a map in my own mind

When I was growing up if food hit the ground, my mother just said, “You can eat that.”

When I was in college, back in the 70s, my engineer not-quiet-yet-husband first told me there was an actual rule about eating food that fell on the floor. He told me food was safe to be picked up from the floor and eaten a full SIX seconds after it fell!

I know other people who actually believe that food is safe up to a whole TEN seconds after it falls!

And now today I have learned that the five-second rule has, in fact, been scientifically proven. I read it first in Kevin Cowherd’s column in the Baltimore Sun today. I checked it out on The Connecticut College website where they reported that two smart women, Molly Goettsche and Nicole Moin, both cellular and molecular biology majors, took it upon themselves to prove the rule using apples (who would eat them after they fall on the floor), Skittles (which everyone knows actually DO last for ever) and agar plates (that’s real science!)

The results prove, Goettsche and Moin said, that you can wait at least 30 seconds to pick up wet foods and more than a minute to pick up dry foods before they become contaminated with bacteria.

They’ll be great mothers one day, I feel certain.

Whoever says that engineers and geeks don’t have a sense of humor is just nuts!

Richard Reardon over at his R&R Business Development Blog started talking about the difference between “wanting change” and “wanting to change.” That’s an interesting distinction.

He suggests that looking at what you have now is the place to look for clues to what you need.

I’m thinking that what I have now is not much help in deciding what to change. I have stuff and I have plans and that’s precisely what keeps me stuck where I am. Perhaps if YOU look at my stuff, YOU might get a clue about what I need. But it’s not your life.

But if I think I want to move to a new house that would indicate a specific change and a plan of action to be developed — lots of stuff has to go away from this house and lots of little things need to get fixed on a more immediate time table.

But if I didn’t know that moving was the change I had in mind, then no amount of looking at my stuff would give me the impetus to rent a dumpster.

So I’m thinking a different first clue is to ask what is it that you don’t want? Then look at the opposite of that and see if that is what you DO want — or if maybe it points at least in the right direction.

Personally, I need pencil and paper to figure out the opposites and that gives me a nice list in the end. And I love lists.