blanket training

Yeah. That's pretty much gone out of favor with puppies, too.

They start trying for the next kid as soon as the previous one is six months old. They wean the kids at six months for specifically that reason.

But... I thought the whole point was taking what God sends along. Isn't trying for kids attempting to influence the matter as well? Oh well. Trying to make other people's reasoning make sense to me is a recipe for a headache.

They use blanket training for the babies: Put the baby on a blanket on the floor. With a wooden spoon, tap around the borders of the blanket. If the baby crawls off the blanket, slap the kid's hand with the spoon, put the kid back on the blanket, and repeat the tapping around the borders of the blanket. A few repetitions, and the kid learns to stay on the blanket.

I really wish I hadn't read that. I'm kind of sick to my stomach now.

blanket training

I wonder if that makes it hard to get out of bed as an adult. A great excuse for oversleeping.

JZ, insent.

Sorry, Jess.

Also, you had a recipe for vegetarian Cincinnatti chili, and I printed it out and tried it and it was really good, but I lost the printout. Do you still have that recipe up online somewhere?

I can't imagine having 17 siblings AND being home-schooled. I'm tempted to call my parents and thank them for not being religious whackaloons.

so God is cool with hitting infants, not-breast feeding, over populating the earth, but NOT contraception. got it.

Do you still have that recipe up online somewhere?

That website got accidentally trashed when I switched webhosts, but I was able to find it on on the Wayback Machine. Woo hoo!

[edit: Looking at that recipe again, there's one thing in there that doesn't actually reflect how I make it anymore - I usually just use one 28-oz can of diced tomatoes and skip the tomato sauce entirely. The rest still looks accurate.]

Where do all the neurotics live?

On the East Coast, of course. A psychological tour of the United States, in five maps.

WE ARE ALL familiar with the rough geography of the United States - the slash of the Rocky Mountains between two great coastlines, the bulge of Maine, the Florida peninsula, the Great Lakes, set in the heartland.

But what about the country's psychogeography? You know, the great river of extroversion that flows roughly southeast from greater Chicago to southern Florida? Or the vast lakes of agreeableness and conscientiousness that pool together in the Sun Belt, especially around Atlanta? Or the jagged peaks of neuroticism in Boston and New York?

...

Interestingly, America's psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest, long a center for the manufacturing industry, has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams.

The Northeast corridor, including Greater Boston, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin, are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies....

...

So regions like Silicon Valley or the high-tech Route 128 corridor around Boston succeed not just because they have great universities and highly educated people (some of the greatest high-tech entrepreneurs of our time are college dropouts), but also because they are magnets for highly ambitious, highly curious, and highly open personalities.