Good Loving Woman
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Dr. Wahls (doctor, researcher, and sufferer of progressive multiple sclerosis) began studying the latest research on autoimmune disease and brain biology, and decided to get her vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and essential fatty acids from the food she ate rather than pills and supplements. This is her story about how she used functional medicine and Paleo principles to walk again. She breaks the (Paleo) diet down very simply into which foods provide what the body–and brain–need to thrive.
Eat for Your Mitochondria – Using Functional Medicine and Paleo Principles to Beat Her Autoimmune Disease
July 9, 2013
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Sliced Bread
July 7, 2013
…was sold for the first time on this date in 1928. Up until that time, consumers baked their own bread, or bought it in solid loaves. Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa, had been working for years perfecting an eponymous invention, the Rohwedder Bread Slicer. He tried to sell it to bakeries. They scoffed, and told him that pre-sliced bread would get stale and dry long before it could be eaten. He tried sticking the slices together with hatpins, but it didn’t work. Finally he hit on the idea of wrapping the bread in waxed paper after it was sliced. Still no sale, until he took a trip to Chillicothe, Missouri, and met a baker who was willing to take a chance. Frank Bench agreed to try the five-foot-long, three-foot-high slicing and wrapping machine in his bakery. The proclamation went out to kitchens all over Chillicothe, via ads in the daily newspaper: “Announcing: The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry Since Bread was Wrapped — Sliced Kleen Maid Bread.” Sales went through the roof. Rohwedder not only gave Americans the gift of convenience and perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but he also provided the English language with the saying that expresses the ultimate in innovation: “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
Narcissus pseudonarcissus
April 1, 2013
compare to March 11 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Natural Wonders
Spring Cleaning: Now that it’s time to put those wool sweaters away, first wash them by hand, then rinse them in the sink with a quarter cup of white vinegar and water to remove any remaining odors. Finish the job with a final rinse in clean water.
gLw
use vinegar before storing woolens
March 31, 2013
Sonnet: Daffodils
March 21, 2013
by Gavin Ewart
Wordsworth really loved daffodils. He said they were flashers.
Certainly they must be the most exhibitionistic flowers
there are.
trumpeting their presence in yellow—by far the most
visible colour.
I grant that after a long hard winter
it’s warming to see snow-drops and crocuses in that iron earth
and the very first daffodils (what a cliché) seem a
resurrection,
something it even seems appropriate to make a fuss about.
They look so perfect, though a bit self-conscious.
After a week or two, however, when Spring is established,
and everywhere you look there are oceans of daffodils
as arrogant as pop stars, they begin to seem ordinary.
You take them for granted. Like a love affair fading
they shrivel and go crinkly, papery and tired.
The Spring too (teenagers witness) has its own kind of
boredom.
“Sonnet: Daffodils” by Gavin Ewart, from Or Where a Young Penguin Lies Screaming. © Little Hampton books, 1978.
CHEMISTRY tickles MARVEL
The Periodic Table of Comic Books
March 13, 2013
Catsilk Mountain >>>>>>> Signs of Spring >>>>>>>>>> Snow Drops <<<<<<<<<
March 11, 2013
March 6, 2013
“I have a close but at the same time uncomfortable relationship with the natural world. I’ve always been most at home in the country probably because I was raised in the country as a boy, and I know something about farming and woodcutting and all the other things that country people know about. That kind of work has been important to me in my personal life and in my writing too. I believe in the values of manual labor and labor that is connected with the earth in some way. But I’m not simply a nature poet. In fact, I consider myself and I consider the whole human race fundamentally alien. By evolving into a state of self-consciousness, we have separated ourselves from the other animals and the plants and from the very earth itself, from the whole universe. So there’s a kind of fear and terror involved in living close to nature. My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.”
Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)
March 5, 2013
“Birthday Cake” (Hayden Carruth)
March 5, 2013
For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past.
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.
“Birthday Cake” by Hayden Carruth, from Toward the Distant Islands: New & Selected Poems. © Copper Canyon Press, 2006.
End of the Line, Valentine
February 14, 2013
Bored
by Margaret Atwood
All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn’t even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the greying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It’s what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn’t be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.
“Bored” by Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House. © Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
Natural Wonders
To remove the smell of mildew from those towels long-forgotten in the washing machine (or just about anything for that matter), use equal parts white vinegar and borax.
gLw
get the mildew out of those towels
February 9, 2013
Master lumberjack, Paul Tesseyman
February 6, 2013
Winter Syntax by Billy Collins
February 5, 2013
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl’s face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.
These cool moments are blazing with silence.
The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it
it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning
outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon
in a corner of the couch.
Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography.
Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.
But the traveler persists in his misery,
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.
At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke
rising from your chimney, and when he stands
before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,
a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,
and the man will express a complete thought.
“…from the tail of the morning star, which is a deer. No evil. Thirteen thank-yous.”
January 23, 2013
Mayan prayer (Martin Prechtal, shaman)
Good Loving Woman 