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Bella Una is 12! And she's as spry and sassy as ever.

I only have one more paper to write (due Monday) and then I am done with homework for the week. Yay! I've whipped through most of my homework so far, writing essays in a few hours, but wading through this paper so that I can write about it is causing my eyes to glaze over a bit. It's chock-full of sentences like the following:

Flowstone stratigraphically overlying the unconformity returned a thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS) uranium-series age of 37.7 ^ 0.2 kyr (sample LB-JR-6A/13–23, Supplementary Table 1c), which provides a minimum extension of the time range for H. floresiensis.

By this point it's likely you've heard a bit about SOPA (or PIPA).  The husband and I are both strongly against this, and I was (extremely) disappointed to see that Al Franken is a co-sponsor of PIPA.  Knowing that online petitions are pretty much useless (something the White House hopes we don't realize) and lacking significant amounts of cash, I decided to call Al Franken's office.

Knowing that when some aid answers the phone at Al Franken's office, I'll have to actually say something - that terrified me. I hate talking on the phone, especially to strangers. But I did.

It may not make any difference, but at least I feel like I did something. Or tried...