Quick Calendar — see the complete calendar on the Web site
Date Event Location Time
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April 25-26 In-House JLT RFK Refer to SPL e-mail
Sleepover for those who can
May 1 FOCL Book Sale help Library 4:45 PM
May 1 Troop 160 PLC Library 6:15 PM (note place!!!)
Quick Look at Adult Help Needed
April 25-26 Need at least one adult to sleep over at RFK. I will be there as well.
May 1 Need a couple of adults to walk back to RFK from Library with Scouts.
Friends of Cary Library Book Sale
FOCL helps the Library in many ways. One of them is their twice-yearly gently used book sale. Our part is to help move the books from storage to the sale area.
FOCL loves Scouts because the work you do makes it possible for them to donate roughly $8,000 for new materials. Those new Manga books for teenagers? Those came from the sale money. Additions to the Children’s Library? Sale money.
Of course everybody gets service hours, but you also get the satisfaction of knowing you are directly helping Cary Library maintain services in a time of very tight budgets.
The next opportunity will be on Thursday, May 1st–the first meeting after school vacation and the same night as the Troop 160 PLC. We will start at 4:45 PM for those who can make it that early, but come whenever you can. There will be the usual free pizza and soft drinks which you can (gasp) eat in the Library. Starting at 6:15 PM some of us will break for the PLC while those not in the PLC will finish the move. That means that the Troop 160 PLC will be at the Library this month, not at RFK Hall.
Once we are finished we will all walk to the Scout meeting.
Troop 119 is invited to share the work and the pizza. Adults can help as well and we will need at least a couple of adults to help with the walk back to the meeting.
In-House JLT
This coming weekend. The SPL has sent out an e-mail about it. Note that it starts on Friday and concludes Saturday morning. The SPL’s note will outline who should be there. For those who attend, you get to wear the TRAINED patch.
This is an overnight event.
We need JASM help as always and I need at least one adult willing to sleep over at RFK.
A light breakfast will be provided.
An Update On Water Bottles
A few months ago I sent an e-mail about plastic water bottles, including the very popular Nalgene hard plastic type which is available in many bright colors. My earlier e-mail is on the troop Web site should you care to re-read it. That e-mail contains a few links to other material on the issue.
Basically, there are questions about certain types of plastic. While my age group appears to be relatively safe, younger users may be at risk. As I said in my earlier communication, the data which currently exists is open to some interpretation. The report can be read at:
http://cerhr.niehs.nih.gov/chemicals/bisphenol/BPADraftBriefVF_04_14_08.pdf
It should be noted that this is a draft report which has not yet been subjected to public comment and peer review. When reading the report, you will come across some measurements which may need some explaining. I quote from an e-mail on the subject I got from Mike Ames:
Toxicologists express doses as an intake rate normalized to body weight. The standard unit (seen in Tables 1 and 2) is micrograms of chemical intake per kilogram body weight per day (ug/kg-d). By normalizing the doses to body weights makes it is easier to use results from animal studies to predict potential human effects.
The concentrations of BPA shown in Tables 2 and 3 are in units of micrograms per liter, which, on a rough weight basis, may be expressed as the unitless term parts per billion parts (ppb). A frequent analogy for a ppb is that 1 ppb is equivalent to one half-teaspoon of
contaminant (2.5 mL) in an Olympic size pool of water (2×25x50 meters).
The fact that many compounds can now commonly be found in human or other environmental samples is partly related to the really low detection limits that can be achieved with modern analytical chemistry. Zero just keeps getting smaller.
However, concern has risen to the point that several chains are pulling hard Nalges from their shelves and there is at least a hint that Nalge Nunc, the manufacturer, will phase out the bottles. The questions about hard plastic bottles has now bubbled over into other areas such as baby bottles and the linings of food and drink cans.
All is not lost. Nalge Nunc has recently released a very similar bottle which is bisphenol-A (BPA) and phthalate-free. It is called the Everyday bottle. It should be hitting stores soon. Camelback already has such a bottle. You can find a comparison of Nalgene bottles at http://www.nalgenechoice.com/compare.html.
Complicating matters is the fact that a #7 designation does not automatically mean that the material used contains BPA pr phthalates. #7 is something of a catchall designation so you have to do a little research when looking at bottles. Most of the new one will say that they are BPA-free right on the bottle.
The warnings about polycarbonate bottles and BPA are not new, by the way. Sierra Club publications first published articles about potential problems in 2003.
For my own part, I have returned to the soft Nalges I used to use before I fell in love with hard Nalges. The soft models are considered to be safer than the current polycarbonate models.
Pancake Breakfast
Great effort all around. As I said in an earlier note, I realized that we have become so much a part of the day that we were listed in the official program. Pancake Breakfast with Troop 160 at St. Brigid’s. Fantastic!