Self Blocking

Why is it that I always have such an active mind?  I'm always wanting to do or learn something different than what I'm doing.  Like right now I'm working on counted cross stitching of a complicated pair of wolves.  I know that it's going to take me a long time to finish and after picking it up again after Christmas this year I was able to finish one square (there are four large squares and four half sized blocks on one side of each square) .. I know it will take me as much as a year to finish so it's an on-going project but my wandering mind is wanting to do something else.  I was into beading, that has kind of went by the wayside, I did a bunch of knitting and that is by the wayside as well, and then I started using Blender to make a digital teddy bear and all of these were, I think, to take me away from my painting.. I think that the reason that I'm not sticking with one craft or art is that if I get really good I think that I will start getting commissions from people and that will make my art a job and will squash my creativity.  Ahhh the self blocking of the troubled mind.

The Sound of the Opposite of Silence

Why is it, that in day to day life, I find it hard to understand what most people are saying, but while watching TV I have to put it on mute when the commercials come on because the sound seems so blaring and unbearably loud?  Alternately, when the program comes on I have to blast the sound so that I can hear what people are saying? A riddle that is.

Denial

   I don't always go down the road into denial land, but when I do it's not a meandering short stroll, it's a headlong, full speed ahead rush. And it's not a day trip.. oh no, it's a multiple months' long journey.

  In October of last year I was at the Doctor's for my quarterly diabetes check up and was told my weight was up a bit as well as my A1C's.   So instead of putting on my big girl panties and making adjustments in my eating, etc,  I decided to get my big girl panties in a bunch and turned my back on reality and even sanity itself.  How can a relatively intelligent woman of 62 be so stupid and destructive you might ask?  Well it ain't easy but I persevered.  I went off of my diet, started eating all the wrong foods and was stupid enough to quit taking my Victoza injections.  Yeah, that stupid.  And the cherry on top is that since October I haven't been checking my blood sugars.

   Lucky for me I had the balls to keep my appointment, a few weeks ago, for my blood test and last week for my appointment.  The news wasn't good, I had gained around 5 pounds and my A1C's were bad, very bad.  Normal  blood sugars are usually between 5 and 7-8.  When I got home I checked mine, finally, and they were 16, later that day they were 17 and that night they were 20!!! I was panicked... This is serious business, not to be fooled with.  All the bread, sweets and candy were wrecking havoc with my blood sugars.

   I finally opened my eyes and am making the slow, painful journey back from the brink.  I have an appointment with the nurse from the Diabetes Association a week from Tuesday and I have started my injections again and am watching what I am eating.  I might have been stupid but a least  I didn't STAY stupid.  I'm getting some better reading, with a reading of 8.5 yesterday before supper and today I even had a 7.7 before lunch and an 8.3 after.  But now that my sugars are down so much I'm feeling like they are too low and have been feeling shaky and off.    Although I still have a ways to go I'm hoping that I didn't do any permanent damage to myself.

I have an appointment at the ophthalmologist on Monday so here's hoping that my eyes are ok.  God watches out for the insane and little children or so they say.



   

Cats.. gotta love'em

You gotta love cats.. how, when you move in for a snuggle, they make little chirping sounds in the back of their throats, and head butt you, then touch noses.  And when you go to walk away you notice, out of the corner of your eye, that they are cleaning every place on their body where your hands happened to touch them.

Enough is Never Enough

Enough is Never Enough

In this money driven world
Where happiness is supposed to come
From the accumulation of wealth, and instead
Feeds the insane hunger
Where enough is never enough.

Where the throw-away society
Strips our earth
And strips our very souls
Of the true wealth,
Our very humanity.

Where Government corruption
And Corporate greed
Drives the few
In their golden carriages
Over the many.
Where the streets are paved
With the poor.

Where enough is never enough.
Where the evil of money
Plummets us towards
The abyss of swirling destruction

Where slavery to the imaginary dollar
Drives us to an early grave
For what?

So that we can line the pockets
Of the rich, while our earth
Caves inward from the pollution?
From the oppression?
From the bone crushing debt?

The true insanity
Where the earth finally dies
And the person
With the biggest cars,
The biggest mansions
And the biggest bank account
Wins?

How can this be considered sane?
How can this be considered desirable?
Why are these people running our world?
Why aren't our voices being heard?
How did it get so out of whack?

How can we,
As a sane, caring people
Of this bountiful, beautiful
Wondrous earth
Pull ourselves upwards and
Back from the downward pull?
How can we reclaim
And reconnect with nature?

How can we disconnect
From what has become "normal"?
How can we take the blinders off
And truly see?

When will we pull back the curtain
And see money for what it really is?
A chain connected to the
Giant machine of oppression!

What would it feel like
To be free?
To have a world without money?
To respect the earth,
To let it heal itself
And continue to provide us
With what we need
Not what we want?

What would it feel like,
To feed the world easily
To return humanity
It's pride
It's joy
It's respect
It's love and light?

What would it be like,
To have a society
Where every man
Where every woman
Where every child
Feels like they belong?
Where they can contribute
To the betterment of all?
Where they count?

What would the world feel like
If the other is viewed as the insanity
And a free world would be considered
The norm?
How would that feel?

-Kathryn DesRoches

Some does and don'ts

After my first year of trying to grow vegetables I discovered the those hanging things are no good for growing tomatoes or strawberries.  Both did not do well at all.  I planted the strawberries in the ground so hopefully I will get some next summer off of those and I know that planting the tomato plants along the front of my house, which faces the south, produces the best crop for those.

I think that I will plant lots of tomatoes next year and make sauce to freeze like I did this past summer. I froze them in individual containers so that I could defrost as needed.  I even did up a second batch with tomatoes my neighbour gave me from next door and they are also gone so I know that it will get used.

The strawberries didn't produce much this year but since it was the first year I didn't really expect too much but I bought lots of boxes and some rhubarb from a roadside vegetable stand and froze them so I have lots left to use over the cold winter months.

I'm not ashamed to admit it...

I'm not ashamed to admit that I have a girl-on-girl crush.  I absolutely love Jennifer Lawrence. ♥  I first saw her in the Hunger Games and since then have seen her in numerous talk shows and I'm in love with her.. sorry Ron.

Her sense of humor is off the chart.  She is so self-effacing and does not appear to be effected by her fame.  I would love to eventually see her in American Hustle because it looks like the part that plays off her natural personality.  And I read the Hunger Games books so I can't wait to see the second movie.

Big Brother

I think that Big Brother may now be watching me.. eeekkk!!  Yesterday I saw an ad on Facebook advertising a book on how to create a 4 foot x 4 foot garden to grow your own food for pennies efficiently.  And since I have actually been growing a few things such as Kale, Cucumber, Tomatoes and Strawberries I thought that this would be a great item to get for a measly $7.00 so I ordered it.  But it was only after I ordered the E-Book that I found out that this is a survivalist group that also tells you how to buy guns and how to make your own ammunition.. double eeekkk!!  Now I'm paranoid that the government will have me in their sights.  I promise that I'm a pacifist.  

My new greenhouse

The interior of our new pop-up greenhouse.

Hanging Strawberries.

Hanging tomatoes, they are not doing well but the ones in the greenhouse seem to be thriving.

Kale,  mmmm.

Various veggies, this was taken a couple of weeks ago, they are a lot bigger now.

So far so good with our new pop-up greenhouse.  I will soon be able to pick some of the vegetables like the kale and the lettuce which are doing great.  Some of the herbs are doing good as well but some leave a little to be desired.. lol.

Never say never.. about your dog.

I remember always saying that I never wanted a yappy dog.  The first dog we got was a miniature poodle and she was yappy but we got her at 7 years old and thought that it was the way she was raised before we got her...  Then along came Tinka, who we got as a tiny puppy and guess what, she's a yappy little girl as well.. so I guess it wasn't the previous owner's fault after all..

MMM... who said that food that is good for you can't taste good?

Nice full-bodied chili, salad and butternut squash.. mmmm. All from scratch.

Spring.. where art thou?

This is supposed to be spring.. well, I guess it is because my flowers are starting to bloom but brrr.. it's cold today.  Yesterday was a busy day for me, I decided I had better get my huge amount of  seeds started for when we get our hothouse and raised gardens started.  We got a seed starter kit that holds 72 of those little seed starter pods, etc. so I spent the afternoon planting seeds into them and finally got them done.  The hothouse was fairly cheap so I don't know if it will last past the season (it's a pop-up type and we are going to put it up soon).  I would love to do away with my  regular flower beds, especially the heart shaped one that is goes down into the ditch because it's so hard to weed it especially with my bad back.  But we'll see if I can talk Ron into it later.


These are my first flowers...

Home is All in Your Mind

They say that you can never go home again.  But I wonder if home ever was, or, if it's all in your mind.  I can't seem to get a clear overview of back then.  I remember snippets of my childhood... making mud pies on old pieces of broken dishes and decorating them with wild flowers. In my mind's eye they were the most beautiful things created.  And I guess they were because they combined natures flawless beauty with a child's imagination.  But, looking back, I wonder how my mother saw me that day as I came into the house covered in mud and smeared with dandelion sap?  My poor mother, I can't even imagine having 13 children to raise [14 if you count our brother Ralph who died as an infant].   The endless washing, cooking, cleaning she must have done.

I also recall climbing out of bed as a very young girl before anyone else and going to the garden my mother and father planted to watch the sun rise.  I can see clearly the dew on the leaves of the plants and a light mist that kissed the ground.  I don't know what possessed me to rise so early being that I wasn't a morning person.  It was the first and last time that I had done that.

I have wanted to plant a vegetable garden for a long time, perhaps to recapture that early morning stroll through dew kissed plants.  Who knows?

Either Feast or Famine

Excuse me for my erratic posting.. but that's just me.. gotta be why you love me, right??

Before Christmas we had two lines of credit, a car payment and a low interest loan for the renovations we did on the house a while back.  I don't work because of my back and so Ron went back to work for a few years to pay off some of our bills.  We got news that our bank, where we have the lowest interest rate, was raising our line of credit quite substantially.. so we paid off our low interest loan [which was still higher than our line of credit], our other line of credit at the other bank that wasn't a lot higher but still was higher, and we also decided last week to pay off the car... so now we have only one payment to make and we can take all the money we were stretching out over the other payments and put it all on the one payment.  Also, if something happens and we are short on money we can make a minimum payment for a month or so on just one bill so that would be a cushion to fall back one.. We figure we will be debt free in a couple of years and will trade in our car at that time.  It really feels like we have things more under control now.  *whew*.. [hope that's not one of those ''famous last words'' type of things.]

MMMMmmm Coffee...

In addition to the new kobo ereader we also invested in a Keurig coffee maker.  Our old one was the kind that had a thermos instead of a glass coffee pot but we ended up wasting so much coffee.  I would get the coffee maker ready the night before and Ron would turn it on when he got up so he could have a cup or two before he left for work.  The only problem is that by the time I got up [I'm a late to bed and late to get up kind of girl], the coffee would be getting cool even in the thermos so that I had to nuke it in the microwave to get it hot enough to drink.  Then I would end up throwing half the pot of coffee away because it was never as good when it was reheated.

We also got a reusable little filter that we used to fill with our own coffee instead of getting the little pods. So the coffee is always very hot and fresh as we need it, no pouring half a pot of coffee down the drain and no wasteful coffee pods to dispose of.. So a win-win proposition.

Oh KOBO I ♥ you so...

We purchased a kobo ereader the other day and I have to say that it's so much better than buying paper books.  Our house is overflowing with the paper kind and we are so out of room for them all.  Our new kobo will hold up to 1,000 books with the possibility of holding up to 30,000 with a memory card.  The one we got is a kobo touch.. really nice and that's saving a LOT of trees.. :)  Later on we may get a second one so that we both can use one at the same time but presently Ron is reading a paper back and I'm using the kobo.

I just finished reading Bones are Forever by Kathy Reichs who wrote the Bones series on TV.  It's a good book but not great.  I guess it's all a matter of taste.  I had meant to use my 90% off coupon to get it but didn't know that I had to put the coupon code in earlier in the checkout process and ended up having to pay full price.  I later found out that there are only a certain set of books at 90% off and got a John Lutz book called Night Kills and there was also a 50% off for new members and I used it to get a book by Heather Gudenkauf called One Breath Away.  I'm reading the last book in the list and I just LOVE it, very well written and although the author is speaking from a number of different voices from the different characters it's still easy to follow.

We got a cover for it as well so that I can take it in my purse without worrying that it will get scratched. ♥

Everywhere at once

I must say that being me can be very confusing at times.  My mind bounces around like a ping-pong ball.  I was on again, off again a couple of times with the wheat elimination, and at the present time I'm back on again with the wheat.  It seems like I can't settle on one thing and stick with it.. but hopefully I'll stick with my counted cross stitching that I'm doing.. The top one shows the start of the picture and the bottom one shows where I am at the present time with it..

Wheat Belly no more.

Just before Christmas I purchased Dr. William Davis' book Wheat Belly.  I had been off of wheat before Christmas and wasn't losing weight but I was consuming high carb. flours such as rice flour, corn starch and some others to make biscuits.  From reading Dr. Davis' book I realized that there were a lot of things that I didn't understand about the whole going wheat free process to achieve optimum benefit.  So one day hubby and I were in Indigo book store to get some Christmas gift cards and I saw a whole shelf  Wheat Belly and decided what do I have to lose?  I decided to wait until after Christmas before I started because I wasn't sure if I could resist all the backed goods and sweets.   So yesterday when hubby and I were shopping I stocked up on healthy vegetables, nut flours, cheese, some items for baking wheat free and some raw almonds and some natural peanut and almond butters.

I have a bunch of recipes to make from the book including pizza, and lots of recipes for meals and lots of deserts like pumpkin spice muffins, cheese cake, etc.  I think I might go easy on the deserts at first so that my body knows it's going through a change.

I'm starting out at 172.8 pounds and will let you know how it unfolds in the coming days, weeks, months and  years.

On the search for the perfect heat source.

When we bought this house 9 and 1/2 years ago it had a wood stove and baseboard hot water heat heated by an oil furnace.  Our heat costs were high and getting higher every year.  Even the cost of wood for the wood stove was high and the oil furnace heated our domestic tap water as well so it had to run all year.  Then we decided to get an electric hot water heater to heat the domestic hot water so that we could save money in the summer months. 

Then Ron fully renovated the house putting in extra insulation and new windows.  We then took out the wood stove and replaced it with a pellet stove and last year we removed the furnace and put in electric heat as back up to the pellet stove.

Then a week or so ago our pellet stove went on us so we replaced it with two infrared heaters that should save us lots of money on electricity.  So contrary to the trend we are spending a lot less than we would have with all the other forms of heat that we have had in the past.  Life is good.

Back on Wheat

I had to go back on wheat for a month because I'm getting a scope done to test for Celiac disease.  I find I'm hungry all the time now and have a lot of stomach problems.  So on the 1st of November in addition to the gastric scope I'm having a bowel scope.  Talk about attacking the problem from both ends.  And on the 6th of November I go to Summerside to have a cat scan done of my pancreas to see if something is wrong there because my blood tests were off a bit and my doctor is very thorough and wants to find out what's causing it.

We're settling into fall now and our Maple trees are so beautiful.