Have you ever wondered...

Why are boogers sticky?


No doubt your child is starting a brilliant scientific career with this question!
"Boogers" are made of mucus. Mucus is made by mucus membranes. Your body has mucus membranes in all sorts of places: The stomach, intestines, nose, lungs, eyes, mouth, and the urinary tract all contain mucus membranes that secrete mucus.

Mucus contains mostly water and mucin (during a sinus or lung infection, it also contains dead white blood cells that have been working on the infection -- see How Your Immune System Works for details). It is the mucin that makes it sticky.

Mucin is a branched polysaccharide. If you have read How Food Works, then you know about saccharides -- they are sugar chains. Starch, for example, is a polysaccharide. As you've probably noticed, if you mix corn starch or flour with water, you get a sticky substance. Mucin is doing the same thing. Mucus is essentially a thin paste made of mucin and water.

Show your four-year-old how corn starch and water is sticky (especially as it dries out) and he will be looking at synthetic boogers! Then ask them if they would like to eat it. If they say no, then tell them not to eat their own.

It's EVEN BETTER

My last post I talked about my MP3 car cd player, we'll I pushed the limits and I still could have had more.
I made an ulitimate country cd with 14 country cds that I owned, legally! It was only 623MB a CD can hold 700MB. So I could have had like 17 or 18 CDs on it. But the total of tracks on that CD was 186. AMAZING!

THE MP3 CD Player In My Car and Why It Rocks!

Ok, so you know I got a new car. We'll I am finding out just how awesome my car really is. The CD player in my car is also an MP3 player. You might ask, so? We'll let me tell you so. An MP3 player is just about like having an ipod inside of your car. Here is the low down...

1. Unlike normal Audio CD's instead of maybe 13 to 20 songs on a disk, you can put over 150 on a CD and not lose ANY quality. The difference is that instead of an audio CD it is made into a DATA CD. Since MP3s are WAY smaller in size than any other audio file it allows for more songs, like 140 more songs. Thus it's like an Ipod for your car.

2. My MP3 player in my car actually tells you the songs your are listening to. Not track 1, but it would say Jesus Walks. On normal Cd's it wouldn't do that, it would just say track 1.

3. Folders, or as I call them albums. When you make an MP3 CD using the data format you can organize your music into albums. Take for instance I am combining all of my Sarah McLachlan Cd's into one. With the MP3 cd, you can actually put the music into seperate folders (albums).
So, each album is individual on the disk, (Solace) (Sarah Mclachlan) (Mirror Ball) (After Glow) etc.. Here is were my car player rocks, It has Folder buttons that let me go from Folder (Album) to Folder (Album) and it has all the songs in that Album under it to listen to. IT ROCKS!

So, having an MP3 player in your car is about the coolest thing ever. It's like having a 14 disc cd changer in your car with out all the CDs. Just thought I'd let everyone know.

Down Grading to Up Grade

Ok, so When Katie and I were at OC and we had a lot of extra cash we decided to go out and buy a brand new car. We went with the Nissan Altima, a great car. It was huge and roomy, great interior and exterior. We loved it. The bad part was that in reality we weren't Altima people. We really couldn't afford the Altima at the time and ended up with a 6 year loan. So fast forward 3 years, the Altima isn't as nice as it was, it has over 50,000 miles, and we still have 3 years left on our loan. So Katie and I decided to see if we couldn't get a deal to correct our spontaneous venture 3 years ago. What we wanted was to get out of our Altima and get in a brand new car and have it paid off in 3 years the same we had on our Altima. We were willing to pay more a month to do it, but it had to be paid off in 3 years. So we went to the Ford dealer in town and told them exactly what we were wanting to accomplish. So After test driving the Fusion and the Focus and getting the number crunched, we came up with this. We were able to get the top Focus and have it paid off in 3 years paying only 58 more dollars a month then we were. So now after six years we will have a 3 yr old car instead of a six year old car and it will have 30,000 instead of 90,000. It will also look much better. Then When we buy a new car we will have a much better second car. This way we will only have one car payment for a while. The dealership gave us 2000 over what our Altima was worth. We also saved on inspection and tags and gas since the filled it up. We also will save a lot on gas. So here you go our brand new 2006 Ford Focus, the Down grade to Up grade.

2006 Ford Focus

This is exactly what it looks like. It has less the 100 miles, man that feels so good!

BLOG HAYWIRE

My blog went freaky on me today and wiped out like 8 of my previous posts. So if you wondering if you went back in time, no my blog just did.

A MUSICAL NIGHT!

Katie and I went and saw Phantom of the Opera last night. It was fantastic! AMAZING! I WAS BLOWN AWAY! From the Time the chandelier (Are you looking for a chandelier? How about this one, or that one, or this one, or that one.) went up to the Phantoms amazing exit from his chair it was AMAZING! I LOVED IT! The Phantom was unbelievable. If you have the chance or the time see this fabulous production.

Stephen's Rating ***** (Five spider thingys)

Rating is based on a * to ***** spider thingy rating