Your nose and the shower

Last time mentioning the 1000 awesome things website and this week having a somewhat stuffy nose reminded me of something.  Blowing my nose in the shower feels great!  Blowing your nose the "traditional" way using tissues takes forever and I never really feel 100% clear.  On the contrary, in the shower I can just go for it.


In general I like to keep my hands clean.  If I eat several chicken wings with my hands I prefer to wash them; the napkins never feel like quite enough.  The exception then for the shower is that the water is constantly cleansing, so it's as if my hands are being continually washed.  This fact allows my mind to put up with and even enjoy the temporary messiness that unfolds.


If my nose is stuffed up when I'm taking a shower I make sure to wash myself AFTER blowing my nose.  Don't want any snot accidentally hanging around (yuck).  It's somewhat liberating being able to just blow and blow and then just wash the mess off my hands.  Hmm, maybe don't take the last sentence out of context...


It's amazing how much mucus in in your nose when it's really plugged up.  Sometimes it feels like you're attempting to expel a small creature and it doesn't want to let go.  The quote I really like that exemplifies this somewhat is from 1000 awesome things and says "If you did the job right, your hand should now look like you just squeezed the life out of a baby jellyfish."  Not for the faint of heart.

The smell of oranges

I like the smell of oranges.  Like say a citrusy smell in the air or the smell of an orange itself.  However I don't particularly enjoy the smell and feel on my fingers after peeling and eating an orange.  I wash my hands but it's futile; the smell persists.  

When I mentioned this to someone they asked why I even smell my fingers at all!?  Well, actually I don't know why.  I think it might be to see if the smell has come off so I won't feel like I'm tainting everything that I touch.  If I type on my computer now it has an orange smelling residue.

Now I wasn't sure if I was alone in feeling this way.  I actually had direct evidence that some people not only don't mind but also enjoy it!  Recently when I was at a student leadership conference the closing speaker was Neil Pasricha, author and known for his website http://1000awesomethings.com/.  He had a little part in his speech where he asked everyone to write down something they thought was awesome and then exchange the note with someone else.  I wrote down something like "sleeping until you wake up naturally with no alarm clock".  (Unfortunately the conference had been on Saturday at 8am and I had stayed out a bit too late Friday night...)  Anyways, to my surprise, the girl that I exchanged with had written "the smell on my fingers after peeling an orange"!  To each their own I suppose.

There was one minor success however, so that I didn't feel too alone.  I discovered a Facebook group entitled "When I eat an orange, my fingers smell like it forever.  I hate it".  I feel a bit better knowing that 30 other people agree with me.

Airplanes and Ears

When I fly on a plane and it's ascending or descending I'll always notice the pressure change by the annoying feeling in my ears.  Yawning has always seemed to work for me and apparently chewing gum isn't bad either.  For the first time that I can remember though, I was unable to "pop" one of my ears and had an annoying little ice pick pain in my head as we descended.  Apparently babies and young children have more sensitive ears so this is actually more common for them (and why they're crying).

What was even more weird was that even after we had landed I still wasn't able to pop my ear.  All the forced yawning in the world wasn't helping.  It's a strange feeling not really being able to tell how loud you're speaking.

After a few hours the feeling had relented somewhat but I could tell my hearing in that ear wasn't at 100%.  To the internet!  I read a few things and decided to wait it out a couple days and see if it improved.

Waking up today it was about the same and I've been trying to yawn to improve it.  Funnily enough as I've been typing this (and yawning some more) the ear finally popped!  Fortunately no drastic measures with hydrogen peroxide or doctor's visits for the time being.

One thing I did learn was that the ear is actually connected to the back of the throat by the Eustachian tube, which is why yawning and chewing gum can have an effect and equalize the pressure.  Yay learning!

The Supermoon

This weekend there was a "Super" Moon.  Basically since the Moon's orbit around the Earth is elliptical (not perfectly circular) it will be closer and farther at different parts of its orbit.  On Saturday the Moon was full and it was also at perigee (its closest distance to the Earth) so it appeared slightly bigger.

But how much bigger was it actually?  The biggest difference would be between when the Moon is at apogee (farthest from Earth) and perigee.  According to Wikipedia the Moon has a mean diameter of 3474 km, distance at apogee: 405,410 km, distance at perigee: 362,570 km.  We can use the small angle approximation to say that tanθ ≈ θ and so θ ≈ s/d where d would be the distance to the Moon and s the diameter of the Moon.  θ is angular diameter in radians.

So at perigee: θ = 3474 / 362570 = 0.009582 radians

At apogee: θ = 3474 / 405410 = 0.008569 radians

This makes sense because the angular diameter should be bigger when the Moon is at perigee.  Their ratio is: 0.009582 / 0.008569 = 1.1182 so about 11.8 % bigger.  This is not insubstantial but it's actually very difficult to notice by eye.