I was listening to npr on my way to the therapist last night, and I heard a story about gender identity, and treating children who self-identify as the opposite gender early in life. I missed part of the story as I picked up meds & had to go into the building, so I was happy to be able to read the story online. My heart aches for families in this situation, but my heart especially breaks for the boy who had his toys taken away.

For something completely different, I found this cool comic strip while haunting the halls of shirt.woot. Today’s comic about genes and whips reminds me of Tom Lehrer’s “Masochism Tango”, but with genes. Geeky is cool, who’da thunk it?

I’ve mentioned the cool t-shirts over at Threadless before. Well, another shirt.woot designer has an intense Threadless submission up titled Apocalypse, be sure to vote for it! jimiyo creates work with such an incredible level of detail. Very cool.

Rachel’s tip for the day: if you work in a checkout lane and ask someone for ID, don’t say “oh, my mom is your age”. Gah. I was feeling old enough when BG turned 10, knowing someone younger than me has a child working in the grocery store completely freaked me out.

While reading the Maximum Ride series, my girls are committed to saving the environment. (When they remember, of course!) We were all thrilled when our local grocery store switched to printing on both sides of the receipt! They aren’t printing goofy ads on the back, either – it’s the regular receipt of purchases, but put on both sides of the paper.

B’s company has also put more green ideas into practice – they gave each employee 3 reusable grocery bags (the nice ones that fold up), and took away the styrofoam and plastic cups for water and coffee, replacing them with a ton of mugs, a rack for the mugs, and special pens so folks can put their names on them. They also have special parking for hybrids, so they’re on the “good” end of businesses!