My favorite posts though, include this video taken from Chimpanzee Giving Birth: Human Moms Should Take Notes

and Can an 80 Pound Woman Give Birth to an 8 Pound Baby?

There are tons of excellent and informative posts here that will get you thinking.

Oneiric has removed all support for any of the gnome options available before, so I couldn’t change the command easily anymore. I actually had to go into the .desktop file and change that. I found though, that it really wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be. So, per the instructions again on this post I entered this command to launch the .desktop editor:

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/skype.desktop

and adjusted the Exec line to read like this:

Exec=bash -c ‘LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype’

I used this version of the command because I have a 64-bit system. Save file, close it and launch Skype.

To be fair, when I opened the terminal, I ran the exec command line straight in the terminal and when Skype opened I tested the video settings to make sure Skype was talking to Video4Linux. It was. After I saved the .desktop file, I tested Skype again from the launcher in my dock. It worked there too.

I have Video4Linux installed on my computer, and wonderfully enough, when I use Cheese, or any of the other applications that utilize the webcam, Video4Linux did a marvelous job of making adjustments. I can invert the image vertically, I can make it the mirror image horizontally and there are a variety of other adjustments it allows you to make. I found this blog post: Ubuntu Root: How to Fix Webcam Problem in Skype which was very helpful. He gave me the command to use and so long as I ran it in the terminal to launch Skype, it worked like a charm.

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

Sadly, the writer recommends changing the .desktop file execute command so that clicking on the icon yields the same result. The computer voodoo god dislikes me so that Skype was ignoring that file when it launched from the icon and Unity doesn’t allow you to change preferences quite as easily from menus. I had to find another way.

I clicked on this series of options to get to the menu that lets you change the launch command for specific icons:

power button > system settings > main menu > internet > skype and clicked on the properties button. I inserted the same command I used in the terminal into the field for the launch command and saved it. Now, Skype talks to Video4Linux no matter how I launch it and life is beautiful.

Update: Now that I have updated to 11.10, you should examine my new adventures in Flipping the Bird Part Deux. Without any options to use Gnome, it was a whole new game.

Grease a Corningware pot.

Mix 6 eggs, 4 cups cheese and 1 cup milk in a mixing bowl. You can also add some chopped scallions, chopped bacon or other things you like in macaroni and cheese.
Drain the macaroni and pour it into the Corningware pot. Pour the egg/cheese/milk mixture over it. Put the lid on. Put it in a pot. Add enough water to the pot around the Corningware to come up about 2/3 of the side. Bring the water in the pot to a boil on the stove for 15 minutes. Set it in the wonder whatever and put the top on. Leave it for about an hour.

I used a pound of macaroni in a 2 1/2 quart corningware and a dutch oven.

First I found a Corningware pot that would fit inside my dutch oven. I put about a half-inch of water on the bottom of my dutch oven and fit the 2 1/2 quart Corningware inside. I then used the Panettone Bread Pudding recipe from The Italian Slow Cooker by Michele Scicolone as a base for the bread pudding: 3 eggs, 3/4 cup sugar beaten together. Beat in 2 cups milk, 1 cup heavy cream and there the similarities ended. I added some cinnamon and nutmeg and cubed six slices of my Amish Sweet Bread and I beat the whole thing together in my Kitchenaid mixer. I poured the conglomeration into the Corningware pot, put the lid on the Corningware and the dutch oven and I brought it to a boil for 15 minutes on the stove. I then used my oven mitts to move the whole apparatus to the bottom of the Wonder Whatever and I set the top over it. I let it sit in that configuration for about 5 hours. The one thing I would do differently in the future is use slightly less milk. Because there is no place for the liquid to evaporate, the pudding cooked completely and gelled, but it never got to the point that you could cut it into pieces.

I started a few days ago with my plan to make my own essential oils. The instructions I am following came from Aromatherapy At Home’s Guide to Homemade Essential Oils as a guide. The idea originally came from a shopping trip to our local Good Earth I asked one of the sales people about garlic and how it helps strengthen the immune system and help with specific ailments. I had chased my nephews all over my sister-in-law’s house that day and discovered a deep seated lingering cough that my lungs hadn’t yet dealt with, complete with some leftover mucus. I had thought I was all better, but evidently that wasn’t the case. I wondered about the most effective way of getting the garlic into my lungs. I wondered if diffusing it in oil form would help, and told the sales people about the organic garlic in my fridge. They agreed that infusing it into olive oil and diffusing it would probably do what I needed. I set about figuring out how to infuse olive oil with garlic so it would take care of my issues. The garlic oil idea stemmed from The Organic Authority: How to Rapidly Relieve an Earache Using Supplies you Probably Already Have in your Home.

I chopped the cloves from a half a bulb of garlic and put them into a glass jar. I added enough olive oil to cover the chopped garlic and set it in the window sill with the most sunlight in my house. I shook it several times a day and after two days, I felt like the oil was probably pretty sufficiently infused. It smells pretty strongly of garlic. I put a drop under my nose, and everything smells like garlic to me right now. I also went through the same process with the zest of seven lemons and have a lot of that in the diffuser right now. The house generally feels and smells cleaner, and the garlic oil is pretty effectively cutting through my congestion. My daughter woke up with a runny nose, so I put a drop under her nose and around her mouth. I hope it’s cutting her congestion as well. I’m pretty excited about my new experiment. Definitely less expensive than investing in a company’s oils. These are also made so I can add them to food if I want to, as well as on the skin or in the bath.

It wasn’t as though I woke up one morning and said, “Hey, I’m going to boil my diapers today for no reason and with no provocation.” I got the idea from my friend, Mamas and Babies who had mentioned boiling diapers as a way of stripping them. All diapers leak if you leave them on too long. It’s like saying that eventually everyone is going to die. Eventually, all diapers leak. She had me wondering if maybe I had trained myself to change The Bump’s diapers before I might otherwise need to though. If there was buildup on the inserts, it would explain why, and I might be able to return them to their former absorbency. Since this is a problem that could happen gradually, I might have trained myself to respond accordingly and just be changing her more frequently, rather than dealing with the residue. I figured boiling them once couldn’t hurt, so I gave it a shot.

I put one of my largest pots on the stove a little more than half full of water and put four clean inserts in to boil. I took them out after several minutes and put the next four inserts in. I repeated this process for all of the inserts. I wasn’t able to do it in one swoop, since she was wearing a diaper, and some needed to be washed anyway, but over the course of the day, allowing the first batch to dry and washing the others, I got to all of them. After the first batch, the smell of ammonia was over powering. My kids were gagging because they thought I was cooking it. I’ve never made any food that smelled inedible, but the benefit of the doubt is beyond kids under the age of ten. I wound up using a cinnamon scented essential oil in a diffuser to deal with the smell, and repeated this process again to deal with the same smell after the second batch.

After boiling the inserts, I washed them and ran them through an extra rinse. I then dried them in the sun. My results were astonishing.

After only boiling and washing and before they were even dried, the inserts FELT more absorbent. The process of the boiling actually removed a lot of dinginess and staining that I had thought was permanent. Obviously, that meant that there was stuff left in my pot, so I washed that on the sanitizing cycle so food could reasonably be cooked in it again, without making me gag from the thought. Once they had dried, the inserts felt soft and spongy again and after using them for a week, the mild diaper rash that nothing was fixing, is gone. I’m guessing the buildup was causing the problem there.

My conclusion with regard to boiling prefolds or inserts for diapers is that you should do it once in awhile. I’m thinking probably every few months is sufficient, so long as your detergent is gentle but strong. I suspect this is the boat I am in. If you have a more stringent or less effective detergent, you probably need to strip more frequently. Thus endeth the lesson. Happy cloth diapering!

I took a roll of paper towels and cut it in half. I now have two short rolls of paper towels. I pulled the cardboard core out of the middle of one and stuck the paper towels, still rolled together, in a cleaned, gallon sized ice cream tub. I poured 2 cups of water and 1/3 cup of olive oil into a bowl and poured it in the middle of the paper towels in the ice cream tub. I put the lid on and cut an X over the middle and then I pulled the top corner of the first paper towel through the X.

When I tried them, the paper towel separated like a dream and popped through the X with no problem. The olive oil got all the poop off her butt with no problem. The olive oil left my hand pretty greasy, so I wiped it on the insert of the fresh diaper. I left the olive oil on her butt. I think it will probably help keep her rash-free and well moisturized.