Seven Quick Takes Friday

Catch some more Friday Quick Takes by dropping by our hostess!

1.  On Monday we finally get the dining room min-reno started....crown moulding, light fixture and paint.  Plus our kitchen will get painted at the same time.  Before then, I need to strip the border paper in the kitchen and empty out the dining room so work can begin.  I'm just happy it will happen before Christmas!

2.  November is birthday month in my family.  So next weekend my brother and I will host a party for my husband, sister-in-law and mother, who will be in town for a week.

3. It's been great spending time with my newly arrived nephews and niece these past couple of weeks.  It's been a long time since I've lived in the same city as one of my sibs and their family, and I'm really enjoying it.  With teen sons, I miss reading stories and answering all the "why" questions, and smelling little freshly bathed heads.

4.  I recently discovered a very interesting blog with "life hacks for home managers".  It's called Simple Mom and I've started using one of her downloads for planning my day called the Daily Docket.  Lots of good stuff there.   One of her recommendations is to use the "brain dump" process from David Allen's Getting Things Done

.  This is crucial to my mental sanity, to get all those nagging to-dos out of your head and onto a piece of paper so that you don't spend mental energy trying to remember them.  Try it!  It's incredibly freeing.

5.  There's gonna be a lot of talk about the new mammography recommendations coming out of the US.  Here's a good piece that describes the math behind recommendations of these sorts. It also has a couple of links to other worthwhile articles.  This is one area where so-called common sense doesn't necessarily work.

6.  I listened to a really interesting podcast from CBC's Ideas yesterday called Neuron Therapy (mp3), an interview with Stuart Shanker, Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, York University.  He talks about the concept of self-regulation (or self-control) and how difficulties with this process may underly all kinds of mental and physical disorders, in particular, autism, his area of research.  Fascinating listening, and something that I will definitely follow-up on, particularly as it pertains to learning and teenagers *cough*.

7. I had an appointment today with my excellent and hilarious dentist.  Today, our topic of conversation was tween girl pop culture.  He has two daughters so is very familiar with the vampire/Hannah Montana/Jonas Brothers stuff that I have been lucky to avoid, having two boys.  He then started to regale his assistant and me with the words to some Hannah Montana song that apparently is on the radio all the time.  I suggested that they should really create pop songs with physics facts in them so that at least we could learn the words to something useful, and he commented that Thomas Dolby's 80s hit "She Blinded Me With Science" featured the physicist Magnus Pyke in the video and shouting in the background.  So, in honour of my newly cleaned teeth and physics for all, here it is!