A Woman's Right for All Health Care

It's that simple - an important part of woman's health care is access to pre-natal care, fertility treatments, birth control and abortion. Access to health care, and what types of health care she wants to use, is up to her.

I'm part of the 70% - I believe Roe vs. Wade should not be overturned and that abortion should stay a woman's choice.

Sleep Schedule for an Insomniac

This is a little extreme even for me, but here's what happened last night:

• 10:45: Get into bed, turn on House Hunters
• 10:50: Fall asleep (I was tired, but not that tired)
• 10:59: Wake up, watch the news
• 11:15: Fall asleep
• 11:34: Wake up, feel wide awake, consider watching Jimmy Kimmel
• 11:36: Fall asleep
• 11:55: Wake up, turn off the TV
  Toss and turn for at least 20 minutes (yes, I know they tell you not to have a TV in your bedroom, but TV sometimes helps me sleep)
  Jim gets into bed sometime after this, but he doesn't wake me up.
• 1:00: Wake up
• 1:10: Fell back to sleep
• 2:20: Wake up. I might have fallen back to sleep quickly except Jim has a cold and he was breathing very noisly. Tried various sleep positions, counting things, any other quiet trick I could think of. Nada. Wide awake.
• 3:20: Got out of bed, went to the guest room, started reading The Signal and the Noise (great first chapter, too much baseball in the second but I know Nate Silver loves baseball)
• 4:30: Decided I was tired enough to go to sleep, so I put the book down and turned off the light
• 4:50ish: Fell asleep
• 6ish: Wake up after having an odd dream that I now can't remember
• 6:10ish: Fell back to sleep
• 7:04: Wake up, went downstairs

So, I was in bed for a little over 8 hours, and I slept about 5 hours of that. Usually, I'm in bed for under 6 hours. Have had 3 nights in a row of 5 hours of sleep, but this was the most disrupted sleep night I've had in a couple of weeks.

Deer Attack

We have some very nice bushes near our door, as a photo from last spring indicates.

Or I should say "had," because this is what they look like now:

Upon closer inspection, we saw the deer prints. I guess they took the reindeer sign literally.

   

Sunrise Photography (1/9/13)

One small advantage of chronic insomnia is I see sunrise almost every morning. And we have a nice view of sunrise from our deck (actually, our sliding glass doors just now as the deck still has a few inches of snow):

Living Among the Gas Wells

In 2011, I didn't think we lived very near any gas wells. About a year ago I realized one was being built south of me (I don't tend to drive that way very often). By April, I was seeing gas burn-off from, not one, but from two nearby wells. Luckily, burn-off and the reek from it is only a temporary phenomenon.

So, for the last nine months, there have been two active wells within a few miles of my house, two more planned...and something being built on a nearby hill (the question mark)

Map courtesy of Independent Water Testing.

About that question mark...we live in modern residential neighborhood in a fairly rural area. Last winter, a small dirt road went in between two houses, which was odd. The area behind the houses is acres and acres of pasture land and some small groves. This week, the dirt road was extended to the top of the next hill, about a half mile away.

I'd like to believe some rich person is building a dream house out that way. Maybe so. But the way land is being gobbled up for gas wells, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see the land will be permitted (though, at this time, it seems it hasn't been yet). [[By March 2013, it was clear the ? is for someone's dream house. I was very relieved, and the house looks very cool.]]

I worry about the pollution from this, but I worry more about the water. Luckily, we're not on well water.

I'm disgusted by the goings-on around the gang rape of a drunk 16-year-old in Steubenville, so I went to #occupysteubenville today. I got there early and took a number of pictures:

More photos.

Next #occupysteubenville rally is planned for February 2. Groundhog day as a symbol for rape makes sense - we've heard about incidents like the Steubenville gang rape where the woman is not believed many, many times and we're sick to death of it.