My mother's been having some health problems. A year or so ago when I was with her and my sister in New Orleans, my sister wouldn't let her go anywhere unsupervised. I was freaking out. I'm not supposed to find out my mother can't be left alone because I show up to someone's funeral! This either has to come up in conversation earlier, or someone's over-reacting. Or both.

I still come down on the side of over-reaction. After all, she's not even retired yet, although my father is doing more of the driving. But I'm not there! Maybe they were just being typical and not telling me shit. Still, she is doing a lot better now.

Nora, fear of radiation is often so irrational that it's hard to come up with an argument someone will respond to. One problem is that many people seem to think radioactivity is some kind of cartoon-villain death ray that turns the food radioactive. Instead, we're talking about small radioactive particles floating in the air. Most of the radioactive isotopes from a nuclear plant have very short half-lives, so they don't even come into the equation on crops away from the plant. The main culprits are Cesium 134, Cesium 137, Strontium 90 and iodine 131. Cesium and strontium have half lives about 30 years, so they'll be around for a while. Iodine 131 has a half life of eight days, which means it's gone altogether in about 80 days. Cesium gets into the food supply because it's water soluble and absorbed like potassium by living things. Strontium 90 mimics calcium, which is how it gets into milk. However, both of these elements pass out of the body pretty quickly and that can be speeded up by using chemicals that bind to them. Everyone alive today has ingested some radioactive strontium and cesium from atomic bomb tests.

In the U.S., one of the first instructions after an event is to put milk animals in barns and feed them stored food. (Once, in a media conference drill, one of the participating journalists asked, "I'm nursing. Am I a milk animal?" The executive doing the briefing took a while to recover.)

Foods like spinach tend to show higher levels because they have so much leaf surface. The highest readings found so far was on spinach grown about 60 miles south of Fukushima Daiichi, which was found to contain 54,000 becquerels of iodine-131, or 27 times the allowable limit. That sounds terrible, doesn't it? To reach the exposure allowed annually for power plant workers, you'd have to eat 41 pounds of spinach. To reach the level that could increase your cancer risk by 4%, you'd have to eat 820 pounds of spinach. In the case of the highest level found in milk so far, you'd have to drink more than 58,000 glasses of milk raise your lifetime cancer risk by 4 percent.

My great-grandmother lived with my grandmother and her family for the last 40 years of her life. (She lived to 103.) When my grandmother got sick, my mom offered to have her come live with us, but my grandmother wanted to stay where she was, because she said she didn't feel safe having her neighbors be "so far away." (She'd lived in apartment buildings her entire life. We lived in the suburbs, on about 1/3 of a acre, approximately a 30 second walk to any of about six neighbors.)

To reach the exposure allowed annually for power plant workers, you'd have to eat 41 pounds of spinach.

I probably do eat about that much spinach in a year. This is going to become one of those things where my crazy relatives point and say, "See? Eating all those vegetables will kill you!" isn't it?

Oh Consuela, I wish I had words of wisdom for you, we are in exactly the same situation with my mother-in-law, and instead of trying to find a place for her to be comfortable before she was as far down the dementia path as she is now, we moved in with her, it was a mistake. I can tell you it is a constant struggle for us (this morning she came up the stairs to tell us that she had swine flu at 4:50). Plus I have lingering resentment that we are living in her house, it's not "my" house, etc. My sister-in-law comes over 4 days a week and my husband takes Friday's off, but we haven't been on a family vacation in the 3 years we have lived with her, because of her fears.

I'm trying to find the origin of this legend:

Once upon a time, there was a big truck stuck under a bridge. It was too big to clear the bridge, and woe, the traffic backed up for miles as engineers of great expertise tried in vain to find a way to raise the bridge.

And then, a tiny voice emerges from the back of a station wagon, and a five year old child asks, "Why not just let the air out of the tires?"

And the moral of the story is engineers are stupid. I think.

Has everyone heard this? Where does it come from? Google is being bitchy about giving me any clue.

"See? Eating all those vegetables will kill you!"

I am feeling pretty vindicated about my life choices right about now, to be honest.

I've heard that story, but it's not a cute, wise child that comes up with the answer, it's an engineer who comes up with it. With the moral being that "smart people will get it fixed when everyone else is standing around with slack jaws."

And then, a tiny voice emerges from the back of a station wagon, and a five year old child asks, "Why not just let the air out of the tires?"

I've heard this as a brainteaser, I think.

I probably do eat about that much spinach in a year.

Even if you did and it was all contaminated, that would mean you had the exposure that is safe for plant workers to receive every year, year after year, and nuclear plant workers on average live somewhat longer than the general population. (That's probably because of the selection process of needing to be fairly bright and physically active, not because of the magic of radiation.)