Karen Sandler

Author: Karen Sandler

  • Phantom Limbs

    As I’ve mentioned before, I share my home with three cats. The oldest, Casper, who turns 14 this year, has always been a grump. As he’s moved into his golden years, he’s become even more of a sour puss. He just does not like to be Messed With.

    On Casper’s list of activities that humans must not do to his person:

    1. Brushing, combing or otherwise grooming his fur
    2. Attempting in any way to remove snarls from his coat
    3. Petting past the shoulders
    4. Trimming his nails
    5. Removing him from anywhere he has curled up to nap, including your lap

    Should a human attempt any of these activities, Casper will give a warning growl that will grow in volume and gusto. If the human persists, Casper will bring out the big guns–his claws and teeth. He has excellent aim.

    Several months ago I made the mistake of trying to shave a snarl off Casper’s chest with my horse clippers. Casper snagged the back of my right hand with his claw, hit a vein and a nerve. Lots of blood and part of my hand and pinkie finger are still numb.

    I thought of my minor injury as I was listening to an interview with medical doctor and behavioral neurologist V. S. Ramachandran. Dr. Ramachandran has, among other things, worked with people experiencing phantom limb pain. It turns out there are particular parts of the brain associated with sensation in particular parts of the body. An arm might be removed, but those parts of the brain continue to “report” the sensations that the arm was feeling.

    In one particular case, a patient felt as though his missing left hand was gripped into a tight fist, with the fingernails digging into his palm. He was in constant pain, with no way to find relief. How do you relax a hand that is no longer there?

    Dr. Ramachandran devised a simple therapy to help the patient. He set up a box with a mirror inside, and positioned the patient so that the right hand was reflected in the mirror. The reflection then made it look like the left hand was still there. The patient watched in the mirror as he opened and closed his right hand in an attempt to trick his brain into thinking he’d relaxed his left. It took a number of sessions, but he was eventually pain-free. Such an elegant and simple treatment. The human brain is an amazing instrument.

    I’d like to think it’s superior to the cat brain. But when I consider how the feline set keep us at their beck and call, petting and pampering, feeding them delicacies and providing warm soft places to sleep, I’m not so sure which of us is the genius.

  • Hablando en español

    I have been studying Spanish for a long, long time. For decades, if you start counting from the third grade when I was first exposed to el caballo, el gato, and el perro. In elementary school, we would watch a fifteen minute Spanish lesson on TV, where the teacher would bate, bate chocolate and sing Dos y dos son cuatro, cuatro y dos son seis… (which I just learned comes from a song by Stanley Lucero).

    I took Spanish all through high school, skipped it entirely in college (oddly, there was no foreign language requirement for my BA), then took classes here and there since then, some private, some not. I have a killer accent, probably because I started studying so young, but unless I’m kind of dumped into a situation where I have to speak only Spanish (like when I went to Mexico), I have to think really hard to say what I want to say.

    I bring this up because I just read about an interesting study where it was discovered that bilingual 8-month-old babies are better able to distinguish between two languages, even if they don’t speak either language. Better still, babies living in bilingual homes get a perceptual “boost” that will improve their thinking throughout their lives. Babies not exposed to a second language don’t have the same visual discrimination skills as bilingual babies do.

    Bilingual babies are apparently able to notice variances in how the face moves when a person is speaking one language versus another. Watching a muted video of people speaking French and English, for example, they could see differences in how the lips moved, how the jaw opened and closed and other facial changes. They’d get bored if a language they’d already been exposed to was repeated, but perk up if it was a new-to-them language.

    What’s also interesting about this is that learning a new language when you’re older is one way that’s supposed to fend off dementia. Bilingual Alzheimer’s patients are, on average, four to five years older. That is, being bilingual, they’re staving off the Alzheimer’s a few years longer.

    So, I’m going to keep studying español. Maintain those brain cells best I can. And speak Spanish to my beautiful granddaughter every chance I get.

  • Galactic Sweet Tooth

    I love sweets. Candy is number one, rich dense stuff like dark chocolate, nut-free fudge, See’s bordeaux chocolates (love those sprinkles). I adore Junior Mints and Peppermint Patties, Kit Kat bars, 3 Musketeers (which used to come as three bars, chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla) and Milky Way.

    Next on the treat food chain is ice cream, any chocolate or caramel-type variety (again sans nuts, although pecans in pralines & cream and walnuts in rocky road are acceptable). The ice cream must be topped with lots of gooey topping (chocolate, caramel or butterscotch). A little whipped topping and a cherry are okay, but not required.

    Then come fudge brownies and chocolate fudge cake, preferably frosted with a nice ganache. I also adore lemon bars and lemon cake and just about any kind of pudding. I’m a bit ambivalent about cookies, although a chewy, fresh-baked chocolate chip is pretty yummy.

    Yeah, kind of ridiculous. Luckily I have some self-control, which keeps me from eating a Halloween bag’s worth every day as I might like. I eat a piece of chocolate here, a bowl of ice cream there, then exercise like crazy to keep the sweets from jumping directly on my hips. I really try hard not to gobble up everything in sight.

    Not so the Milky Way (the galaxy, not the candy bar). Apparently, that monstrously big collection of stars has been gobbling up other galaxies in the neighborhood. Astronomers have discovered stars within the Milky Way that all have similar speeds and chemical compositions, which indicates they originally came from a common source. This Science News article describes how the Aquarius star stream within the Milky Way is fairly compactly grouped, which indicates the stars were gulped down by Milky Way somewhat recently. They haven’t yet had time to stretch out, although the Milky Way’s gravity is stretching Aquarius like taffy. There are other star streams that astronomers have identified as well, which were consumed by greedy Milky Way billions of years ago.

    So maybe I don’t feel so bad about my sweet tooth. At least I’m not munching up galaxies like the Milky Way does. I’ve got way more self-control than that.

    Of course, if the galaxies were made of chocolate, it might be a different story entirely.

  • Weirdness

    Cats are pretty peculiar animals. Cat personalities range from dog-like affectionate gregariousness to the high-catness of I-don’t-give-a-damn. Unlike socially-promiscuous dogs, who tend to be madly in love with any human they see, even a friendly cat is much more choosy, dashing off to hide under the bed if an undesirable steps inside the house. These are sweeping generalizations, of course, but since I’m more a cat person than a dog person and because this is my blog, I can sweep all I want.

    I have three cats living with me: Tenka, Zak and Casper.

    This is the indiscriminate Tenka, who drops and rolls on her back at every opportunity, exposing her belly for a rub. Nearly 14 pounds o’ feline love. She’s both a purr factory (loud and rumbly) and fur factory (I swear, she ejects fur like a porcupine does quills). As a mostly white cat, she especially likes to cozy up to people wearing dark clothes. Black pants are a favorite. Her main weirdness–refusing to eat unless I’m standing next to her.

    This is Zak, our cautious former feral. My son and daughter-in-law discovered Zak and his litter-mates hiding with their feral mom outside their apartment. At the direction of a cat rescue group, Ryan & Dani tried to corral all the kittens, but only managed to catch Zak. After many months of complete skittishness around strangers, Zak is now very affectionate, and scary athletic. A big boy (also nearly 14 pounds), he can stretch up at least three feet and jump far higher than that. Many weirdnesses, such as liking to carry his cat toys around like a dog would, tapping his water with his paw before drinking it (a feral cat trick) and burrowing under covers like a rat terrier.

    At 13.5 years old, Casper is the old man of the bunch. He was a stray (found under the deck at my sister’s house), but not particularly feral. He tolerates people, but doesn’t like them very much. Luckily, he puts up with twice-daily insulin shots for his diabetes. But once when I tried to shave off some matted fur, he snagged my hand with a claw, hitting a vein and some nerves. Lots of blood and my pinky is still numb. Casper as a whole is just plain weird.

    There is another kind of weird that only tangentially relates to cats, which is where the science part of this post comes in. I was reading this morning about quantum entanglement, which relates to the infamous Schrödinger’s Cat. Quantum entanglement involves objects which are linked in such a way that they cannot be measured or described unless all the linked objects are measured/described.

    In the case of Schrödinger’s thought experiment, a cat in hidden in a box is linked to the state of a subatomic particle. One state (say, positively charged) means the cat is alive. The other state (say, negatively charged) means the cat is dead. Since you can’t check the charge of the particle until you open the box, you won’t know until then whether the cat is alive or dead.

    Einstein considered this sort of supposition weird, and he didn’t like it, at least as it applied to physics. He felt that the weirdness of entanglements just meant the theory was incomplete (hence his compulsion to find a unified theory of physics). A colleague of his, Bohr, was just fine with weird ambiguities. Luckily they never came to blows over the disagreement.

    Physics is full of cool terms like “quantum entanglements.” There are the names of quarks–up, down, beauty, strange. There’s photon, vortex and ergs. Just shows that physicists have a sense of humor.

    And by the way…I never let my cats hide in a box with questionable subatomic particles. It just isn’t worth the risk.

  • Breadapalooza

    On Saturday, my son Ryan and I engaged in a bread-baking extravaganza. I’d requested the day as a Christmas gift–I wanted him to teach me how to make artisan breads. As an extra-special, wonderful bonus, he and my daughter-in-law, Dani, brought my beautiful granddaughter over to spend the day. Dani went shopping with her mother and sister and my husband did the babysitting while Ryan and I baked.

    Although he bakes fantastic breads, Ryan’s not a professional baker. He and Dani are working on their doctorates in economics (yes, in addition to being new parents). Baking artisan breads is a hobby (edging on an obsession :-)) for Ryan. I taught him the basics of bread baking when he was a kid, and now things have gone full circle with him teaching me graduate level yeastonomics.

    The night before our breadapalooza, as instructed by the master, I made two pre-ferments, a biga and a poolish, and left them out on the counter to do their yeasty magic. We started the first actual dough around 9:30am on Saturday. Our goal for the day–two batches of each of three varieties. Each batch made two loaves. The idea was that he would mix, fold and stretch, pre-shape, shape and slash two loaves of Italian, then I would do the same when my turn came. Repeat with potato rosemary bread and with rustic French.

    Here’s the tricky part. I don’t have a commercial oven (alas), and I own only one baking stone. So only two loaves fit in my oven at any given time. We couldn’t make our Italian bread side by side because all four loaves would be proofed and ready to go in the oven at the same time.  As a consequence, everything had to be staggered on the schedule. So what does any self-respecting doctoral candidate do to prepare for a breadapalooza? Create an Excel spreadsheet, of course.

    I printed the schedule out on legal-sized paper and we taped it up onto the stove hood. That schedule was our lodestar. We spent half our time running over to check what we were supposed to be doing next. If you haven’t yet done the math–four loaves of each of 3 varieties of bread–we were making a dozen loaves. And because of the staggering effect, we had six sessions of mixing, six of stretch and fold, six of pre-shaping…you get the idea. Mass confusion at times, even with the schedule.

    Which led to one bobble–the wrong batch of potato rosemary bread got shaped and put into the proofing basket. Instead of using the earlier one that my son had mixed, the one that wasn’t ready for shaping (which I had mixed), got prepped for proofing. This may sound like not a big deal, but when you’re going for perfection in appearance, crumb and taste, it was near disaster.

    With a few adjustments, all turned out fine. The end results were quite spectacular as you can see from the picture.

    We took one each of the three types over to Dani’s parents’ house for dinner that night to celebrate Dani’s dad’s birthday.

    It was a lot of bread, but it was oh-so-wonderful. And what a fantastic day with my son. Bonding over fermentation, gluten development, and autolizing. What more could a mother ask for?

    If you’d like to see Ryan’s perspective of the day, hop on over to his blog entry at The Fresh Loaf. He’s got more pictures to admire.