The New York Times is reporting today (link requires registration) that several atypical antipsychotic (AA) drugs increase the patient's risk of diabetes. This includes Zyprexa and Risperidal, the two leading AAs.

This is a bummer for anyone who's on AAs. Of course the near-term benefits of the AA are often worth significant downline risk: how do you enjoy your healthy old age without your sanity? But -- especially if you've been prescribed AAs because you suffer from mental illness -- how difficult would it be to believe the following paranoid scenario: The pharmaceutical companies are giving you one drug ("because you're crazy") to make you diabetic and thereby hook you on their diabetes-management products?

Probably there's a Philip K. Dick novel which explores this issue.

Our nine-year-old niece was visiting for the last two weeks too. I remember her as the first child I really babysat, when she was about 16 months old; my sister and my mom took a night off and left me at home with the baby. I think I even changed her, which was a big YUCK moment for me.

Our lifestyle is pretty boring, especially for a nine-year-old. But she's been doing stuff all summer: sports camp, theater camp, actual camping trips. So she welcomed the opportunity to do nothing at all. For the first four days, she reclined on our couch in the sunlight and occasionally picked raspberries.

We did do some fun things, too -- more fun than the Folk Festival that we dragged her to. We spent a day at the West Edmonton Mall waterpark, which is a lot more fun that I would have expected. I start to see how people could come here and stay in the mall for a week as a vacation.

The most amusing moment was when I found out she abetted (and probably encouraged) our five-year-old nephew (my wife's sister's son) in filling his hair with a mixture of glue and sequins. No-one's used to having older kids around -- especially unrelated kids with enough charisma to inspire such behavior. We were quite upset with her, of course. But it was still funny.

Yesterday I went around the house and closed all the windows; I also turned the heater off of "summer mode". I left the bathroom windows open an inch for ventilation, but other than that we're starting to seal up the house for the winter.

It's getting chilly early this year. When we moved here in early August 2001, I don't remember it feeling like this until September.