Recipe Thursday....I really should do this more.

So I haven't posted a recipe for "Recipe Thursday" since I tried to start this theme day of the week. But last night I changed and adapted a recipe I made Monday night and now it is time to share it with the world. I have been trying to do a Meatless Monday because we both need more veggies in our lives and I'd like to know how to make more vegetarian dishes for Chris. So Monday I made cheese tortellini with a roasted tomato, spinach and white wine sauce. Last night i took the left over sauce from Monday and added more veggies and chicken to it. Den loved it and I thought it was good. I didn't want to make pasta twice in the same week but we were supposed to have friends come over last night and with the limited food in the house, pasta was easiest. We're attempting not to over shop as we have been known to do in the past. So big meals for more than the 2 of us are hard especially when you have someone with food allergies coming over for dinner.

Here's the recipe

1 qtr cup chopped mushrooms
1 qtr cup diced yellow onion
1 qtr cup diced frozen multi color bell peppers
1 frozen package of spinach thawed and water drained
2 cans of roasted tomatoes
1 qtr cup favorite white wine
1 package Penne pasta

Cook pasta to al dente
Reserve one cup of starchy water from pasta for sauce
Put a little olive oil in cooked pasta to keep it from sticking

In a separate saute mushrooms, onion and bell pepper. Once veggies are soft, add spinach and tomatoes. Do not bother to drain the tomatoes. Once veggies are combined add white wine. Simmer and let wine reduce in veggie mixture. Once the wine has reduced, pour in half of starchy water. This will thicken the veggie sauce mixture. Continue adding water until the sauce has the consistency you want. Mix sauce and pasta together. Add to a baking pan and cook for 10 minutes. The baking will help the sauce flavor infuse into the pasta.

Feel free to add chicken or other meat to the dish to make this meal not vegetarian.

I'm not the best recipe writer, especially because I do most of this on the fly while I'm in the kitchen, so if you have questions, feel free to ask.

Today the media has offended me....

I get random questions about what I think about our first black President in my small community. I realize that there are not a lot of black people in this area....Yes, I'm making this specifically about black people because there are many people of color in this area but that color is usually derived from some background of Hispanic or Latino. I understand that people want some perspective from someone of a different background...so I don't mind the questions. I don't even mind national budget questions even though I think it will take a miracle to fix the mess we're in now.

So here is how the media has offended me today....I'm not one of those easily offended people but today it may seem like I am. Michelle Obama, who I believe is an amazing first lady (mainly because the things she cares about and tries to change are important issues that need to be addressed) is under fire today for discussing her daughters weight when addressing the nations child obesity rate has tripled. I was sure this statistic was coming out since we used to have talk shows like Maury Povich with toddlers who weigh more than some 4th graders. That's insane. Michelle Obama is a concerned mother trying to relate to regular people in the US. A lot of mothers take their children to the doctor and hear the same information from a physician. They have the same thought process as the first lady "My kids are perfect. How are they becoming overweight?" Being overweight the majority of my life I was not really supported in any efforts to slim down. I was harassed to loose weight as a child for my diabetes. As a teenager, I took on working out to get in shape for myself but the effort put forth was never good enough. I never slimmed down to a size 10. Today I look back at how I felt then and wished I felt that good today. My stomach wasn't perfectly flat but it was closer than it is now. Now that I'm almost 30 I work out to try to live longer, to be apart of my family longer.

Ultimately I think if Michelle Obama has a great parenting relationship with her girls and can talk to them about how they feel and how they're handling all of the publicity, they'll be fine. No one really chastised the political group that used images of the Sasha and Malia in their campaign to get better school lunches for hungry children. But now it's not ok for the First Lady to relate to mothers everywhere about their children and their weight problems. I'm offended. As a woman who is dying to be a mother, I would think that the first lady talks to her daughters about body issues (weight being one of them) because I would want to talk to my daughter about body issues. I would want to make sure that my children understood how to work towards change and provide them with all of the support in the world. I commend Michelle Obama for trying to be a First Lady who helps people and changes their lives. With the many lists the First Lady has been named to, I love how it doesn't phase her. She is still just being herself, a married woman supporting her husband, doing her thing, being a mother and loving her children. Mrs. Obama, You Are Inspiring!

Is it okay to talk about your daughters’ weight if it’s for the national good?

by Mira Jacob, Shine staff,

Two weeks after announcing the unnerving news that childhood obesity has tripled over the last 30 years, and unveiling her own initiative to combat it, Michelle Obama has offended critics by discussing her own “wake-up” moment—when the family pediatrician told her that daughters Sasha and Malia were becoming overweight.

“In my eyes I thought my children were perfect,” Mrs. Obama said at the January launch of her initiative. “I didn’t see the changes.”

While innocuous to some, this comment has set off both valid and not-so-valid criticism in the blogosphere—everything from calling the first lady well-intentioned-but-misguided to hinting that she could be tipping off her daughters’ future eating disorders. Even with one-third of American children classified as overweight or obese, several critics are far more concerned with Michelle Obama’s anecdotal use of her daughters.

Jeanne Sager, a writer for Strollerderby who admits to reading “everything through eating-disorder glasses” says she feels worried for the girls because their mother has “taken an extremely touchy subject out into the open.”

She goes on to say, “On the brink of teenagehood, Malia Obama is at an especially precarious position. With a naturally changing body, the idea that she has to face the world debating her fat puts her at higher risk for an eating disorder.”

In a post that delineates the difference between what is accepted in “the eating disorder world” vs. "the outside world," Laura Collins Lyster-Mensh of the Huffington Post writes, “I am sucker-punched to read that our First Family put their daughters on a 'diet' because they feared 'obesity' and no doubt will be lauded for it…This is not an eating disorder issue, however, and it should not be only us who know this and speak out about it. These are medical, social, and ultimately self-defeating errors in thinking that do harm to all children and all of us. I am very sad today.”

Jezebel brings up the fair point (via Fox News Channel contributor Michelle Malkin) that perhaps in “revealing that her children have had weight issues too” Michelle Obama is “exposing her children to scrutiny at an early age.” Judging from the over-scrutinized lives of other White House daughters—from Amy Carter to Chelsea Clinton to the Bush twins—that’s one fate the Obamas might want to avoid whenever possible.

Mrs. Obama also sat down for a revealing interview on “The Today Show” (see clip below), where she talked about keeping Sasha and Malia grounded, finding time for dinner, and handling the pressures of being a style icon.

Valued economist or wasted research?!?!?!?!?!?

If you know me, you know I highly value education and I am proud to be a smart woman. I know many smart women. I can give several examples but that would give you more to read and the article with the blog is long enough. So instead I will use 2 examples, my mother and a really good friend of mine, the Kat....these examples will make more sense later. Both of these women are college educated. My mother went to CSU Hayward, which is called CSU East Bay now and KP is a UCLA grad.

Being an economist of sorts....I don't actively pursue economist research positions because I love the world of finance but my background is in economics...I love checking out new research that is going on in the field of economics. I was very interested in reading the article today in the Wall Street Journal about the struggles of "winter babies". First off you have to realize, I didn't know that "winter babies" were struggling with anything. Since I am a winter baby, for this BLOG, I used my mother and KP, who has a daughter born on the same day a year after I was born for comparison to this study. I wanted to find out what The Cookie and I should have struggled with in life.

I spent part of my afternoon at my high paying job reading this article. I was so appalled that I decided to write this BLOG. I mentioned 2 women that have winter babies that are both college educated mothers with college educated children. As I have these 2 cases to compare to this study, I thought, well maybe we just aren't the normal "winter babies". My mother drove me to become a great person. She was the GREATEST example of a strong woman and provided me with anything I needed, my grandparents filled in the gaps with things I wanted. From talking to the Kat, I know her daughter had great grandparents like I did and she has the Kat as a strong smart mother in her life. We were not and are not suffering from this "winter baby" syndrome. I want to know....why are you even doing this study?? Tell me the greater good this will have on man kind. Why aren't you spending your valuable research time figuring out how to get the US economy back on the fast track to being a thriving society instead of this downward spiral into deep black abyss.

Please economist find something better to study. Don't present graphs that could be sheer coincidence. Stop thinking you're doing important work and actually DO important work.

New Light on the Plight of Winter Babies

Researchers Stumble Upon Alternative Explanation for the Lifelong Challenges Faced by Children Born in Colder Months

By JUSTIN LAHART

Children born in the winter months already have a few strikes against them. Study after study has shown that they test poorly, don't get as far in school, earn less, are less healthy, and don't live as long as children born at other times of year. Researchers have spent years documenting the effect and trying to understand it.

But economists Kasey Buckles and Daniel Hungerman at the University of Notre Dame may have uncovered an overlooked explanation for why season of birth matters.

Their discovery challenges the validity of past research and highlights how seemingly safe assumptions economists make may overlook key causes of curious effects. And they came across it by accident.

In 2007, Mr. Hungerman was doing research on sibling behavior when he noticed that children in the same families tend to be born at the same time of year. Meanwhile, Ms. Buckles was examining the economic factors that lead to multiple births, and coming across what looked like a relationship between mothers' education levels and when children were born.

"I was just playing around with the data and getting an unexpected result," Ms. Buckles recalls of the tendency that less educated mothers were having children in winter.

The two economists, whose offices are across from one another, were comparing notes one day and realized that they might have stumbled across an answer to the season-of-birth puzzle that previous research had overlooked.

A key assumption of much of that research is that the backgrounds of children born in the winter are the same as the backgrounds of children born at other times of the year. It must be something that happens to those winter-born children that accounts for their faring poorly.

In a celebrated 1991 paper, economists Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Alan Krueger of Princeton University argued that season-of-birth differences in how far children go in school is due to how school-attendance laws affect children born at different times of the year. Children born in the winter reach their 16th birthdays earlier in the year than other children, which means they can legally drop out of school sooner in the school year -- which some do, leading to lower education levels in the group.

While it was well known that the educated earned more, they also tended to come from privileged backgrounds -- something that also affects later earnings. Up until then, no one knew how to separately judge the impact of education on higher earnings. Data already showed the researchers that winter babies tended to earn less. Once Mr. Krueger and Mr. Angrist knew how much winter births affected education level, they were able to estimate how education affects later earnings.

The statistical techniques Mr. Angrist and Mr. Kreuger developed helped set off a flurry of research that employs "natural experiments." In these, economists use some random or natural influence to approximate the controlled conditions of laboratory experiments -- the type of research that University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt popularized in the book "Freakonomics." Examples include using differences in the introduction of television in different parts of the U.S. to see how TV affects children's cognitive ability and using changes in daylight-saving time to see how setting clocks forward every spring affects energy use.

Other researchers have suggested other reasons for season-of-birth differences. Maybe vitamin D was playing a role, for example, because children born in the winter were getting less sunshine in early life. Or maybe being put in the same school year with children who are mostly younger makes children born in the winter less socially mature. A study published in the medical journal Acta Pædriatica in April found that children born in the winter have higher birth-defect rates and suggested it was due to a higher concentration of pesticides in surface water in the spring and summer, when the children were conceived.

There may be validity to all of that research. But if there was any truth to the pattern that Ms. Buckles and Mr. Hungerman discovered, it would question the weightiness of other factors from past research. If winter babies were more likely to come from less-privileged families, it would be natural to expect them to do more poorly in life.

The two economists examined birth-certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 52 million children born between 1989 and 2001, which represents virtually all of the births in the U.S. during those years. The same pattern kept turning up: The percentage of children born to unwed mothers, teenage mothers and mothers who hadn't completed high school kept peaking in January every year. Over the 13-year period, for example, 13.2% of January births were to teen mothers, compared with 12% in May -- a small but statistically significant difference, they say.

"Honestly, when we first saw these patterns, we were so stunned we wondered if we made some mistake," says Mr. Hungerman. "We weren't even excited, we were like, 'Is that right?' "

He and Ms. Buckles estimate that family background accounts for up to 50% of the differences in education and earnings. That suggests to them that the compulsory-schooling effect Mr. Angrist and Mr. Krueger described could still be there, but that it can't be used to measure how schooling affects later earnings because it still mixes the effects of privilege and education instead of isolating them.

Mr. Angrist, who has reviewed their research, disagrees. "The bottom line is a slight change in the estimate," he says. "It hardly overturns our finding." (Mr. Krueger, now an assistant Treasury secretary, deferred to Mr. Angrist for comment).

The new research has hit the conference circuit. University of Texas economist Daniel Hamermesh, who selected for a conference discussion the working paper that resulted from Ms. Buckles and Mr. Hungerman's research, says that it makes an important point about the assumptions that economists rely on in natural experiments. "I love the paper," he says. "It means you have to think about things more than you want to think."

Janet Currie, a Columbia University economist who also selected the paper for a conference, says that what strikes her is how the pattern Ms. Buckles and Mr. Hungerman found shows up even in simple charts. "You can take a look at those graphs and see the clear pattern and that it's remarkably stable over time," she says. "It speaks for itself -- you don't have to put a lot of interpretation on it."

The question now is what drives women from different socioeconomic backgrounds to tend to have children at different times of the year.

Ms. Buckles and Mr. Hungerman aren't entirely sure yet. Perhaps it has to do with fluctuations in employment; married women tend to conceive when unemployment is higher, research has shown. They also speculate it might be due to cooler temperatures in springtime, which don't adversely affect the fertility of poor parents, who may not have air conditioning, like hot temperatures do. Or they wonder if there might even be a "prom" effect at work. January is, after all, about nine months after many of those soirees.

Scary things in life.....

I write this BLOG today as I am trying to be positive about life changing events. There are so many things that can happen that can change the way a life is going to quickly. Someone can die in a car accident, a woman can get pregnant, a new job can be found half way across the country, or someone can find out that they are terminally ill but live for so long it's hard to remember that he was even sick and many many other things. I've spent much of the last week talking with my husband about living your life for you and not the ones you love. In some ways I forget that sometimes living your life for the ones you love keeps you going when you're older. Ultimately I know life is a series of decisions and I hope that the people I love know that I try to make the best decisions for everyone involved in my life and many of those decisions are hard and take a long time to finally come to fruition but most of the time, they are worth the wait. I hope that those I love remember that everyday they are missed and thought of in some way. I also hope they know that I long for the day that we'll all be close enough to have big family gatherings and for our children to be able to see our children often. And I really hope that everyone out in BLOG land remembers to tell your loved ones that you love them EVERYDAY!!!!!

Single girls....BEWARE....

Being married I don't have to worry about shenanigans like the one in the article and sound clip below. Thank goodness if a man asks for my number I can flash him my wedding ring (that is if I'm wearing it and trust me this article makes me want to remember it more often). Not that men ever really ask me for my number....I don't go out to bars or clubs or really any social gathering where single men are trolling for single women and if by chance I end up somewhere where this might happen, I'm sure I have "FUCK OFF" stamped across my forehead when people bother me in situations like that. Check out the little description and then listen to the clip...it's hilarious.

http://parlourmagazine.com/2009/08/wonder-why-women-are-single-meet-dimitri/

Sometimes I feel smarter than everyone else.....

Ok...So at one time I felt bad for feeling smarter than most people in the world. Today I read an article that confirmed that feeling smarter than everyone else isn't such a bad thing. Please feel free to read the article below. It is well worth the read....it should make you feel very smart and if it doesn't, we should talk.

New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country

Bill Maher

Host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher"

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. It was amazing - in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! It's how they get the blood circulating when the Cialis wears off. Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which A) proves my point, and B) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him.

Now, the hate mail all seemed to have a running theme: that I may live in a stupid country, but they lived in the greatest country on earth, and that perhaps I should move to another country, like Somalia. Well, the joke's on them because I happen to have a summer home in Somalia... and no I can't show you an original copy of my birth certificate because Woody Harrelson spilled bong water on it.

And before I go about demonstrating how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness dragging down our country, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Four years later, 34% still did. Or take the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their constituents." An urge they should resist because their constituents don't know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.

Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only 30% got their wife's name right on the first try.

Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen, and a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge."

People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes 24% of our federal budget. It's actually less than 1%. And don't even ask about cabinet members: seven in ten think Napolitano is a kind of three-flavored ice cream. And last election, a full one-third of voters forgot why they were in the booth, handed out their pants, and asked, "Do you have these in a relaxed-fit?"

And I haven't even brought up America's religious beliefs. But here's one fun fact you can take away: did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which one came first.

And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? Please, this country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget town halls, and replace them with study halls. There's a lot of populist anger directed towards Washington, but you know who concerned citizens should be most angry at? Their fellow citizens. "Inside the beltway" thinking may be wrong, but at least it's thinking, which is more than you can say for what's going on outside the beltway.

And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they're talking about. That means Obama budget director Peter Orszag, not Sarah Palin.

Which is the way our founding fathers wanted it. James Madison wrote that "pure democracy" doesn't work because "there is nothing to check... an obnoxious individual." Then, in the margins, he doodled a picture of Joe the Plumber.

Until we admit there are things we don't know, we can't even start asking the questions to find out. Until we admit that America can make a mistake, we can't stop the next one. A smart guy named Chesterton once said: "My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying... It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" To which most Americans would respond: "Are you calling my mother a drunk?"

Bill Maher is the host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," and will be joined on the show tonight by Arianna Huffington. "Real Time" airs fridays on HBO at 10:00PM Eastern Time.

The New Justice.....

Today a friend of mine sent me this story:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24778.html

I like political news and since this political news somewhat relates to my life since I have the same chronic condition as the new justice...i thought i'd share it. Please keep in mind the quotes are from the actual article above.

"Numerous colleagues of Sotomayor have said that her diabetes has not affected her work, though some have noticed her testing her blood sugar or administering insulin shots during work hours. There have been no reports of dramatic health-related incidents — save for the broken ankle she suffered this month at a New York airport."

I read this and wanted to stab someone. I test my blood sugar 4 times when i'm here...it's apart of being diabetic. What is WRONG with people? I'm sure it's not interfering with court. And her broken ankle will take a little longer to heal.

"The organization’s official policy opposes flat-out employment bans, but encourages that employment decisions take into account an individual’s medical history 'particularly in regard to the occurrence of incapacitating hypoglycemic episodes.'"

Adam Morrison is a NBA basketball player........And Diabetic. People praised him for doing that career. He was even on the cover of the American Diabetes Association Magazine. I don't usually become offended but this is somewhat offending me.

"Still, unlike almost any other public official — save the president himself — the health of a Supreme Court nominee is a topic of public debate. It’s no secret that political partisans hope presidents who share their views will pick healthy and relatively young candidates for the lifetime posts — all the better to have an influence on the court’s decisions that long outlasts the leaders who picked them."

She looks young to me and I bet she can out live any of the old farts on the bench managing her diabetes. I think that this pick by Obama probably inspired some kids out there who think that they can't do things because of their diabetes. Obama being president, I'm sure, inspired kids, and it showed true progress in the US. But questions like these also prove that everything weather it's race, gender, or a chronic condition can be a point of controversy for no real reason. Is congress really going to grill her about her chronic condition. Keep in mind...some governmental genius allowed health care providers to call Diabetes a Chronic Condition and not a disease anymore.

This statement is pure BS:

“To do that ... you’re going to have episodes of low blood sugar — hypoglycemia,” Arky said. “Anybody with a hemoglobin of 6.5 percent and less almost universally will have one or two episodes of hypoglycemia a week.” Arky said he counsels his patients to shoot for a level of 7.2 percent because of the risks of going lower.

My A1C is at a 7% which makes you more sensitive to low blood sugars. When my blood sugar gets to 70 I feel low. I wasn't very low last night at your house but feeling like that SUCKS! Which also makes this statement irrelevant:

"Experts say the warning signs of hypoglycemia are often subtle and can include lightheadedness, sleepiness, inability to focus or confusion. If caught early, such events are easily resolved by taking a sugar pill, or a drink of juice or sugary soda. Studies have shown that many diabetics experiencing a hypoglycemic event do not have good judgment about whether their mental abilities are impaired, and if a diabetic misses the signs completely, he or she can lose consciousness."

She is probably super sensitive to low blood sugar feelings. I bet when she's around 80, she feels low.

This is the best statement of the entire news story:

“She’s minimized her chance to develop future complications,” said Dr. William Cefalu of Louisiana State University. Cefalu called her illness “a complete nonissue. ... People live a completely normal life with diabetes. That’s the message.”

I hope this lady kicks butt and takes names!!!!!!! And I really hope that congress isn't a bunch of idiots when they interview her. My husband being the sweet silly person that he is said she should make a new constitutional amendment to make blood sugar test strips free! :D