St. John's Ambulance, Part II

In my copious amounts of spare time, I am thinking of becoming a volunteer for SJA. I would get first-responder training, which will definitely be useful for me in the future. Today's course focused on administering first aid to traumatic injuries (accompanied by videos with stressful music and wonderfully un-hysterical victims who answered questions clearly and concisely and didn't flail or shriek even when they got large foreign objects lodged in their eyes).

I acquired loot in the form of two first-aid kits: one for humans, one for pets (hey, cats can get injured too, especially since my kitties go outside), a book on first-aid for pets (mostly cats and dogs), and SJA's Officia Wilderness First Aid Guide. I read about 50 pages of it on my way home and it's chock-full of pertinent information and useful illustrations. fearsclave and ai731 in particular, you may want to check it out. It has a lot of useful information for providing first-aid for long periods of time (hours to days and even weeks), for those who are traveling or who live in remote areas.

In short, I am now certified in CPR, first-aid, and the use of a commercially-available defibrillator. Not the big medical kind with the paddles, but the small kind with adhesive charge pads. Still, I can now increase someone's chances of surviving respiratory and cardiac failure from 3% to 50%! It's very exciting.

ashforestwalker came by today and now the stairs and the large room in the basement are looking pretty gorgeous. Unfortunately, the weather has not been cooperating with the paint drying, but I hope we'll be able to get this done before ashforestwalker has to go back to his regular job.

Call for recipes!

Dear flist,

As part of my 101 Things in 1001 Days project, I am trying to broaden my cooking horizons. So for the next three months, the plan is to cook a "new" and "exotic" dish every week.

I could always go hunt down recipes on the internet, but I find that my experience is always best when I get recommendations from my friends.

So, dear flist, do you have any fun/new/exciting recipes that I could try? My regular culinary experience is North American/French Canadian, with occasional forays into cooking with curry and various stir-fries. What can you suggest that will make me break out of my culinary rut? (Dish names are good, and bonus points if you can provide the actual recipe)

:::cross-posted to recipe_trade:::

Season 7: not quite as bad, but more complicated

Dear writers/directors/producers of 24,

I don't know if you know this, but making your plot even more complicated than before is not necessarily the way to a better show. In fact, right now, about 3/4 of the way through the show, you are dangerously close to what's known as a Thirty-Xanatos Pileup.

( Spoilers behind the cut )

Also, way to fail AGAIN at writing convincing strong female characters. Sure, you added in like sixty-gazillion of them, but they're all essentially as ineffective as they always have been.

The only redeeming features were that scene between Jack and Senator Mayer, in which the latter actually seems to have got through to him about due process and not going outside the bounds of the law and trusting the very institutions he defends. Too bad you had to go and undermine it by ( Spoilers! )

The other scene I liked was the bit with his daughter, who finally grew up and quit being a whiny brat. Sadly, you also wrecked the end of that scene by giving two very competent actors shitty lines and an implausible conclusion to the scene. So, meh.

Overall, I'm not sure why I'm still watching this. I was told that Season 7 was better than Season 6, and I'm not convinced of that. It's less... horrifically violent, that much I can say. For instance, no one tears out their enemy's trachea with their teeth and then spits it out on the floor, so that's a small mercy. Otherwise, though, it's pretty much the same old, same old.