Aeglaeca

On March 5th, 2010 my 16 year old daughter, Katey, ran away.  She left a note and her cell phone.  She also left a video of herself on the phone saying good-bye in which it was clear that she was under the influence of drugs. I considered publishing the video here for her friends to see but decided that she’s getting more than enough attention.  (Those of you close to the situation will understand that.)   She jumped out her story and a half bedroom window and ran on foot and was last seen around 4PM north of Wausau on highway 51.  From the onset we suspected she was with her (I thought, EX) boyfriend.  For those who did not know, Katey was recently in trouble with the county with this boy – in fact, she was almost charged with assault and she had pressed cahrges against him for the same.   As various reports came in from her friends and their parents we didn’t know what to think or make of the information.

3/6/10 She was seen on Saturday by one of her girlfriends.  She is in town and on the run with her “boyfriend”.  They are running from house to house trying to evade the cops – not because they are looking for Katey but because they are looking for her drug-dealing, meth-head of a boyfriend.  Reports from her girlfriends are that she is using drugs and has been kicked out of at least one friend’s home once the parents found that she was a runaway (sadly it sounds as if they kicked their own kid out for the offense as well). 

She is apparently telling everyone that I kicked her out and took her phone because I forbade her from seeing this boy.  The sad truth is I only found out on Friday after she left that she was even having anything to do with him again.  Though, I certainly would have tried to keep her from seeing him — that much is true since he was hitting her when they dated several months ago.  I thought she was dating another boy the last 2 months and when I called him Friday night he told he’d brokeen up with her the week before because he found out she was messing around with this other boy.  At this point we believe that she has been seeing him again since early January and that she has been using drugs with him since then as well.  We think that her recent medical issues may be a result of the drug use. 

3/8/10 She did not attend school today which is no suprise but soon the county will issue a truancy warrant.  We still do not know where she is and according to her social worker and Wisconsin law there is absolutely nothing more I can do but wait for her friends to call or e-mail me information.

IF YOU SEE KATEY CALL THE POLICE @ 715-261-1200 and tell them you want to report on the time & location of a missing person — this is the only way I will get them to help.  This the last update I am going to put here until she is returned home — thanks for all of your support and the kind phone calls and e-mails.  While I truly hope she gets sober enough to come to her senses (hopefully before he beats the hell out of her) there is nothing I can do until she decides to seek help.  We need to take care of our other three children , we have jobs to maintain and we are in the process of moving into a new house and those plans are not going to change.  

For those of you who think I’m being callous or I haven’t tried hard enough to find her you are welcome to give me the money for a private investigator to track her down and bring her in and the money for a  private treatment facility that I can admit her too as a parent without her consent because short of that happening my hands are tied.

Act 1,  Scene 1 – Good-bye freakish hair… next time all of it goes!

Current Mood: Aaarrggghhh!!!!! & Yeah! Yippee! & yes yes yessssss!!!!

February 5th, 2010 (9 months + 21 days) 9-month Check-Up  – Doc says they are perfect!

*HC = Head Circumference

Ellie is a crawling machine and Marcus is getting there.  He can pull himself along pretty quickly with his arms, he just hasn’t gotten his belly off the floor yet.  They are both walking along the furniture and pulling themselves upon everything.  The are both getting a top tooth to go with their bottom two.  Ellie is hell on wheels in her walker… nothing in her reash is safe!  Marcus still only goes backwards but he grabs all he can reach too.

The both love pancakes and orange juice on Saturday morning.  Ellie likes to dance and Marcus likes to sing.  Austin has already worked out all the instruments they are going to learn so the three of them can have a band.

It’s hard to believe that they will be turning 1 in a few short months… geez, where did the time go?

Current Mood: Ellie Kisses & Sweet Marcus & Twinnies & Yeah! Yippee!

trep·i·da·tion

  (tr?p’?-d?’sh?n)   

n.  

1. A state of alarm or dread; apprehension. See Synonyms at fear.
2. An involuntary trembling or quivering.

[Latin trepid?ti?, trepid?ti?n-, from trepid?tus, past participle of trepid?re, to be in a state of confusion, from trepidus, anxious.]
trep’i·da’tious (-sh?s) adj.

“trepidatious.” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 06 Feb. 2010. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/trepidatious>.

…made an offer on a house today…

Current Mood: Anxious

…gets a little bit closer to reality!  The open beta started today, I’m downloading the client right now!  Check it out! http://startrekonline.com/

Current Mood: Abducted & Happy & Ja Ja Ja & Yeah! Yippee! & yes yes yessssss!!!!

Ellie and Marcus have been rolling and scooching for about a month now and recently pulling themselves up on their playpen wall and walking along it (for the last few weeks).  Ellie is a bit further along than Marcus with getting into the crawling position but until tonight I’d only ever seen her go backwards.  BUT… tonight Ellie crawled from the couch to her jumper (about 2 feet) and then later crawled across the playpen to get to me!  So little Elle is officially a crawler! 

Incidently, last weekend we had to lower the crib mattresses because I went in to check them and they were both standing, thankfully on the inside rail, just chatting it up and having a good time.  Tonight, Ellie stood up in the crib and pulled down part of the mobile — so those are gone now. 

My little monkeys are starting to get mobile, watch out!!

Current Mood: Ellie & Happy Babies! & Marcus & Proud & Twin Kisses

Adieu to 2009.  Welcome 2010.  I don’t think I’ll be able to top giving birth to twins in the new year for excitement but you just never know what will happen.  I resolve to follow through on the best laid plans of mice and men…

Current Mood: Tired & Weird

The tyres of the future may be made from dandelions

Tremble, Michelin, tremble

OTHER than being an ingredient of the more recherché sorts of salad, herbal tea or wine, dandelions are pretty useless plants. Or, at least, they were. But one species, a Russian variety called Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), may yet make the big time. It produces molecules of rubber in its sap and if two research programmes, one going on in Germany and one in America, come to fruition, it could supplement—or even replace—the traditional rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis.

Despite the invention of synthetic rubbers, there is often no good substitute for the real thing, for nothing artificial yet matches natural rubber’s resilience and strength. This is because natural-rubber molecules, the product of a stepwise synthesis by enzymes, have a more regular structure than the artificial ones made by chemical engineering. Around a fifth of an average car tyre is therefore made of natural rubber. In an aeroplane tyre that figure can be more than four-fifths. Moreover, the price of synthetic rubber is tied to that of the oil from which it is made, rendering it vulnerable to changes in the oil price. Because oil is likely to become more costly in the future, natural rubber looks an attractive alternative from an economic point of view as well as an engineering one.

Natural rubber has problems, though. Growing Hevea in the Americas is hard. A disease called leaf blight means the trees have to be spaced widely. Even in Asia, currently blight-free, planting new rubber trees often means cutting down rainforest, to general disapproval. And trees, being large, take time to grow to the point where they can yield a crop. A smaller plant that could be harvested for its rubber therefore has obvious appeal.

To this end, Christian Schulze Gronover of the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology in Aachen, Germany, and his colleagues have identified the genes that allow TKS to produce usable rubber. In particular, they have discovered an enzyme called polyphenoloxidase that is responsible for making its rubbery sap coagulate.

From the plant’s point of view this coagulation is a good thing. The evolutionary purpose of rubber, and the reason why it has appeared independently in plants as diverse as trees, guayule and dandelions, is that it gums up the mouthparts of herbivorous insects. Human users, however, do not want it to coagulate too soon, and Dr Schulze Gronover has found a way to switch polyphenoloxidase off, using a technique called RNA interference. This intercepts and destroys the molecular messengers that carry instructions from the polyphenoloxidase gene to make the enzyme, meaning that rubber can be extracted more easily from the plant.

Meanwhile, in America Matthew Kleinhenz of Ohio State University is working on increasing the yield of rubber from TKS. Dr Kleinhenz is doing things the old-fashioned way, growing different strains of TKS, grinding up the roots (where most of the sap is found) to see which have the highest rubber content, and crossbreeding the winners. His aim is to create a plant that is both high-yielding and has roots chunky enough to be harvested mechanically by the sort of device now used to pick carrots.

Combining the two approaches—high-tech bioengineering and low-tech plant breeding—may produce that rarity in the modern world, a whole new crop species. It would also mark a step on a journey that some see as the way forward: a return to the use of plant-based products that have, briefly, been overshadowed by the transient availability of cheap oil.

SOURCE:  http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15172672&subjectID=348924&fsrc=nwl.

Current Mood: *Wink* & Cool

Current Mood: Happy & I Love You!

I’m very sick of working (re-working) my blog tonight. At least it is back together and not having errors and issues. Just have to do some cleanup but it will keep until tomorrow. For now I am officially updated to v2.9 and ready for v3 in the spring.

Current Mood: Aaarrggghhh!!!!! & Bored