For the past few months I've been working on the UI for Demigod (and by the way, we released the first official trailer today) and we reached a point a couple of weeks ago in which the UI needed a complete overhaul. The other leads on the project were worried about how I'd take this because they knew they were essentially telling me, "we're sorry, but you have to completely redo this, it doesn't fit with the game now." After discussing what changes we wanted to make one of the leads asked me worriedly, "are you okay with this? I mean, we're basically redoing everything." And when I said yes, explaining that this always happens in UI because there's a point you reach at which it just sort of...well, happens, he said, "it does? So what are we doing wrong, then?" Speaking in the broad, industry-wide sense of the word we.

It looks like I made that goal -- earlier that I thought, even -- because my belly dance instructor has asked me to join her troupe, Skin Deep. I guess this means I'm a real belly dancer now.

It seemed that as soon as I joined the troupe we started getting a slew of performance dates alongside Skin Deep's student troupe, and since I've got a lot of family and friends local to the area, I thought it would be useful to point out where we're performing.

But all of that has changed, my friend! On a complete whim last year I decided I was going to try belly dancing. I figured if there was any kind of dance I might have a remote chance of being decent at it would be something that utilized my more than ample junk in the trunk. Sure, they call it belly dancing, but that turns out to be a bit of a misnomer.

If you're an atypical gaming female like me, it's easy to let a knee-jerk reaction get the best of you and make you want to call him a misogynist or sexist, but if you have that reaction then you need to remember one thing: Magnus Bergsson isn't talking about you. He's talking about your average woman, and you know what? He's right.

This isn't entirely new to me. Back in high school I was in Marine Corps. Junior ROTC where I was not only a good shot on the air rifle team (I had a sharpshooter medal), but I was able to spend a week in full immersion at Parris Island, Marine Corps. boot camp. Part of the boot camp experience was the M-16 rifle course, and I'm proud to say that I didn't do too badly, but that experience is a distant memory...

What have I got for sale? Well, in addition to the handknit items I've been putting in my Etsy shop, I've been going through my handspun yarn stash and I thought I'd see if people were interested in buying it. If you're a knitter who's unfamiliar with handspun yarn, you might wonder to yourself, "why would I buy handspun yarn when I can get cheaper yarn from the knit shop?"

Now you guys can finally see what it is I've been working on behind the scenes here, and I hope you like it. Not everything is finished yet, and in fact many things are still in transition. But given that most people are here to read my blog I thought that I could work on finishing up the rest of the site and make most of it live. You may find a broken link here and there or a page that hasn't been converted over to the new design. Don't worry...it'll all be taken care of soon.

O'Reilly's comments focus a lot on the erroneous belief that so many anti-game people hold: that people who play video games lose the ability to socialize with people. They don't know their neighbors, he says. Nothing could be further from the truth. Video games have, especially in the last few years, become a foundation for vast social interactivity. Hardly anyone sits in their room anymore playing a game in the dark by themselves; they're adding people to their Friends Lists and playing games together, either against each other or cooperatively. Or they're playing World of Warcraft with a thousand other people and making friends with them. Or they're going to game conventions or E3 and meeting people in person who they've only ever known as a voice on the other side of the Xbox headset. Video gamers have grown up and are having children, and now parents spend time with their kids playing video games together. As a video game developer, I can say that the social interactivity factor of games and the new console systems is nearly more important than the game itself now.

O'Reilly talks about gamers as if his sole exposure to them comes from a poorly written TV stereotype. I'd wager he's never actually met one. A video game console in a home is about as common a site today as a toaster. Video games are so common place that MTV, that shining beacon of social trend prediction, now has its own video game show. (Which bears the unfortunate name of The G-Hole...but we'll save that for another entry.) There are socially inept and withdrawn people who play video games, and there are socially inept and withdrawn people who have no idea what an XBox or a Playstation is. There are surgeons who have been shown to have improved motor skills and coordination because they play video games. There are soldiers in O'Reilly's beloved Iraq War that are better UAV pilots because they play video games.

There have always been people like O'Reilly -- people who are fearful of some new technology or new fad and think that it will be the death of civilization as we know it. It was said that comics would ruin society (they didn't), and the same was said about television and radio, the very media that O'Reilly relies on for his paycheck and yet conveniently considers benign.

He goes on at length about how impossible it is to hold a conversation with a computer geek, and that you can't really talk to them. The moment he said this, O'Reilly might as well have hung a big neon sign around his neck that read, I'M IRRELEVANT. While everyone else in the world moves on with new advancements and new technology, the dinosaurs of our society, the people who fear change, fear advancement, and fear their own relevancy and ability to keep up, wail and gnash their teeth about how society is dying and no one else can see it but them. And society doesn't crumble beneath our feet.

If O'Reilly can't have a conversation with a person who plays video games, uses computers, or uses an iPod (another device that he complains about), devices that are considered these days to be as basic as a calculator, it's much more telling about his own inability to keep up with the rest of society. Perhaps he should be more concerned about his imminent irrelevancy and less concerned about people who don't fear technology and are out talking to their friends and their coworkers about it.

There was a time in games, back before Alyx in Half-Life 2, before Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, when female characters in games came in only one variety: overboobified, underwaistified, barely-dressed stripper. For a female gamer like me, it was an easy time championing the fight to include less sexed-up female characters with more clothes on on their body and a few more brain cells in their head. All we had to do was hold up any ad from any gaming magazine that had a prominent female character and point to it. Or just say, "come on...just look at Lara Croft, for God's sake."

Then we were rewarded with the Alyxes and the Jades, and we female gamers were the happier for it. Finally we had some realistic female characters, ones who were smart, ones who wore real clothes and didn't exist solely to serve the male fantasy. We had characters we wanted to be.

So we should be happy, right? We won our fight, didn't we?

I had an interesting discussion with friends and fellow game developers today, and it made me realize that we're in danger of thinking we've won the war when we've only really won the battle. The discussion started with video from Gears of War that I can't link to because it's been pulled for copyright reasons, but the video had a shot of a female character that helps the player through the game -- her name is Anya and she's an intelligence officer that you mostly hear but never see. The video, however, gave us a sneak peek of her and one of my friends raised an interesting point: while Anya certainly isn't scantily clad by any means, my friend found it interesting that in the video she's standing with a fully-armored soldier having just landed in a helicopter. My friend wondered why the one female character didn't have any armor on while the male soldiers had full protection?

I'm not going to pick on Gears of War specifically -- Anya is a great character. She's exactly what a great female character should be: intelligent, approachable, and not oversexualized. I think the way Epic designed her is terrific. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that she's another character in a trend that I worry is almost eroding the very thing we're trying to get video games to stop doing: perpetuating the idea that women are an unusual commodity unfit for ordinary places in these fantasy worlds.

In an effort to raise video games out of the depths of sexism, more game companies are designing female characters that aren't oversexualized, that are approachable, and that play a pivotable role in the game. This is commendable, certainly. But what do Alyx and Anya have in common? (Or seem to -- I'll certainly be quite happy to retract any of this once GoW is released and I'm wrong about the role Anya plays.) They're helper characters. And they're almost always the only female character in the game.

It's as if the designers have figured out that they need to have a woman in the game in order to help work out this whole strippers-in-games problem, but they didn't broaden their scope enough to go beyond a band-aid solution. So they put in a female character that's certainly important enough to be a key part of the game, but its at the expense of the rest of the game world. (I should note that I'm mostly limiting this to shooters and other "hardcore" genre games -- RPGs generally do a pretty good job of having a lot of characters of both genders in their game worlds.)

Women make up 51% of the population. Women are construction workers, CEOs of large corporations, soldiers, some of whom serve in combat now. Why, when we're creating futuristic worlds, are we not including them among the background characters of our game world? Why is it that when you're walking around a military base in a futuristic world and encountering one generic soldier after another, not one of them is female?

I'm not absolving my own company (Raven Software) of this. We made Quake 4 and we absolutely should have had a good female marine in the game. We have a few women at Raven and all of us told the team that we really wanted a female marine. One of our artists even concepted a very good character but due to memory andtime constraints, we were told, there was no way to put her in. It's unfortunate, and it's something we ought to remedy in future projects.

But the remedy isn't making one very special female character, one carefully crafted to please the eye yet not offend the sensibilities, charged with carrying the burden of representing the entire female gender in the entire game. The remedy is actually a lot more plain than that: just add female characters to your game world. Add them in ordinary positions doing ordinary things. Got a game that has a scene in a futuristic space dock? Make one out of four of your generic dock worker models a woman. Got a game that takes place on futuristic battlefields with squads of soldiers, most of whom are there to add a living element to the game? Make one of them a woman. And if you can't spare the memory for the extra female model plus her voice files, put a couple of generic female voice files on one of your armored-up helmeted soldiers. After all, do men and women soldiers in heavy armor really look that different? (This idea was suggested by my friend who originally asked about Anya's armor, and I think it's a great idea. Okay, the model animations should definitely look different between a man and a woman, but hey, I'm willing to sacrifice that for something so much more obviously female as a voice file.)

Making special female characters is great, but in doing so we shift the focus from wondering why there are only strippers for female characters in a game to why there is only one woman in the game. That just shifts the problem, it doesn't help to solve it. We're an industry that's grown up a lot over the last couple of decades and we're really making strides. Many of the young guys who make games today have gone on to become family men, yet we're still seen as the socially awkward pimply-faced teen who has completely unrealistic ideas about women in games and art. Imagine how your wife, your girlfriend, or your daughter live in a world in which they can do anything they want and be represented, and then look at the game world that you're helping to create and re-evaluate why you might be leaving them out of it.

Special female characters are great and it shows how far we've come in our short history. But when the day comes that the inclusion of women characters in games is as ordinary and unexciting as the inclusion of male characters already is...that's when we've really nailed it.

And by the way, I want to add a postscript here. Some of you may say, "but Caryn, what about the Hellchick model? That's supposed to represent you, and she's the height of oversexualized, underdressed game characters!"

I want to make it clear that I have no problems with these kind of characters existing, and existing especially in game worlds that are suited for them. I like the expression of sexuality in games; I just don't want to see it as the only representation of women. Did anyone play Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2? I did, and the main character was Julie Strain, a stripper heroine with only a few scarves around her that could barely be called clothes. And I loved her, because it fit the world she was in, just like the Hellchick model fits the world she lives in: a succubus creature designed specifically to be shown off in that way.

It's great to have both kinds of characters. We just need a little bit more of the ordinary ones to catch up with the extraordinary ones.

Listen. No one else is going to tell you this because they don't want to make you feel uncomfortable or anything, because, you know, what if they run into you again and oh God, wouldn't that just be really awkward? So I'm going to say this to you not to hurt your feelings or anything, but to help you. We girls have to stick together.

It's the 80s fashion. You've really got to let it die. Unlike most of you I actually lived during the 80s. My formative years. The high school ones. Oh, it was a heady time -- New Order was the rage and everyone wanted to be a character in The Breakfast Club. So unlike all of you who are wearing the skinny jeans, the leg warmers, all that crap, I actually know how stupid it looks because, like Jesus dying on the cross for your sins, I've already worn the stupid for you.

Those black leggings under the skirt have to be the first to go. I know, I know -- it's painful to hear. But really, when was the last time you wore black leggings under a skirt? It was when you were eight years old and your mom made you wear dresses because it was what little girls were supposed to do but you wanted to climb the trees and play hockey in the street (even though Eddie Sabatini said that girls can't play hockey, but he was just a stupid boy so what did he know) and you couldn't just let everyone see your underwear so you compromised, and that's where the leggings came in. And that's exactly where they need to stay. You look like a goofy 20-something-year-old trying to look eight. And failing. Miserably.

Do I really even need to say anything about leg warmers? If you were drunk when I saw you wearing them at the mall today, or maybe your hot boyfriend had just broken up with you and you weren't thinking straight, you can tell me. I'll forgive you. It's the only explanation I can think of for anyone wearing them. Ever.

Come on, ladies. Don't let the fashion industry bully you around. You know what they're doing, don't you? They're sitting around dredging up the worst fashions of every decade, probably sharing some port or sherry and saying, "do think we can get them to wear that?!" "Oh, honey, they're wrapped around our delicate little pinkies! When we say 'jump', women of America say, 'what kind of mule or espadrille would you like us to jump in?'" And then they bend their hands, lean forward, and laugh with their mouths wide open, but it's that kind of fake laugh where you're pretty sure they think the other one is a total bitch.

Seriously. Say no to 80s fashion. Do you really want to end up with Flock of Seagulls hair? Think about it.

Hey, I said you could have one cookie, not the whole damn plate.

Last week I went up to Washington state for my dad's wedding. It was a wonderful ceremony; he and my new mom/stepmom (either one is perfectly fine, I think) were married in her backyard at sunset in the rock garden that overlooks a cove off the Puget Sound on the Key Penninsula. There were about forty or fifty friends and family members, and we spent the day leading up to sunset having some wine and mingling and catching up with everyone. The ceremony lasted about ten or fifteen minutes; my sister Xoe and I walked our dad out, and then Molly's daughter Stephanie walked Molly out. Stephanie's two daughters carried the rings. It was lovely, of course, and everyone got all teary-eyed as you're supposed to do at a wedding. I think the whole family feels the way Len and I do: we're so happy to have Molly in the family, so everyone wish them a nice congratulations.

Apart from that, my time in July and August was spent in the garden, so let's talk a little bit about that. Summer is just about over and I think I can say that for my first full-scale garden, I've had a pretty successful first run. Here's a summary of each vegetable and how it's done.

Beans

The beans are among the most successful of the garden veggies this year. I grew three varieties: Jacob's Cattle dry beans, Brittle Wax beans, and Kentucky Wonder pole beans, an afterthought that I threw into the potato buckets slightly late in the season. Despite that, I've gotten at least a couple of bunches of them, and it was a good way to utilize the empty space in the potato buckets. The yellow wax beans have also done very well -- I've gotten at least a couple of pounds from those, and man, are they tasty! I gathered only about a cup of Jacob's Cattle beans, though; that should be enough for one good-sized batch of soup.

The only trouble with the bush beans is that they seem to take up a lot of space for their yield. I'd like to try and find a yellow wax pole bean and a dry pole bean as well -- I plan to do quite a few more potato buckets next year in the driveway (since we have a lot of space in the corner) and would like to do all my beans in the buckets to leave more space in the garden.

Potatoes

I haven't dug up the potatoes yet, but if the tops are any indication of how well they're doing then they seem to be great so far. I'm growing two kinds: Peruvian Purple potatoes, and some run-of-the-mill white potato that my friend Rick gave us. The tops of the white potato have died off, so that means they're ready to dig up. The tops on the purple potatoes are just about dead as well, so perhaps I'll dig up all the potatoes tomorrow.

Peppers

Even though peppers are your standard garden vegetable that anyone can grow, they've done surprisingly poorly in my garden this year, but I believe that was my own fault and I think I know what I did wrong. I started them in tiny seed packs but never transferred them to anything larger; as a result, they were very small when I transplanted them and possibly nutritionally deprived. So unfortunately I got no purple or red bells like I'd planned. Bummer, especially since sweet peppers are one of my favorite veggies. The nursery transplants that I put in as a backup plan are doing fine, but while the peppers look beautiful they're still green. I'm hoping they'll turn red before it gets too cold. Finally, the chili peppers that I planted a bit late look beautiful, but they haven't turned red yet, either.

Turnips

My turnips were so beautiful in the ground! They grew and grew and then poked their little purple shoulders up out of the ground. I dug them all up and they looked so nice and tasty. We put them in a pot for cleaning...and then let them sit too long because we didn't have proper storage for them. As a result they rotted away and we never got a chance to taste them. I'm sad about that.

Beets

I had some beets in a plot. But Len, good-intentioned though he was, mistook them for weeds and tilled them in. D'oh.

Squash

I planted three types of squash this year, and like a completely newbie I planted two varieties -- the Delicata and the Yellow Summer squash -- too close to each other. As a result I've got two different squashes growing on one plant. It's bizarre. And somehow the yellow squash plants died off and seemed to succumb to a bug or a disease, and so we only got one yellow squash off of them.

The zucchini, however, has been doing great (because you can't kill zucchini if you try) and we've had several of those over the season. The Delicata squashes look wonderful and I'll be picking those this weekend. We'll see if cross-pollination has ruined them when I open them up for cooking.

Radishes

The radishes really seemed to take a long time to grow, and because of that they were really hot. I've planted a new variety not long ago, a Chinese radish, that looks interesting. Pictures will follow when they're big enough to pull out of the ground.

Spinach

The spinach really did well this year, and unlike some spinach it didn't have any E. Coli in it. I got about a salad and a half out of it, which means I definitely need to plant more next year. A couple of weeks ago I planted another batch.

Lettuce

Another very successful veggie in the garden. I really liked this variety (Yugoslavian Red), although some of the stuff I picked at the height of the summer heat was a little bitter, which was to be expected. The early stuff was deliciously sweet. I'd like to plant two or maybe three varieties next year, if I can spare the room. This and spinach are two vegetables that I'm going to try growing in the cool sunroom in containers over winter.

Tomatoes

These have to be put down as unsuccessful. Like the peppers, I started them a little late and kept them in small seed packs for too long; when I planted them their leaves were purple, which signified a lack of nutrition. Next year I plan to start them earlier and make sure I transplant them into larger pots before going into the garden so they get good and big before they're set out.

We did try and plant the small seedlings we had in tomato buckets in order to grow them upside down. We're going to try this next year, too. The one seedling that lived, though, seemed to do really well until it was plucked, I'm guessing, right out of the pot by a bird. I went out one day and it was gone.

The nursery Brandywine transplants that I put in are doing very well, though, and Len says they're very tasty tomatoes (I'm not a tomato fan myself).

Carrots

I didn't get to plan that many of these this year and I wasn't really sure they'd grow at all because my soil wasn't the nice, light soil that carrots love. I didn't pick a few out of the ground, though, and while they were short and stubby they were also pretty tasty. Next year I'll be added sphagnum moss into the soil to help lighten it up and make it a little softer for the carrots. I got some Purple Haze carrot seeds to try for next year -- purple carrots!

Brussels Sprouts

These are a late veggie so they haven't produced any sprouts yet, but the plants themselves look nice and healthy. We've got twelve plants out there; that should give us a great yield.

Broccoli

I think the broccoli was my favorite vegetable from the garden this year next to the beans and spinach. I have never eaten broccoli so tasty and fresh before. It didn't need anything on it, just a bit of steaming and it was good to go. I thought that cutting off the shoots and then the subsequent side shoots would be the only harvest I'd get, but each plant kept producing quite a bit. I didn't plant that much, so we only got a tiny bit each meal, but if I plant just a few more next year we should have a great harvest.

Watermelon

Last year our watermelons did all right, but this year I've got only one growing out there. Not sure why that is.

Currants

We picked about two gallon-sized plastic bags of currants this year! They're sitting in the freezer just waiting to be turned into something. I'm mostly likely going to make some jam out of them, and maybe I'll try a pie.

Raspberries

Last year we got a ton of raspberries. This year, we didn't get to them fast enough and the birds took them. Better luck next year, I guess. That's another sad loss this year. I love raspberries.

Chives

We have chives growing at the side of the house, and they've done well since we've lived here. Tasty stuff!

I've learned a lot this year, and the gardening season isn't over yet -- I still have some of my cold-weather stuff to grow and harvest, and I'm planning on growing stuff in containers in the house as well. Next year, wish me luck on more successful tomatoes, peppers, and other veggies. I'll also take a picture of the front of the house to show how well all the flowers are doing.

I've got some other stuff to write about but I'll save it for later this weekend and let this post steep a little bit like a fine tea.

Ever since adolescence I've been overweight. I can't remember a time in my adult life when I have, under normal healthy conditions, been less than 185 pounds. I'm tall at 5'9" and I come from both Finnish and Norwegian families, which means I have the body of a Scandinavian farm girl, but even 185 pounds is heavy on my frame. At some point in the last five years or so my weight hit a maximum of 197 pounds. Because I have a large frame, I'm curvy, and I'm tall, most people have underguessed my weight, but it was still 197 pounds up until a few months ago.

For most of my adult life I've also had very dry skin, brittle nails, dry and brittle hair, and flaky eyebrows. In fact, for years my husband would joke about my "rogue eyebrow" (my left one) as he brushed flakes away from the outer edge. We never thought anything of it -- we thought it was just me. My periods had also never been regular at all -- my average cycle was 52 days, and there were periods of time when I would go three months or so without getting my period at all, or I'd get it two weeks after I'd already gotten it. When I asked doctors about this I was told that every woman is different and it was nothing to be concerned about.

When I was about 24 or 25, I wanted to join the National Guard. To do so, I had to be a certain weight or body fat percentage for my height and age. Their requirement was 169 pounds or 32% body fat. So I began working hard: I added more exercise and I ate better. I was 185 and I stayed that way for quite a while. At my weigh-ins at the Guard post, they were dismayed at my lack of progress and insisted that I really had to stick to a diet and exercise regimen. I was, but since I wasn't seeing results I increased my regimen of exercise and reduced my caloric intake even more. I only lost a few pounds and I remained heavy. I continued to push myself further and further, trying to lose more weight. At my lowest I was at 172 pounds, still considered heavy by any standard for my height. The weight wasn't even muscular weight -- it was pudgy fat. The only way I was able to get to this weight and maintain it was by exercising for two hours every single morning and reducing my food intake to a single salad per day and nothing more. I was exhausted, I was tense, and I was mystified at how two hours of weights and aerobics and practically no food could still result in me being pudgy and overweight. And most of all, tired. I was exhausted. I saw a doctor, and he said, "your body simply doesn't want to get any lower than 172 pounds. I don't know what to tell you." I gave up trying to get into the National Guard, and while I kept a normal exercise regimen and diet, my weight ballooned back up to about 190 pounds.

About five years ago I began asking my doctor in California about why I hadn't gotten pregnant yet. She ran a few blood tests that led to an MRI, and that MRI revealed that I had something called a pituitary adenoma, or a small, benign nodule on my pituitary gland. The adenoma was, supposedly, pressing on my pituitary gland slightly and causing my body to produce elevated levels of certain hormones that fooled my body into thinking it was pregnant all the time. (This actually explained a lot of things for me.)

She prescribed Dostinex for me and told me that I had to follow up with an endocrinologist. The Dostinex was going to help offset the extra hormones and I would see a major difference -- my periods would finally be regular. I followed up with an endocrinologist, as my GP had suggested.

He did blood work and found out that in addition to my pituitary issue, I had something called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, a not uncommon autoimmune disorder in which the body mistakes the thyroid gland for a foreign agent and produces specific antibodies to destroy it. From what he explained it was common to have a pituitary condition in addition to a thyroid problem as the two were closely related. When he asked me about previous doctors and the fact that my periods had always been irregular, he was appalled when I told him that no other doctor had been interested. He said that women's health care was in a terrible state and many women were never listened to when they brought up issues like that to their doctor. This made me feel that I'd found a good doctor.

Like anyone would do, I researched Hashimoto's Thyroiditis on the web. I read that some Hashimoto's patients can experience hypothyroidism, a condition in which the thyroid gland is underfunctioning. The symptoms included dry, brittle skin and hair, exhaustion, inability to concentrate, irregular periods, infertility, inability to lose weight or a weight gain, and -- oddly specific -- flakiness or balding on the outer edges of the eyebrows.

I was stunned. Could this have been causing all those problems for me? Could this by why I hadn't been able to get to a reasonable weight despite a good diet and exercise? At my next appointment I told this doctor that I'd read about it and how relieved I was to have found an explanation for these things. He gave me a patronizing smile and said, "you don't have those symptoms." I looked at him oddly. I wasn't making them up. I explained that I'd had them forever, especially the flaky eyebrows. He smiled again and waved his hand away. "No, you couldn't be experiencing those. You would be very far advanced in hypothyroidism."

So this doctor who'd just told me at my last appointment that female patients get short shrift was telling me I was lying, or that I was a hypochondriac. He said that my Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) level was within the normal range, and therefore I couldn't be experiencing symptoms of it being out of that range. There wasn't anything I could do, so I simply went on with life, continuing to experience these same symptoms and continuing to not get pregnant.

We moved to Wisconsin and I continued to take Dostinex. By the time we'd moved I'd been on it for three years. Most patients are supposed to have gotten pregnant in less than a year on the medication. My endocrinologist didn't seem fased by this and simply kept me on it.

By the time we'd moved to Wisconsin, I was the heaviest I'd ever been: 197 pounds. Just a couple of months after we moved, I noticed that I was feeling incredibly exhausted all the time. At 8 pm I'd be sitting on the couch, literally unable to stay awake. Sometimes I'd doze off while sitting at the dining room table in front of my laptop. I'd go to bed at 8 pm, get eight hours of sleep, and wake up exhausted again the next day. I had a workout regiment of 45 minutes of exercise four times a week in the mornings. I'd force myself to get through my workout, but as the months went on I found that instead of being able to increase the difficulty of my workout, I couldn't even make it through easier workouts than I'd done before. I was getting more and more exhausted. Doing ten minutes of light housework had me sititng on the couch trying to keep from passing out. To be honest, I felt like a cancer patient. I was exhausted and sick all the time.

More troubling than this was a change in my period. During the first two days I began to cramp so painfully that I'd feel nauseous and nearly throw up. Until a year ago I'd normally just have to take a couple of Advil for normal cramps. I had to increase that to three Advil, and then finally four, with four pills still not doing the trick. At random times of the month I would get stabbing pain in my abdomen and cramps so bad that I had to lie down and take more Advil.

All of this continued to get worse over the course of our first year in Wisconsin. I asked my GP about the exhaustion; his explanation was that I had just moved from California and simply wasn't used to the seasonal differences here. I asked him about the abdominal cramping; he did all the gynecological tests and found nothing. I asked him about my inability to lose weight despite eating right and exercising regularly; his explanation was that he didn't have an explanation. Work out more, eat less. At this time I was already down to about 1000 calories a day -- even working out I was simply never hungry. I could eat one small meal a day and not be hungry until the next day. It was as if my metabolism simply was not burning very well. I even tried eating more food in case I wasn't getting enough and my body was going into starvation mode. It didn't work -- I experienced the same results and no change in weight.

He recommended that I follow up with a new endocrinologist here since I was still taking Dostinex and I needed to follow up on the thyroid issue anyway. (My previous endo had told me that Hashimoto's patients had to get regular check ups on their thyroid antibody count to find out if they'd gone hypothyroid -- the condition that that doctor had told me I couldn't have been experiencing -- so they can begin taking thyroid medication.)

I found the only endo available on my new insurance plan. I showed up and, because the medical establishment here is heavily involved in the UW medical school, spoke with the endo's medical intern (or whatever you call them). I spoke with her for 20 minutes and went through everything I'd been experiencing: the increasing abdominal pain, the increasing exhaustion, the weight gain and inability to lose weight, and the general feel of unwellness. She wrote some things down, explained that she'd speak to the endo, and would return with him for the actual exam.

The old doctor walked in and looked at her notes. He immediately dismissed everything that she'd suggested following up on. He then asked my why iIwas still taking Dostinex, as if it was my fault for some reason. I explained that my previous endo had continued to prescribe it. He said that it was unusual for doctors to prescribe Dostinex for longer than one year because they "don't know what kind of effects it will have." Oh, great.

It should be noted that this doctor stared at my chest during the whole five minutes he saw me.

He then palpated my thyroid -- a common thing to do with thyroid problem patients -- so roughly that he was choking me. He grunted and said it felt fine. He said that he was going to prescribe bromocryptine for the infertility. He kept focusing on fixing the infertility, which by now was pretty low on my list of health priorities.

I asked him about the abdominal pain, the lack of weight loss and the exhaustion. He literally waved his hand dismissively and his exact words were, "I don't know. We can check your bloodwork, but we won't find anything." He then proceeded to write out the infertility medication prescription and sent me on my way. The visit took five minutes.

I left the office thinking that I was a hypochondriac and that it was all in my head. For a couple of months I continued to feel abdominal pain, continued to be frustrated with my ill health, and just assumed that I was going to feel like this for the rest of my life and that I'd better get used to it.

Then I snapped out of it and figured I'd better find yet another doctor, someone willing to listen to me. I did some thyroid-related research and found a doctor in Milwaukee, an hour and a half away, who apparently was very interested in patients who'd been told the same thing I'd been told. His name is Dr. Burton Waisbren and I made an appointment.

His office is somewhat retro and he's very old-fashioned. This almost put me off but at this point I was willing to try anything. He sat down and talked to me about everything I'd been through medically up to this point. He said that he'd heard my story many times before and that doctors used to do a certain kind of test for hypothyroidism called the T3 and free T4 test. This measured certain compounds that your pituitary and thyroid both dealt with. At some point in the recent past, he explained, doctors switched to measuring only TSH. He believes that the older tests were more accurate and he's found that people with normal TSH levels will show abnormal T3 and free T4 levels and have all the symptoms of hypothyroidism, which he said it sounded like I had.

He did the requisite bloodwork and then I saw him for a follow up. He said that I was definitely hypothyroid -- my T3 and free T4 tests had come back showing it, and what was more, my Hashimoto's antibodies were incredibly high. He'd also done a few other tests that show I have a predilection towards autoimmunity (where my own body wants to attack itself) and he wanted to begin a regimen. He explained that we would try a few things and see what worked for me, but that we wouldn't stop until we found something that worked. He said that he wanted to make sure that I felt better first before we became concerned with any infertility issues.

One of the things he had me do was get a thyroid uptake scan and have another MRI to check on the pituitary adenoma. I went to the radiology department of the UW clinic and had the scan done. The radiologist said that everything looked normal and my uptake was smack in the middle of the normal range. So he scoffed when I told him that I was having another doctor take a look at this. He insisted I was wasting my time and that what I was looking for would not be found in my thyroid condition.

My doctor got the results and started my regimen. What worked was the first thing he tried: Armour Thyroid medication. He started me on a low dose and then followed up with me a month later, where he increased it from three pills a day to four. And let me tell you, I've never felt better. My exhaustion is gone, my skin isn't so dry anymore, and the weight is dropping off. This morning I weighed in at 176 pounds. I've lost 21 pounds so far since I've started taking Thyroid. I no longer fall asleep at 8 pm -- the other night I did yoga at 9 o'clock. I don't feel sick all the time, and I'm less prone to getting sick (it seemed that in the first year of being in Wisconsin I came down with colds and even walking pneumonia all the time). I started taking tae kwon do again, and instead of feeling like I'm going to die after a strenuous workout, I feel toughened up and exhausted in the right kind of way. I finally feel normal!

I'm happy that I pressed on and found a doctor who will listen to me. If you've been told this kind of stuff is in your head, don't listen to them. Keep looking and find a doctor who will actually listen to your symptoms. It's your body, and you're the only one who knows for sure when something's wrong.

If you didn't catch the segment on The Daily Show last night about the Congressional hearings on video game violence currently wasting your hard-earned tax dollars, your homework assignment is to watch it right here.

The first two thirds of the segment mostly just uncovers the complete out-of-touchness of the people that we hire to represent us to our government. You have some gems in there, such as Congressman Fred Upton (R-Michigan) proudly proclaiming that he's a gamer because he's an expert at Pong. I'm going to assume that right after he said that, he got into his Model T to go home and play the latest wax cylinder musical recording on his brand-new grammaphone.

Mr. Upton, if the last game you played was Pong, you haven't played a game in about 25 years, and there's generally a statute of limitations on the use of the word "gamer" when claiming that you are one. Things have advanced now. We have computers, there's a space station in orbit, and we have these things called lattes. You might consider checking them out.

But the best part is that while Jon Stewart is doing what he does best -- publicly making fun of those who deserve it -- he slips in some absolute gems of blazing ignorance. Take this quote from Congressman Joseph Pitts (R-Pennsylvania):

"It's safe to say that a wealthy kid from the suburbs can play Grand Theft Auto or similar games without turning to a life of crime, but a poor kid who lives in a neighborhood where people really do steal cars or deal drugs or shoot cops might not be so fortunate."

I want you to read that passage again, folks, because those are his exact words, unaltered. And then I want you to wonder how someone so astoundingly ignorant could have had enough sense to put on pants that morning.

So let's analyze this, shall we? According to Rep. Pitts, crime did not exist before video games. People didn't steal cars, do drugs, or shoot cops before Grand Theft Auto told them how. That's right, folks: Rep. Pitts actually stated the cause of poor kids turning to crime -- that of living in an environment where crime is commonplace -- and in the same sentence proceeded to blame it on a medium that is approximately 1/1,000,000th as old as crime.

And in case it wasn't clear to you, Rep. Pitts wants to assure you that this is why suburban kids never steal cars, do drugs, or shoot cops. He wants to make sure you know that suburban kids can obviously -- without any fear whatsoever of being influenced by them -- play the most violent, gory video games and never, ever commit the crimes they see in them.

Wait...why are we having these hearings again? I thought they just said that kids are all influenced by the video games they play?

This is ridiculous. These people are assinine, and Stewart's quote that Congress is filled with insane jackasses is absolutely dead correct. These people have no right to say one word against a medium that they so proudly display an astounding ignorance of.

Not only that, but they only seem to have one game they like to hold up as the example for all video games that have ever been made; to them, every game is Grand Theft Auto or Postal. This would be analogous to saying that every movie is Faces of Death, and because that movie is out there we need to have a Congressional hearing about movies and how our young people aren't being protected from them. There is a world of video games out there of which the Grand Theft Autos make up a very small portion. But they refuse to get off of the Grand Theft Auto train because they are crusaders on a mission that lacks all common sense.

If you're reading this and you live in the states that these Congressmen represent, you owe it to your own intelligence to write to them and tell them to get out of office and let someone with at least one living brain cell do their job.

These are the people trying to tell you what's best for you and your kids. These are the people who say that you as a parent aren't capable of making your own informed decisions on what your child should and shouldn't be exposed to. These are the people who are making our laws.

Don't let these ignorant jackasses tell you what you're supposed to think, especially when they don't even know anything about what it is they're trying to legislate.

So everything is still alive and things are growing. The squash plants -- Delicata, and summer green and yellow -- are absolutely thriving. Which is great, since we love us some squash. The watermelons are purring along as are the cucumbers, although something seems to have dug up one of my cucumber seed hills. The seeds nonetheless struggled through anyway.

As I may have mentioned, the only drawback is that things just aren't growing very fast. Some of those things are plants I started as transplants and some were directly sown. I'm disappointed in the tomatoes and peppers I started as transplants from seeds I bought -- they got to be about an inch high and then simply stopped growing. My hypothesis is that I started them in very tiny seed starter pots and I suspect that they might have eaten up all the nutrition in that soil and then just stopped growing.

Because of this, I got a couple of transplants for peppers and tomatoes just in case mine don't produce any fruit -- and at this point it's highly doubtful they will -- and as you can see from today's picture, my sweet banana peppers, a transplant from the nursery, are starting to fruit. I picked up Brandywine heirloom transplants and I'll likely also pick up a pear tomato plant or two since those are also very tiny.

But at least there are things starting to produce soon-to-be-edible foods now, such as my turnips. The beans are looking good and are beginning to flower, while the potato plants are just getting plain huge. I'll have more pictures of those through the week.