Vitamin C at Night ?

Last week I purchased a multivitamin/sleep aid which contained more than 1,000 mg of vitamin C. This surprised me because in France, I heard so much about vitamin C being a stimulant and therefore shouldn’t be consumed near bedtime, I started to believe it. I have only had it once, when I was already exhausted, so I can’t tell whether it affected my sleep.

A friend who lives just outside Paris had mentioned a few years ago that she only learned about vitamin C being a stimulant when she moved to France. I told her about my multivitamins that were supposed to cause drowsiness. She went a step further and did research it online. When she did a search of "vitamine c" and "sommeil," she got a lot of advice lumping vitamin C in with Coke, coffee and tea as "stimulants" that can keep you from getting a good night’s rest, whereas when she looked up "vitamin C" and "sleep" or "insomnia," nothing of the sort turned up in the search results, except for some info saying that vitamin C can help you sleep, which she concluded was probably related to evidence that insomnia is a symptom of a calcium deficiency or perhaps a deficiency in vitamin C itself.

So the thing about vitamin C being a stimulant along the lines of Coke is probably an old wives’ tale, as some French sites have also concluded. So now I won’t feel guilty about pouring my son a glass of orange juice in the afternoon, as he sometimes requests.

The perfect water bottle

When I moved to Paris a couple of years ago, I took a lot of my old habits with me, including a tendency to refill my spring water bottles with tap water. It’s not like I didn’t like the municipal water in Paris – I got used to the limestone – it’s just that it was much cheaper to refill one bottle a few times before buying a new one. I also discovered that sparkling water, like St. Yorre and Badoit, was bottled in sturdier plastic which were convenient for reuse. The sleek, half-liter-size bottles easy to carry in my messenger bag from work to gym to home. I’d hold on to a bottle for several days before replacing it, so I’d end up whipping out a bottle that was scratched, with a peeling label from excessive washing, and crinkled from one-too-many trips in my bag and from being crammed into cup holders.

I gave up the habit – or rather I significantly cut down on the amount of times I reused a bottle – after someone mentioned that "people" who reused bottles were running health risks because of all the bacteria around the part of the bottle you put in your mouth.

About a month ago, I thought of going back to my habit of reusing plastic spring water bottles after a coworker decided to retire her reusable plastic water bottle – the tinted, reusable kind designed for outdoor sports –out of fear the plastic would leach toxic chemicals. Since I have the same blue water bottle, I followed suit; however, when I failed to find a suitable replacement, I resurrected my blue bottle. I just wasn’t drinking as much water without it, and I could no longer tolerate those little waxy paper cups by the water cooler.

The water we buy is bottled in ultra thin, crinkly plastic which is horrible for reuse, so I am still searching for an alternative to my blue leachy bottle.

Metal in the Microwave?

Anyone who knows his way around a modern kitchen knows you shouldn’t place metal objects in a microwave oven. Aluminum foil, for instance, can give off sparks and even catch fire.

I saw a father put that rule to the test at Ikea this afternoon by microwaving a pair of jeans in one of the ovens made available to the Ikea restaurant patrons.

Our families toured the showroom at the same time. His two daughters, who I guessed were around two and four years old, looked very much alike. While waiting for my boys to return from the restroom outside the restaurant, I noticed the mom, clutching a partially-dressed toddler (I can relate to that), while the dad and his older daughter stood near the microwave oven. But instead of extracting a meal or bottle, he pulled out a pair of tiny jeans, sniffed them, and walked off to join the mom, who quickly unloaded her toddler on the table top and proceeded to dress her in the microwaved jeans.

Besides being a questionable hygiene practice, it also could have been dangerous, I thought, to microwave an item of clothing with metal snaps and studs. The one time I put a dish decorated with a silver trim in our microwave, weird noises started going off, as if sparks were about to ignite. Since then, I have avoided putting any decorative kind of metal in the microwave. Couldn’t the metal zipper and the buttons on the jeans overheat and set off sparks?

When I got home, I did some research and learned that rounded metal objects such as spoons are less likely to set off sparks. But what about the teeth of zipper?

Leap Day

365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds

Another four years, another leap day. Earth takes 365¼ days to circle the Sun. The extra hours each year (roughly 6 x 4= 24 hours) are lumped together in an extra day every four years.

After that, the math and scientific calendar tweaking and tinkering get confusing: special rules apply to years ending in double zeros and years that are divisible by 400. I didn’t know why that extra day is inserted between February and March, instead of added at the end of the year on December 32. David looked it up and informed me that at some point, February was the last month of the year. It’s shorter than the other months because two of its days were given to July and August, which honored more powerful gods.

Netflix

A couple of years ago, I read an article in either Time or Newsweek about Netflix guilt, which afflicts DVD-my-mail subscribers who rent films and hold on to them indefinitely without ever watching them. I remember that the phenomenon seemed to be more prevalent among "high-brow" rentals, like tear jerkers and works with subtitles.

Netflix definitely wasn’t an option for us, I concluded. The only time Hollywood Video ever charged us a late fee was for a "really good" Australian coming-of-age film I rented based on a recommendation, but couldn’t find the right time to sit through with David. If our rental plan didn’t include late fees, we might have held on to that movie for months, and still not have found the right time – or be in the right mood – to watch it.

There are countless documentaries and Academy-Award-worthy movies I’d like to watch some day. And if had unlimited access to a comprehensive library of such titles, I might just try to take full advantage. Of course, finding the right time and waiting for the right mood to see some of the headier movies would pose a greater challenge. It’s so much easier for David and me to agree on a tense thriller on a Friday night than it would to agree on a thought-provoking documentary.

For months, I insisted to David that we just couldn’t decide, weeks in advance, what we wanted to see on a given night, and that it would be better to agree on a film genre, and just walk to the video store to find a good fit for that evening. Otherwise, I remember explaining, we’d turn our treasured Friday night movie nights into a chore and a bore, acquiescing to watching whatever Netflix happened to mail to us that week.

What’s more, I started thinking about all the TV recordings in our DVR catalogue that we just end up erasing each week – without watching – to free up DVR space for newer recordings. Ever since we acquired the ability to record TV programs, I started recording everything I ever wanted to watch but never had the time. Then I started putting off watching some of them because I still didn’t have the time. Then I thought about the piles of unread magazines in our magazine rack. I couldn’t find the time to catch up but wouldn’t dream of cancelling my subscription or throwing out any magazines I haven’t read from cover to cover.

A few months ago, David signed up with Netflix and we cancelled our monthly rental plan with Hollywood Video. And, surprisingly, I’m happy with getting DVDs by mail thus far. Nothing prevents us from renting an occasional title at Hollywood, if the mood strikes, and, as with our video membership, we simply return anything we haven’t watched in a week. If we regret our decision, we just added it back to our queue. I have also discovered that Netflix isn’t like those Columbia CD sales deals. They don’t just start sending you random titles based on your past movie rental choices. You can rearrange your rental queue as you see fit, moving things up and down the priority list, and adding and removing titles, epending on your changing preferences.

Surprisingly, I feel more relief than guilt when I return a film I have no intention of watching, and I rarely add movies back to the queue.

A rose of any other color

I know that red roses symbolize love and romance, but I can never remember what the other colors mean. It seems:

• Pink roses are for someone you appreciate or  admire
• Orange roses are for those you desire
• Yellow roses are for friends and Texans
• Carnations – of any color I believe – are for a new or blossoming relationships

Buon San Valentino!

 

Regarde la Mer

I just watched a terrific Francois Ozon Thriller. After X-2000, David was leery about sitting through another one of Ozon’s earlier films, but I know he’ll regret not watching Regarde la Mer (See the Sea) with me.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a thriller that was this intense. An oddball, nomad backpacker shows up at the doorstep of a beach house – with those French-style, painted wooden shutters I love so much – and asks if she can camp out in the yard for a couple of nights.

She’s clearly a creep: her request to pitch her tent sounds more like a demand; her hygiene is questionable and her behavior is inappropriate by anybody’s standards. It’s harder to tell, however, if something is also not right with the host, who leaves her baby unattended in the bathtub to get the door, even though she wasn’t even expecting anyone. She then asks her creepy house – or dare I say lawn guest – to babysit while she go shopping for groceries. Then again, her husband is off on business, leaving her with a baby in a secluded beach house, so she could simply be lonely and preoccupied. Either way, I kept switching back and forth about where I thought the story was going.

Time seemed to fly by as I watched this film. Just as I was getting into it, the closing credits started to roll. Luckily for David, I have re-added Regarde la Mer to our Netflix queue.

Marina de Van, the actress who plays the creepy backpacker, also plays a quirky character in Sitcom, another Francois Ozon film we just watched.

Baby talk with a British Accent

I haven’t paid much attention to the differences between British English and American English until our friend and new mom, Adele, started sharing experiences from her life in the United States in general, and from the findings from her US-edited baby books in particular.

Okay. I know that English people say courgette and aubergine, instead of zucchini and eggplant, and that they pronounce other words that are the same in both British English and American English differently enough to raise eyebrows in restaurants. For instance, Adele complained that when she pronounces tuna fish more like "tyou-na" than like "toona," nobody understands her. And I know that in England, people fill up their cars with petrol (gas) to take the motorway (freeway) and get pissed off (and never pissed) when other motorists cut them off while driving like they were pissed (drunk).

As for baby words, I already knew that in England, tey say nappies for cloth diapers; pushchairs, prams and buggies for strollers; and cots for bassinettes. I’m also, however, adding lots of new words to my vocabulary and becoming familiar with even more grammatical and spelling differences for other common words.

A suivre…