kibble.) However, despite making for a swell excuse to visit the museum, I found the AMNH almost entirely fly-free.

(Should I have checked this before just arriving at the museum, which was already a pain in the neck because, hey, Brooklyn to upper west side = difficult, and Brooklyn to upper west side when the trains are delayed for some sort of smoke-in-the-station = nearly impossible? Sure. But let's move past these things, shall we?)

John and I spent some time exploring the Hall of Biodiversity, where I'd never been before, and which features some remarkable beetles, as well as a many-times-magnified bee arm (bee leg? I have no idea). There is also a large, bronze nematode head, the kind of thing that will haunt my nightmares forevermore.

Regardless.

Here goes: a Comic Lite version of the housefly-as-disease-vector. Enjoy it, kids.

Run! Run!

And! Consider the Army Physical Fitness test passed, circa 6:00 or so tonight. Thanks, YMCA!

I'm not slick enough to read on the treadmill (currently: The Phantom of the Opera, which is surprisingly good even for people like me who've never seen the musical), so instead running is all music. Lady Gaga and I crossed the (theoretical, treadmill-based) finish line with seconds to spare. Go team!

Anyone got some stretching tips, though? I seem to have pulled some muscles in my upper back during the push-up component of the test, and I'm not overly psyched about it. I've never been as good about stretching as I should, but I'm genuinely not sure what to do differently!

Contagion

So, like I've mentioned a lot lately, I'm exposed every day to a lot of ick. (Despite being over the flu, I haven't been back to the gym yet, by the way, so the final requirement for the athletics badge is still on hold 'til this week, I hope.) But spending time thinking about has led me to the natural next badge project: Public Health.

The first task: "Tell what should be done to a house which has been occupied by a person who has had a contagious disease." I can make that happen, because I spend time worrying about it after school every single day.

Unlike in 1911, quarantines and even the intense house-cleanups that used to go with them are pretty well out of fashion -- the CDC explains that, while they keep no records of voluntary quarantines, the mandatory type is extremely rare these days. The biggest concerns, they elaborate (largely via the H1N1 info pages) are twofold: the cleaning of doorknobs, books, and other common surfaces and the washing of hands. Now, the CDC recommends various antibacterial household cleaners for the surfaces and soap and water for hands, and a good bout of laundry-doing for all involved.

The laundry (and the CDC's H1N1 reference page) is reassuring: when I was a kid, no story broke my heart like "The Velveteen Rabbit." Specifically, the part about the rabbit being confiscated after the boy has scarlet fever. See, I think the rabbit becoming real is lovely, but as a child I was so attached to my stuffed animals that the notion of one of them being taken away if I got sick was omnipresent and sort of terrifying. (I was, for a notable time, actually a little nervous about having my favorite stuffed animals out if I had a cold or something, just in case.) I'd actually even been a little worried about looking into this particular requirement, on the off-chance I'd learn that, no, I actually should have burnt my favorite childhood toys.

Oh man. Just got a little overemotional there.

Hand-washing notes are forthcoming: oddly, my friend Wendy and I had a long discussion about how we each wash our own hands just this afternoon, and I'm trying out a slight modification to my handwashing routine. I'm a little more excited about this than maybe I should be.

Anyway. All's well that ends well and I'm going to bed.

I haven't forgotten you

I just still have the flu.

I can't shake this one, guys. Five days (maybe six, if you want to count last Friday when I started feeling crappy), and an ongoing low to moderate fever, headache, ew. John made me delicious lentil soup, so that helps.

I had to buy hermit crabs for school today, and I think that maybe I'm kind of a softie. See, I spent way more on the crabs than I can actually get reimbursed for. But! I feel really bad for creatures that live in cages. And I learned that hermit crabs are unable to breed in captivity, so every hermit crab you see in the pet store was caught in the wild somewhere. Think about that. Insane. (Yes, I know they have brains smaller than a sesame seed. But still.) So anyway. I bought the hermit crabs a ton of stuff. Lots of sand (I heard they like to burrow). Dechlorination drops for their water (the chlorine can build up on their gills). Sea sponges for their water dishes (otherwise, small crabs can get caught in the dishes and drown). The list goes on. Also, since I heard hermit crabs are social animals (in the wild, they live in colonies of hundreds or thousands), I bought up every crab in the store. (Sure, it's only three, but still: I'm going to go back in a week or two 'til I have eight or ten.)

Thing is, I don't even particularly like hermit crabs. I just feel bad for them. I feel a little like my grandmother though all this. When my mother was a teenager, she had a cat. Cat the cat. And my grandmother hated Cat. She had no interest in him whatsoever, except in keeping him out. She wanted him outside or n the basement, no two ways about it. But Gma didn't really like the idea of cat food -- it seemed so unappetizing. So, on a fairly regular basis, she would go to the butcher to get liver for Cat. And she would cook it for him. Not because she really wanted Cat in particular to have a tasty dinner, but because the idea of anyone having unpleasant food just seemed wrong.

I am the Gma of hermit crabs.

(Update: John just arrived home from work with a bouquet of tulips for me. This has 100% made my day. Aw.)

Flu!

I have the regular flu (not the swine one) -- fever, chills, light sensitivity (which I thought was a symptom of vampirism, but John assures me that no, just flu), the whole lot.

Clearly, there is only one appropriate response: I've spend the entire day playing Pandemic 2, all while muttering under my breath "if I have to be sick, everybody has to be sick." Sadly, only the part about the audible muttering is made up. (Also, I am totally moving to Madagascar, since I cannot infect it, try as I might. What the hell, Malagasy? Why do you always close your ports just when I start to up the symptom severity?)

Boogers

As I guess I've already mentioned, I have a new job teaching elementary school science (a job of such specificity that I didn't know it existed before I interviewed for it). It's a big change moving from middle to elementary school, but the biggest issue is a surprising one:

Nose picking.

Seriously. I cannot even handle it. The little kids hardly know better, of course, but still, it's ongoing and it's making me think a lot about the public health badge.

Also prompting some public health thoughts was my trip this weekend to the Chinatown flu clinic's swine flu vaccination event. Despite a long, long line, things were remarkably well-organized. We arrived by ten, signed in, and received a noon appointment, though we waited and got seen by 11. There were color-coded lines, tidily organized time charts, and I was, in general, totally, totally impressed by the efficiency of the whole shebang. (Heck, the clinic even had escorts to bring small groups of vaccinatees up the elevators.)

Incidentally, the vaccine I got was the nasal spray version, which had a back-of-throat numbing effect and a weirdly dental hygiene taste, but was so much better than the shot. Oh man. I want all my shots to be administered via nose from now on.

This was not my first use of one of the city's free clinics, either. This summer, when I was between insurances, I went to the Bed-Stuy Lung Center for a TB test. Once again, a long wait time, but this time it wasn't evened out by excellent service -- though, of course, given the cost of the appointment, I hardly have grounds for complaint. Really, though, I waited there for nearly three hours for a five-minute blood test. Since summer, for a teacher, isn't exactly the busy season, this wasn't a big deal. There aren't many free lung clinics in the city, and they're pretty high on demand and low on funds. If that means they can only employ so many doctors, can only have so much in the way of office staff, so be it. That's far from the fault of the fine people there. But let me tell you, using the free clinic there kind of sucked.

Please, please, please don't you dare take this as a statement that publicly funded health care is a bad thing. Not hardly Underfunded and overused health care is a less than ideal thing. The situation of uninsured folks who have to wait all day for a single appointment is a bad thing. I have the utmost gratitude to the city's health system. (Hey, free swine flu vaccine! Free TB test!) But there's such a gap between the health care haves and the health care haven'ts, and sitting in the Bed-Stuy clinic with lots and lots of poor kids . . . . There are few words.

There's more here to consider, and more I'd love to go into. But now may not be the time. Not in a blog post entitled "boogers."