Good old Elizabeth Edwards.  She’s so smart and dignified.

I was listening to NPR in the car yesterday (I don’t know which show, since I tuned in while it was already in progress), and the topic was illness.  One caller was talking about how she beat cancer and she just knows it was due to prayer.

Elizabeth Edwards, who was a guest on the show, articulated well how silly that is.  She said it in a very non-jerky way, as is her style, but the point she made is that prayer and positive thinking certainly aren’t going to hurt anything, but it’s important to remember that there are a whole lot of very strong, positive people who can’t beat cancer.  The whole attitude of crediting prayer and positive thinking for medical success 1) denigrates the lifework of medical professionals and researchers who have made great strides in cancer treatment, and 2) implies that those who die of cancer are somehow to blame for it, because they weren’t positive enough or didn’t pray hard enough.

My dad, who spends a lot more time around athletes than I do, gets annoyed for similar reasons when winners thank god for their success.  Nobody ever blames a deity for failures, though it only takes like six grams of thought to come to that conclusion.

AND ANOTHER THING!  There’s a billboard around here somewhere (on I-380, maybe?) that says “God Is Pro-Life.”  Do people seriously only think about these things until 50% of the way through the process, then quit?  If you believe that god creates life, how hard is it to come to the realization that he also creates death?  A billboard saying “God Is Pro-Death” would make just as much sense.

My personal belief system is irrelevant here.  I’m just talking internal consistency.

Also, Elizabeth Edwards is smart and dignified.

This is what happens when Miles and I lounge around in bed in the morning.

[quicktime width=”320″ height=”256″]http://www.aprille.org/media/upyournose.mov[/quicktime]

It has obviously been way too long since I’ve caught up with Mark’s blog, because I didn’t catch his link to manbabies.com until just now.

I love Photoshop.  What a wonderful way to spend Miles’s naptime.

The fam and I took a walk in the back yard tonight, and I found that the rhubarb is much bigger up close than it looks from the kitchen window. I really need to make some rhubarb barbs (aka rhubarb bars). I used to make these with my Grammy when she’d come to take care of me when my parents were busy. I like to use my site as a reference for recipes, so here it is for my future search purposes.

This isn’t exactly the recipe we used in the old days, but it’s close. I find my grown-up tastes prefer butter to shortening in the crust, and I skip the Jell-o from the original.

I could seriously eat a whole pan of these.

Rhubarb Barbs

Crust and topping:

• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups old-fashioned or quick-cooking oats, divided
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup brown sugar

Filling

• 1/4 cup water
• 2 T cornstarch
• 1 1/2 cup sugar (you may need a little more sugar if you don’t like tart-flavored things)
• 4 cups rhubarb, chopped into about 1/2″ pieces
• 1 tsp. vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 375F.
2. Mix cornstarch and water. Add granulated sugar and rhubarb. Cook in a heavy saucepan over medium heat until thick. Cool slightly and add vanilla.
3. In a food processor, pulse together flour, baking soda, brown sugar, salt, and 3/4 cup of the oats a few times to combine. Add butter and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.
4. Remove from food processor and stir in remaining 3/4 cup oats.
5. Spray a 9×13 baking dish with nonstick spray. Pat 2/3 of the mixture into the dish and press down to form the crust. Spread cooled rhubarb mixture over crust. Sprinkle the remaining crumbs on top.
6. Bake for 30-35 minutes until light golden brown.

Giant congratulations to Kaspar and Sabine (pictured here at their wedding in Norway in 2006) on the birth of their beautiful new daughter.