A popular brain hemorrhage shot recipe calls for peach schnapps, Irish cream and grenadine.  This Halloween, I’ve traded the peach schnapps for creme de cacoa and the results is a delicious, decadent and devilish treat!

This morning, it all started with @scicurious tweeting her lastest @sciamblogs post ‘Is city living driving you crazy?’.  I retweeted this great post, along with the smart-ass comment “No. My city’s steady stream of coffee & cocktails soothes me “.   After @GertyZ asked, “What is the best caffeinated cocktail?”, @scicurious, @doc_becca, @GertyZ and I were atwitter about chocolate espresso martinis.  

I thought about a such a delicious concoction all day.  Tonight, I whipped up a Chocolate Toddy Martini to enjoy as I unwind from a day livin’ in the big city!

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Chocolate Toddy Martini

rim glass brown sugar (optional)

To cocktail shaker add the following:

1 oz chocolate vodka (I used 360 Double Chocolate Vodka)

1.5 oz cold brew coffee (toddy)

1/2 tbsp simple syrup

Ice

Directions: shake, strain and enjoy!

Carkeek Cocktail

Being the Drunken Scientist that I am, while hiking around Carkeek Park I thought of a cocktail recipe.  It all started with a snack of blackberries, which were conveniently trail-side and ripe for the picking.  Enjoying these delicious berries got me thinking of my homemade blackberry liquor, which got me thinking of my homemade limencello.

The hike continued and so did my thoughts about the cocktail I would enjoy at the hike’s end.  Once home, and after a few minutes in my cocktail laboratory, I’d whipped up the Carkeek Cocktail.  Enjoy!

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Carkeek Cocktail

1 oz gin (Rogue Pink Spruce Gin is delicious in this!)

1/2 oz blackberry liquor

1/2 oz limencello

1 tablespoon ginger beer syrup (I used Kelly’s)

crushed ice

Directions: place ice in cocktail shaker, add all remaining ingredients.  Strain into glass and enjoy in the sun.

Holy shit.  According to the Guttmacher Institute, in the first six months of 2011, 19 states enacted 80 restrictions on abortion.  Some of these are based on such bullshit reasons with no basis in science – the medical consensus is that the foetus is incapable of feeling pain prior to 24 weeks gestation, so laws using foetal pain as the crux of their arguments are flawed.

Ohio’s plan to ban abortion after the point at which foetal heartbeat is detected is almost as restrictive as banning abortion altogether.  I’m not an embryologist, but I know that’s a tight window: according to the Mayo Clinic, the heart may be pumping blood from the sixth week of pregnancy (the fourth week since conception).  The earliest a woman normally finds out she is pregnant is two weeks after conception (I know, some of these super early test kits can do it earlier than that).  So that’s two weeks to make a decision, get funds and find an abortion provider.  Fuck a duck, that’s not long.

It’s only marginally better the other side of the Atlantic.  It’s a little easier to summarise because this shit is all being done nationally rather than at a state or county level.  Nadine Dorries, Bedfordshire’s answer to Michelle Bachman (why are there so many anti-woman women?), is tabling amendments to restrict abortions, including the demand that women receive counselling from “independent” organisations (and you just know the UK branches of the CPC are lining up to provide that counselling), and that the RCOG (you know, the dudes I quoted on foetal pain) are removed from their position of authority on abortion guidance, because hey, all gynaecologists live for killing babies and so how could they possibly be unbiased?!

Add in to that her repeated attempts to lower the abortion limit (and don’t even get me started on her plans for abstinence-only sex education just for girls), and a survey carried out by the Department of Health saying 25% of medical students would not perform an abortion for failed contraception, and Britain is becoming a scary place to be a fertile woman.

This bothers me so much in part because I am one of the 33% of women who has had an abortion.  And I’m sorry to say my experience is likely to be less and less common if these laws are passed and if fewer doctors learn how to perform abortions.  I probably had the best possible abortion ever.  I found I was pregnant on a Friday night.  The following Monday I was able to see my doctor and be referred to a clinic.  I had an appointment and ultrasound on the Tuesday (the ultrasound was purely for them to determine gestational age, and I was never told I had to see it, although there was very little to see), and I went back the following Friday and Saturday for the two stages of the medical abortion procedure.  I had counselling – I was given as much information on continuing with the pregnancy as terminating it, and at every stage I was asked if I was still sure I wanted to go through the abortion.  My clinic was two miles from my house, and it did not cost me a penny.  I was damn lucky.

I’m most disappointed at the medical students.  I teach a lot of students who go on to study medicine, and I am so sad that 20% of them would not perform an abortion on a child who had been raped.  I had my own reasons for not wishing to continue with the pregnancy.  So does every woman who seeks an abortion.  It is a legal procedure, and sometimes a life-saving one.  Hell, the 1967 Abortion Act in the UK was brought in as a response to the sheer number of women dying from backstreet abortions.

Women are being squeezed – the access restrictions being placed on abortions put a delay on women having the procedures, by adding in extra counselling requirements, demanding ultrasounds and allowing more and more doctors to opt out of performing abortions (and you can bet an awful lot of them will not fulfill their requirement to refer women to doctors who will perform abortions).  And further restrictions lower the limit at which abortions can be performed, making the window narrower still.  Presumably the aim is that the upper and lower limits eventually meet, and women and girls are again forced to endure unwanted pregnancies against their wills.  But hell, I guess if you’re a child and you don’t want to be pregnant, then you shouldn’t go and get yourself raped.

Summer Sangria

• 1 magnum bottle Moscato
• 1/3 cup peach schnapps
• 1/3 cup apple schnapps
• 1 apple, peeled, cored, diced and sprinkled with cinnamon.
• 1 nectarine, diced
• 1 orange, thinly sliced
• 1 lemon, thinly sliced
• Ice cubes
• Club soda

*If I never had to plan my route through my workplace based on which security guard is assigned to guard the escalator, for fear of an encounter that leaves me feeling disgusted and like I should be wearing a burka.
*If I could have a >50% chance of making it through the week without an inappropriate comment about my appearance or witnessing an inappropriate comment about another woman’s appearance.
*If I didn’t have to worry about staying late at work and being alone in a hallway in what is ostensibly an extremely secure building.

And most importantly,
*If the people whose job it is to listen to such complaints would actually do a damn thing about them.
*If the other men who witness these things didn’t give the harassers a free-pass because they’re “just that kind of guy”, or “that was just a little thing. You shouldn’t worry about it.”

It still amazes me how few people see these as problems. While each one taken separately really is just a minor annoyance, when you add them all together, these little bits and pieces of annoyance add up to a big, big problem. A problem that affects how a woman who deals with them is both perceived and perceives herself. Things that originally just caused them to roll their eyes become the many reasons why a woman can begin to wonder just how much she wants to take, just how much she’s willing to push for what she wants and knows is right.

These little problems are so little that it makes you feel petty and silly to complain, and you know it will make you look just as silly and petty if you do. However, they’re so constant and present that you feel like you’re doing as much harm to yourself by not complaining as you will do to your reputation (and possibly your career) if you do.

Yes, each piece can be brushed off with ease, but just like with physical friction, the continual brushing rubs a spot raw in the psyche. This raw spot remains and grows bigger and will continue to cause minor irritations and minor pains all the while masking an infection slowly eating away at even the strongest women.