Things To Do Today

I woke up with all the things I want to get done rolling around in my head.  So here's my to list (I'm updating as I go):

Feed pets 
This list!
Unload dishwasher, put away pots and pan
Clean up dishes that didn't quite get done last night
Put on load of napkins and dish towels
Smoothies for breakfast
Make R lunch to go
Start pot roast in slow cooker
Shower
Call mold company
Call/email Barb about wedding
Work on Latin homework
Walk dog
Start seedlings
Lunch
Pick up B from co-op
Have B walk dog at some point in afternoon
Prep for Latin
Meet with Marion
Watch Dylan
Make dinner salad
Dinner
Clean up
Put Dylan to bed
Read

Update the next morning.  Hopefully I will get to the things I didn't get done yesterday today.  And the mold testing company is due here this morning at 10:00 a.m.

And Now . . . The Anti-Candida Diet!

So, as I have complained many times here, I feel, B has been on an anti-inflammatory diet which is no gluten, no cow dairy, no soy.  She also developed an allergy to nuts so she's no tree nuts.  It's been difficult to adjust, but we've done it.  Except, she really has been eating lots of sweets and eating lots of gf breads/bagels, etc.

Well, her black mold tests came back and her numbers were slightly lower in 3 areas and higher in a 4th.  She finished her charcoal and glutathimine.  So now we are testing her room for mold (looking into getting a company in this week) and they put her on a low sugar diet.  Apparently all those refined carbs and sugar create a nice petri dish for black mold to thrive in. 

So she's only allowed a tsp of honey or maple syrup a day plus 3 low sugar fruits.  However, the nutritionist made two excepts she can have a small or 1/2 banana in a smoothie and she can have a little bit of peanut butter.  She actually isn't supposed to have pb because apparently peanuts, along with mushrooms and potatoes are high mold foods! 

But we have to wean into this.  B is completely off any gf free grain except rice, quinoa and oats.   She's off any refined sugar.  Both of those things are huge!  She was regularly eating gluten free cookies or brownies, gf bagels.  Since she's avoiding nuts she couldn't have anything that had almond flour in it (which is a lot of gf baked goods) so she ate only the ones with potato starch, tapioca, etc.  I could tell they were pretty empty and junky.  Just cuz something's gf doesn't make it healthy!  She also had a lot of sugary drinks, sodas, iced teas, refreshers from Starbucks. 

She's been doing about 3 tsps of honey a day.  Plus she's been having peanut butter that has cane sugar in it.  Plus she gets to have that high sugar banana!  So she's still getting way more sugar than they want her to have, but it is greatly reduced in terms of what she was eating before.

They also have to put her on a prescription medicine since the other protocol didn't seem to work.   This medicine is really constipating, so she has to way up her fiber.  She has to have 8 servings of low starch vegetables a day.  this includes fresh herbs.

Breakfast:  eggs cooked with herbs/spinach, etc., sausage, low sugar fruit (green apple, berries)

or

Smoothie made with plain goat yogurt, veggies like spinach, cucumber, avocado, herbs like mint/parsley, berries, small or 1/2 banana.

Lunch:  big salad with lots of veggies and some kind of meat or fish.

Dinner:  half of plate of veggies/salad, with meat/fish

Snack:  low sugar fruit or pumpkin/sunflower seeds

Beverages:  water, herbal tea, bone broth, veggie juice

The nutritionist told her she could make 'energy balls' if she's really having a sweet tooth craving.  B found a recipe.  I think these still have too much sugar in them.  I think she needs to reduce the amount of honey perhaps, since the peanut butter already had some cane sugar.  These were so delicious and tasted like fudge:

Rolled oats
Pumpkin and sunflower seeds (I bought a bag of raw, unsalted)
Coconut flakes
Peanut butter
Honey
100% cocoa powder

I don't know the proportions, but wow, are they delicious.  We are trying to only eat 2 a day. 

We really bad at this no sugar thing.

The other thing we are bad at is living without potatoes.  This includes sweet potatoes.  We are making an exception for Tuesdays when B is at the co-op and walks with friends to the Chick fil A to eat lunch.  She'll get a small order of fries.  And when she gets a paleo burger at Elevation Burger, she'll also get a small fry or even share a small fry. 

Anyway, we are going through a period of adjustment. B is trying to eat more red meat for her anemia and also she truly is trying to eat more vegetables.  I made steamed broccoli the other night.  I steamed it lightly because if you overcook broccoli, in my opinion, it goes from being delicious to disgusting very easily.  Then I dressed it in olive oil, lemon juice and a little sea salt.  She ate a lot!

Last night I made up my own recipe for pork fried rice.  I made rice in the rice cooked with homemade chicken broth.

I had 4 pork chops to share among 7 people, so I sliced up the meat in thin strips and stir fried it.  I am saving what I could not slice up nicely to flavor some spinach later in the week.

Then I cooked up some zucchini, yellow squash, celery and red onion.  Then I threw in the cooked rice and sprinkled it all generously with coco aminos.  Then I added an egg to make it egg fried rice and finally some chopped parsley.

Everyone liked it!  I think the rice and coco aminos disguised the squash and celery enough that they didn't think they were eating veggies. 

For our salad we had red cabbage slaw. 

I think tonight we'll have some kind of bratwurst or kielbasa with roasted butternut squash and the rest of the slaw.  Tomorrow night we'll have pot roast slow cooked with lots of onions, garlic and tomatoes and a big, hearty tossed salad on the side.     Wednesday will be some kind of chicken dish.  Becky has been asked for a variation on my old white enchilada casserole.  We can have salad and then the spinach on the side.  I need to swap out ingredients: goat yogurt instead of regular, goat cheese, corn tortillas instead of wheat, and left over chicken.  And green salsa.  So maybe that will be Thursday night's dinner.  I think we'll have a salmon salad on Friday.

I forget what the nutritionist said about corn.  Sigh.

Anyway, soldiering on here!

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains - Book 7

I stumbled on this book, once again, when I had insomnia and went looking for a free Kindle book.  Even though I planned to stick to Ancient History for these three months of the year, I am doing abysmally at keeping to my own self-imposed plan.  I found this book and began to read it.  I had never heard of Isabella Bird but she was quite a fantastic character.  In 1873 she rode horseback for 800 miles over the course of several months, exploring the brand new state of Colorado.

Our intrepid adventurer!

I have been to Denver and I did take a tourist trip out to Georgetown but my memories are very dim.  She mentions both in her journal.  Bird travels all over the place, Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, Longmont.  I was not familiar with any of the peaks she writes of, except Pike's Peak.  She talks a lot about different 'parks' especially Estes Park.  And I have no idea where that is.

Most of the time, Bird is riding on a horse that happened to be named Birdie.  The author is an incredible adventurer.  She absolutely loved the landscape, flora and fauna and crisp dry mountain air.  She is incredibly hardy, traveling through two feet or more of snow in below freezing weather, in storms and wind, in her increasingly threadbare riding habit.  She writes poetically of the grandeur of the nature around her.  Her language is very descriptive and erudite.  She often throws in quotes from English poetry to describe her feelings at glorying in the beauty around her.

She meets many colorful characters. She travels safely throughout the rugged countryside meeting all kinds of cowboys, ranchers, adventurers and even an outlaw, and yet she is never molested.  There was a strong sense of chivalry.  The outlaw, Mountain Jim Nugent seemed quite taken with her. She spends a lot of time with him.  He seemed to be a highly gifted man with deep psychological issues. During her travels, she had to live in close quarters with strange men for days or even weeks at a time.  I was really curious about how she went to the bathroom and that sort of thing but of course she never mentions that.  Did she wash her hair the whole time?  She doesn't say.  She does talk about cooking, eating venison steaks and fresh trout, baking biscuits and cakes.  At times the food is nasty, at other times a real feast.  She talks about how she was constantly mending her clothes to get them to last.

From an Estes Park tourist advert.

One thing that was really jarring was when about 2/3s through the book she suddenly has a couple paragraphs on the American Indians.  Her language is incredibly insensitive and harsh.  She obviously thinks of them as subhuman.  But a few pages later she is in town and enjoying a beautiful church service's music.  She often references God in her praise of Colorado's beauty.  It really is incongruous from our current day perspective just how good people could have such very blind bigotry.

I know the idea of women breaking free from their chains and attaining equality with men is a seemingly big deal still.  But Isabella Bird out toughs most other women of today, and was proven equal or even better then the men she encountered.  And yet at one point she writes about how the men she stayed with appreciated women and their civilizing influence on them.  They really enjoyed having a woman around.  Not to exploit or dominate, but simply as a good companion.

I enjoyed A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains.  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks. 

Housekeeping and Nature Notes - 2/22/19

Housekeeping has been nil lately.  I do clean the kitchen, mostly, and get laundry done and give a spot clean here and there to our bathrooms.  And occasionally go through the piles of mail and throw stuff into recycling.  But that's about it!  Viviane cleaned up a bit for her guests and just today she tidied and swept the main floor.  God bless her.

I have been going through the books in our study and cleaning that up somewhat.  R dumped stuff from this father's condo in there and I've sort of pushed things to the corners so we can walk in and out.  I did set up my seedling shelves but I still haven't gotten my soil blocker so I haven't started on that.

Yes, this is pathetically an after photo.  I've already spent time trying to organize.

The weather has been wild, veering between dark, gloomy, rainy days, to bitter cold and snow, to crisp blue skies studded with clouds, to 56 degrees and lovely to this morning when I took my walk with Skipper,  which is 43 degrees, cloudy and raw.  The ground is so saturated, it's like walking on a sopping wet sponge except worse because it's all mud!

Taking the dog for walks, I've spied bluebirds and other song birds, hawks, turkey vultures.  One day there were a few dozen Canada Geese on the pond out back.  We used to have geese all the time, then they did something to the pond because the geese left.  I think these were just stopping on their way some place else. They weren't there today.  I also saw a Mallard duck couple for a few days as well. They were there first and then the Canada geese joined them.  I didn't see them this morning so I don't know if they left with the geese or if they were just hiding among the rushes.

This photo makes my seedling old baker's rack look like it tilted.

I had my 4th sighting of the fox this morning.  I got a really good look this time.  Definitely a fox and not a coyote.  I really think it is a grey fox not a red one.  It has a substantial amount of grey on it's back and haunches.   Skipper doesn't even bark or get that excited.  He just looks at it very alert.  He's interested but he's never out of control excited like he is when he sees other dogs.

#WalkAway

I've gone down a rabbit hole lately watching these #walkaway videos.  I had never heard of this campaign before a few days ago, started by a gay hairdresser from New York City.  He was a liberal and voted for Hillary but while suffering from the post election outrage, he had an old family friend point out that the video showing Trump making fun of a disabled reporter had been taken out of context to smear Trump.  He couldn't believe it at first but after researching, he realized it was true.  That made him wonder why CNN and MSNBC were pushing these videos.  This was his 'red pill' moment.  He gradually grew very angry at the liberal media and wound up publicly leaving the Democratic party and starting this #Walkaway campaign, first on twitter and then on Youtube.    He just announced he wants to challenge AOC next election!  He's from her district.

Now I do not agree with a lot of what the #walkaway videos say.  I agree with some, some are over the top (see above video!) Some are kinda weird.  But I myself walked away years ago because of abortion.  I came from a labor union family and that's why we were Democrats.  My parents really loved FDR and JFK.  However, they were really troubled about abortion when that became something embraced by Democrats in the 1970s.  They had to wrestle with that, but finally in the last election my mom ever voted in before her death, she voted against the Democrats, simply because she felt like she was colluding with abortionists if she continued to vote Democrat.  She was a mother of 10 and a devout Catholic and she was sick to death of hearing the Democratic party push abortion.  She was tired of getting all this junk mail from Planned Parenthood simply because she was a registered Democrat.

I moved away also because it was just too much to stomach after a while.  Initially, I relied on the old argument I shouldn't be a single issue voter.  But then I realized that this single issue effects a lot of things both culturally and politically.  And it is such a grave evil, you can't just sweep it under the rug like that.  However, I never have joined the Republican party.  I'm an Independent.  I am much more liberal on immigration and the environment, for instance, to feel comfortable being a Republican.  And I am very much in sympathy with Never Trumpers.  In truth, I see deep flaws in both parties.  My sympathies are torn, but I tend to see the Democratic party as beyond redemption, whereas, even in the age of Trump, the Republican party seems slightly more likely to be capable of reform (emphasis on slightly!).

Here is a good example though of a great #walkaway story.  This guy really impressed me.

This pastor has started a really neat thing he mentions in his video, call the 2019 Movement.  

Anyway, this is an interesting social media phenomenon.  It's nice to get away from the MSM groupthink and hear personal stories.  That's real diversity!

Morning Meditation

Human beings are marked simultaneously both by immortal longings and by the certainty of death.  They form a crossroads between God and the whole material creation, standing at the heart of the created order.  This is one reason the devil, in his revolt against the wisdom of God, seeks to wrestle humanity away from God so as to make a caricature of the creation of God and to mark the world of men with clear signs of moral capitulation and spiritual failure.

Christianity claims that God's central response to human sin, however, has been to become human.  Why?  If the human situation is marked by opaque meaning, residual moral frailty, and physical mortality, then why should God embrace our situation?  If God is real, ought he not simply to have chosen to remake the human condition from scratch, by divine fiat?  Why should he unite himself to us in our very imperfect situation?  The answer is divine love.  God manifests his mysterious wisdom and power not by destroying or instantly resolving our situation, but by offering us his divine mercy, grace, and friendship, and by offering all this to us in the midst of our suffering and moral fragility.  Divine love has its own customs which are infinitely wise, but which are not those of men.  God sees fit to "rehabilitate" the human race after sin not by destroying it, but by entering into it via incarnation, in the vulnerability of being a human child and of death by crucifixion, so as to invite the human race to discipleship and to resurrection from the dead.

From pp. 135-136, In The Light of Christ. 

Lessons from Out of Town Guests

We just had some out of town guests over the weekend.  It was rather impromptu.  Our long term house guest has a friend from Cote D'ivoire who has settled in Ohio.  He has to come back periodically to the embassy in DC.  When he does he always visits V.  His mother just flew here into Newark, so he drove to pick her up and then drove down here to visit.  They had to crash here because they just don't have enough money for hotels, etc.  Airplane flights are very expensive and budgets are extremely tight.  He also brought his wife, his not-quite-two son and who I thought was his sister but she's really a cousin, who is studying here in the U.S.  It was a lot of people to host for 4 days.  They are extremely nice people and very grateful.  However, English isn't their native language so conversation can be kind of awkward.  But also I think I am discerning something in African culture.  They love to have long conversations with anybody!  I felt this as a weakness in my own culture and my own introverted tendencies.  I can't maintain 4 hour long conversations (and not small talk!) with people I don't know all that well.  The intensity of their sociability is daunting to me. 

But one thing we learned about was the state of things in Cote D'ivoire.  It has fractured into political rivals and the whole  society is crumbling because of it.  Corruption is rampant and if you oppose one side and wind up in a bad situation, you might very well end up dead.  When they were freed from colonial rule, their first president was one of those presidents for life.  Never a good idea!  He was great at ramping up the economy though so for his long reign the country did fairly well compared to other African countries.  However, opposition was brewing against him and when he died it broke loose.  They had a tragic civil war that they are still recovering from.  The chaos and desperation brought on more corruption.  So that now you can only get anywhere if you have connections and can grease the palm of everyone along the way.  There's no rule of law that is honored. 

At the same time, they've never thrown off their colonial exploiters. Cote D'ivoire is the biggest exporter of cocoa and yet there are no manufacturing plants.  It's mercantilism all over again, this time not forced by a colonizing country but by big multi-national corporations.  The money these corporations give to differing factions are what fuel a lot of the intransigent corruption. 

I fear our own country is becoming so divided to a frightening degree.  We really can lose all that we have in this nation, respect for rule of law, peaceful change of leadership, freedom of religion and speech, opportunities for entrepreneurship. 

Trump does it by inflammatory language, his stupid tweets, his revolving door of cabinet appointments, his alliance with questionable people like Steve Bannon, his shut down and his national emergency.  The left does it through it's stupid 'resist' movement (resist what?  It sounds like they want violent revolution.  Come up with better policies and win the voters.), through their obsessive and hysterical, media coverage, through their mob mentality, through their hostility to religious freedom and freedom of speech. 

Both sides are so roiled up and so emotional they talk past each other.  One side will see a legitimate instance of racism that happened somewhere in the hinterland and blow it way out of proportion, while the other side will find an instance of a racial hoax and use that to refute the other side's claim. 

Political stability is a balancing act.  We benefit from the institutions and respect for law our forefathers established.  But we can disrupt all this.  We've had civil war before and we can again.  The default for mankind is turmoil, brutality and power struggles.  We need to guard our first principles and stop demonizing the other side.