Home Canning

Most people don't can fruit anymore. For the most part people had jobs, and coming home to a hot waterbath canner in the evening was not their idea of fun. Now people don't have jobs, and they're thinking cheap. The cost breakdown may be comparable to store bought cans of food, but the taste test is the proof of the pudding. OTOH, gleaning is free. Look around in your neighborhood to see if an elderly person or some lucky duck who still has a job has a tree that's overproducing, and ask them if you can pick fruit. Perhaps they'd be willing to let you have fruit in exchange for some of the jars of preserves or jam that you make. My experience has been that most people don't want to pick up more apples from the ground to mow the grass than they have to, so they'll give you the go-ahead. Be Careful of the Buds! When you pick apples you have to be very careful not to break the stubs off the branch where the apple attaches. That is where next year's fruit will come on, and if you don't twist the stem off gently, you will ruin next year's crop and make yourself persona non grata.

All that said, really canning is very satisfying and not so very difficult. Living out here in the woods with a store that closes early and has high prices has taught me how to make things from scratch. It's not hard, it's not intimidating, and with great websites like allrecipes.com out there you can check reviews to see if recipes are worth making, rather than buying a stack of cookbooks and not knowing what modifications are necessary. And modifications are always necessary! ;) A really great site for home processing is pickyourown.org, with pictures and step by step instructions for newbies or for those that haven't done it in a few years. One thing to keep in mind is that jams, butters, and chutneys make great gifts. It's fun to have guests over that rave over the product of your effort, and then off-handedly say, oh, here, have a jar! Watch their eyes light up! :)

And now I need to get back to that box of pears... Should I make pear butter with the whole thing, or can some??? Hmmmmm.

digging through the drawers

Can anyone explain to me why men dig through their neatly folded (by me) drawers for the sweatshirt they want like a dog after a groundhog?

If you see any of my family with a fabulously wrinkled t-shirt on? That's them, not me. It was laundered, folded, and placed gently in the drawer. Then they started pawing. Too many clothes? Maybe. Flylady says you should only have 7 outfits, but Flylady is not a boy in mud country.

On the Cheap

Ok, so in my last post I talked about some of the ways I save money. A lot of people do really well with coupons, but that hasn't worked for me. If you buy name brands or buy premade foods, that can work out really well for you, though, and I highly encourage it. If companies are going to give you free money, you go for it. Even Costco has coupon books now, and I have used those here and there.

Now that so many people are unemployed, we have time to learn to do some of the things our mothers or grandmothers knew, like making our own pectin using green apples, rather than paying $3 or more on a package. Here's a great website teaching just that. You would be absolutely amazed what you can do and make with a little ingenuity and an inquiring mind that asks how things work. We are so conditioned here in the US to buy everything premade and packaged, when there are so many things that we could just make out of nothing. For instance, I was checking into starting my own seeds, and found all these ads for seed starter kits and mini indoor greenhouse systems with special waterflow watsymajigs... and then I found a site from the UK advocating using newsprint to make little pots you could put directly in the garden, and layers of damp newspaper underneath the starting tray. Tada! FREE. Not 'New Low Special Offer' but free!

For a short time (very short) there was a UK interior design show on HGTV that I don't even remember the name of. One of the things they showed was how to make textured paint by using dirt from the garden (yard, here in the US). That's right. Not sanitized bags of sand at Home Depot, but good old clean dirt that you've sieved to take out the big chunks. (Unless you want big chunks.) It was like a little light bulb went off in my head! I started looking at everything I had taken for granted buying, and started asking how it was made and if I could do that. When you think that way, it's really surprising how consumer-oriented we are as a people. Look how many people pay twenty bucks for a bag of rice or seed corn to heat in the microwave for a heating pad when they could easily make it for themselves. It's just a matter of learning how to make do. Like our grandmothers did. We need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves for what we can't have, and start empowering ourselves to save our money for the things that are really important to us.

Pour Some Sugar On Me...

Not really, I just like freaking the kids out with Def Leppard! I am going to complain about sugar prices though... So fruit is starting to come on, and it's canning season, and I ran out of sugar mid-batch. I ran to the local store and a 10 pound sack of sugar was almost $7. Is this another one of those 'sin tax' things no one told me about? (Yes, we have those in WA state, pop and candy are taxed now) I was mad as heck, because frankly one of the most irritating things about living in a small town is the prices at the local grocery store being soooo much higher than they are down in the city. I usually take 2 big shopping trips a month, then buy small things or impulse items locally to try and budget my money. With 2 kids and their friends, our grocery bill can easily become astronomical, and my layoff a year ago makes getting by tougher and tougher... So when I'm trying to be frugal by putting up my own fruit for winter and I'm hit by a price increase at the market on staples, I get upset (and whiny). We don't buy a lot of premade junk food, I cook from scratch, I watch the sales fliers, I try really hard to plan ahead and my grocery bill is still astronomical. People say 'Use Coupons' and for me that is such a joke, as we don't buy any of that stuff. Especially since my food allergies condition became significantly worse.

Anyway, back to sugar: Then I started snooping around online, and lo and behold, there are issues! What issues? Well, apparently in 2009 the price of sugar doubled because the crazy weather the world is having affected the crops. My local store owner probably bought some of his sugar supply while the prices were so high. The fact is that we need to look around and think about why things are happening, instead of just what local thing happened and how mad we are about it.

A lot of times we see international tragedies on the news (or not, depending on whether the national news is still repeating something endlessly and pointlessly, like whether Angelina and Brad had another baby) and we don't think about how we are affected by things happening across the world. We are. The rise in sugar prices caused by crop failures is a small example. We have been encouraged to 'buy locally and think globally'. Oftentimes we stress the first part, but not the second. That thought pattern is obvious in the simple fact that we don't hear of many international happenings unless #1 American citizens are directly affected or #2 we look online at international news. How many times have you watched the news only to see a horrific tragedy wrapped up with the words 'And out of the 140 victims, 3 Americans died'. Like American lives are more valuable....

So I'll stop whining about the price of sugar in favor of thinking about the livelihoods and farms lost in the terrible international floods of the last year. Kind of puts it all in perspective.

No One's Perfect, Not Even You

I'm a little sad today... just heard about a couple I know separating. The really sad thing is that this marriage is barely past the honeymoon stage, and the even sadder thing is that there are kids involved who have already been through one divorce. Seems that we're all surrounded by broken homes today. I remember when I was a kid and I was the only one in my class with a single parent. When my son started school 12 years ago, he was one of the only kids whose parents were still married. Times have changed so much.

Sometimes it even reaches a level of craziness when teenagers start dating, then their parents start dating each other and the former dates become some blend of stepkids... oooo there's a strange world!

The thing that gets me is how many times I see people basically marry the same person over and over again, making the same mistakes time and again. Why not stay with the first one and cut out all the work of finding someone else only to have them turn out to have the same problems? No one's perfect, so you're not going to find the perfect man out there. Especially on the rebound.

Which leads to the second part of this. I don't care how bad your spouse was, you made some mistakes too. Own it. Until you do, you're going to make the same mistakes you 'didn't' make over and over and you're going to continue to be miserable and make everyone around you miserable and then people are going to start avoiding you because you're delusional and bitter. No one's perfect, remember? Not even you, so quit pretending. The only one you're fooling is yourself.

For the most part the thing I'm seeing is that everyone's more worried about hopping in the sack than they are in making sure that they can get along for the 23 hours a day that they're not having sex...keep in mind that if you don't get along and don't have the same principles and worldview, sooner or later you're not going to be having sex anyway. Kisses don't make it all better, talking your problems through respectfully does. Even though you all live in the same house now you still have to be as nice to each other as you were before... maybe nicer. And remember, just because you feel right doesn't mean you are right. Sometimes there is no solution to an argument, so you have to learn to agree to disagree. Be NICE. Remember, there's no I in team, and that's what a good marriage needs: Teamwork... dang... now I know I've been watching too much ESPN. I'm speaking in 'coach'...
 

Good Sjogren's Info

I've found a few good resources for information about Sjogrens, one is Sjogren's World, which offers great support for fellow sufferers. Another great place is the website for the Sjogren's Syndrome Foundation. They have published some books that I have already found to be so informative and helpful in coping with this problem.

If you have a loved one with the problem, or suspect you may have it, check these sources out to see what you can do.

Arrogance in a Lab Coat

I went to my local doctor a couple of weeks ago to catch him up on my findings from Dr. Ranheim, and because I was hurting really bad perhaps talk to him about pain management. I have had carpal tunnel issues ever since my teen years. By the time I would get done with a 13 hour day at the cherry shed I wouldn't be able to move my hands or hold a spoon, but neither could anyone else, I thought. Over the years I got 'used to' having repetitive stress injuries. I was absolutely enthralled with my medical transcription course, but by the end of my 2 year course I had to use my left hand for the mouse, and knew that I could never do it for a living. I still suffer intense pain in my neck, shoulder, elbow, and right hand when I type too much, and immediately if I have to use a mouse with my right hand. There's a point to this whining! Don't lose patience...

So here I am in the doctor's office, having paid him $100 (oops, got the bill later, the insurance will pay the majority of over $300!) to catch up on the other doctors I'm spending money on. He had an intern in to train, so the baby doctor got to watch the show too... which consisted of 'my' doctor's complete humiliation of me. I went in and told him that in going to a different allergist and having complete blood tests I'd found that I need more doctors than an environmental allergist. I need a recommendation for a rheumatologist from him, and right now more immediately I really needed some muscle relaxants for the spasms in my neck and shoulder, I had overdone and hurt myself and couldn't sleep at night.

He looked at me like I was a drug-seeking addict, and immediately objected that he didn't think I have RA.

When I described my pain to him he proceeded to tell me that if I had RA, which he didn't think I did, I wouldn't have muscle pain, just pain in my joints, because pain in my muscles would mean that I have fibromyalgia. (which is not what my research told me) I looked him right in the eye at this point, since he was standing so close that we were face to face (For once I was liking sitting up on that table, it put me at eye level!), and told him 'You diagnosed me with fibro 5 years ago, remember?' He harrumphed and told me he wanted an xray. I said fine.

Twenty minutes or more later he came back in the room telling me that I have severe, um, moderately severe arthritic changes to my neck, but he wanted to see lab work. I signed papers to get them sent over, and thankfully he went ahead and prescribed the muscle relaxants. I slept that night.

Two weeks later I got a call from the office telling me that 'Doctor looked at my paperwork and said I can see a rheumatologist now'.  Oh thank you, Doctor... And can someone tell me why people who work in doctor's offices habitually drop 'The' when speaking of 'the doctor'. It's like their doctor is the only one. Like God. Hmmmm.... maybe I'm onto something here....

What I don't understand is why a problem has to be either/or with doctors, as if you can't have carpal tunnel and an elbow problem or pinched nerve from the neck at the same time. It's like they try to catch you in a wrong answer, rather than figure out why your wrist hurts but the wrong fingers are numb... to be honest, the intern explained to me the anatomy of the problem with my elbow better than my GP, who I swear won't be my GP anymore. Someone tell me how you find a doctor that listens and is competent?

Sjogren's Syndrome

Caution: Novella ahead!

Last week I saw my doctor, and received the results of the most thorough blood tests I've ever had. I found this doctor through the American Academy of Environmental Medicine website.

I've suffered with intense allergies most of my life, and always thought they were the key to my problems with exhaustion. My aches and pains I chalked up to wear and tear, all those things that I did in my twenties catching up with me. Headaches? Who doesn't have headaches? Mostly I've self-medicated, or gone to my local GP and the conventional allergist, taken the drugs they offered, let them look at me sceptically and tell me that how I feel is common among women (key: among women). It's tough when your doctor doesn't take you seriously. They acted as if not feeling good was just plain old life as we know it, so deal with it. In all these years the local GP has never scheduled me with a complete physical, and only referred me to a pulmonologist when I became upset enough over my chronic cough that I insisted on a referral, which he wasn't going to give me until he took an x-ray, only to find that there is a mass in my lung. Surprise! 1st lesson: Stick with what you know, and argue with the doctor.

Some years ago I went to a naturepath, and she told me there was a diet component to my problems, that I needed to leave gluten alone. I was under a lot of stress taking care of my mom, and didn't follow her recommendations closely. When I asked the conventional allergist about gluten sensitivities he shrugged it off, and said that 'naturepaths do blood tests that aren't always accurate'. He did a scratch test for food allergies which was negative on all counts, and gave me another inhaler and more prednisone. He never did a blood test for food sensitivities, but I chose to believe him.

So by now I've gained more than 20 pounds from steroids, my breathing hasn't improved that much since this started, and the drugs that the doctor is offering me now raise my cancer risk, which is already genetically high. I still hurt all over, and am exhausted all the time. That's when I hit the internet to learn more. I found the Stop the Thyroid Madness website, which seemed to have some answers for me. On that site I found the link above to the Environmental Medicine site, where I found a doctor within 60 miles of where I live. I filled out a lot of papers, and gave about 3 gallons of blood, and talked to the doctor for an hour or more. A couple of weeks later I was given a prescription for a small amount of testosterone cream, which helped with my muscle soreness and moods. Who'd a thunk it? You'd think that there'd be enough testosterone floating around this male-dominated house to provide for my needs!

So I finally had my follow up visit last week and he went over my labs with me, only to tell me that I have tested positive for Sjogren's Syndrome. That means my eyes are dry, my mouth is dry, and there's a reason beyond allergy medicine for it. Wow. What also goes along with this syndrome is pain. Pain in my joints and muscles... So all this time that the doctors were looking at me like I was an out-of-shape whiner, I had this stinking disease in me, it's just that no one bothered to test for it before because they were busy not taking me seriously. They just wanted to give me anti-depressants. Yeah. It's all in my head... except for these blood tests that prove otherwise.

What else was contained in my blood tests? The fact that I am gluten sensitive. It's listed in the blood tests under 'anti-gliadin Ab AgA and IgG.' When I started researching gluten sensitivities and celiac disease I was floored by the correspondence between my condition and the characteristics of celiac disease. It's a lot more than digestive upsets. Everything from skin conditions to chronic fatigue and crippling muscle and joint aches can be a result. The changes in diet required by avoiding gluten are simply overwhelming in many ways, but there are a lot of successful and far healthier people out there that are sticking with it, and if they can do it, so can I. So here I am embarking on something new and different and 'really hard' according to all the people I know that won't do it themselves, despite their own health problems. I've tested my reaction to wheat, and now I know for a fact that it brings on asthma attacks and intense body aches and joint pain. Can I live without a sandwich if it means not hurting all over? I think so. Will it always be easy and convenient? No. I will have to carry snacks with me wherever I go... which is easy when I think of the alternative of not being able to breathe in and out, or having an asthma attack in a restaurant with my lunch, which I have done in the past. Carrying snacks is better than seeing the fear in my kid's eyes as I cough and choke and fight for air.

I finally have some answers. Now I just need to work with what I know.

Dogs and Stewbones

Yesterday I was stewing up a nice pot of homemade beef broth, mostly using the nice recipe found on Simply Recipes that I've linked to. Most of my recipe searches have ended there lately, as I cook from scratch. It's cheaper and healthier, and I have more control of the ingredients in my food. Since I've discovered that I suffer from food sensitivities the benefits have been more than just tasty meals.

I learned how to cook at a very young age. I remember standing on a chair next to the stove while mom fried up breakfast. I learned to wear a shirt even when it's really hot from the spitting and popping bacon on that stovetop when I was just a little critter. I still remember Mom hollering "I told you..." as I ran to the bathroom for a cold washcloth. Guess my kids come by that bullheaded streak honestly. Now when my 10-year-old proudly flips an egg without breaking the yoke or cracks an egg with one hand (yeah, baby, he can do that!) it takes me back to when I was a kid.

Not surprisingly, most of the best memories involved food, whether cooking it, eating it, or never touching it again. SpaghettiOs are a big oh no, not going there, not ever, I'd die of starvation first. Everyone has some smell that makes them want to launch. For my husband it's lemon cream pie. For me, it's SpaghettiOs.

The smell of roasted beef stew bones, on the other hand, just makes me happy.

When I was very small I remember mom bringing home brown bags of cold neck bones from work to make stew at home with what was left on them. She worked at a deli, and we lived in a little 2 room guest house tucked down a long paved driveway. I used to sit on the cement step in the open kitchen door gnawing on one of those bones while my dog waited impatiently, sure I was confused about who those bones were actually for, until I relented and handed over her share. To this day, when I roast and stew beef for broth I remember that cement step, the orange tree shading it, the dusty smell of our backyard, and the slurping and gnawing that both Sugar and I were doing on those stew bones. It was a little moment in time of complete security and contentment. If you want happy kids, get a dog. My dog taught me to share, she taught me patience, she taught me unconditional love, and she taught me never to leave a pet turtle where she could reach it. See, everything is about food.

Dealing with grief

It's been 2 years since my mother died, and I still have moments of intense grief. It's just the way it is. There are moments when I still break down crying, even though I have a strong religious faith and a deep core belief in the resurrection hope held out in the bible.

There are a lot of grief management books, websites, and support groups out there. Lots of acknowledgment that people need to grieve, that suffering loss is a healthy thing, that there are many stages of grief, that not feeling or showing grief is unnatural and creepy, yada yada.

Yeah, so?

So two weeks ago I saw a new doctor, and on the initial visit while explaining what types of work I have done that may have led to some of the health problems I now suffer I broke down in tears when telling him about my mother's illness and death. He then offered me the phone number to a counselor and told me I obviously had some unresolved issues I needed to deal with. He may be right, and I did take the number, but my appointment was also almost exactly on the anniversary of my mother's death... Why wouldn't I cry over her loss? While my religious faith makes her loss easier to bear, it is still a loss. Old age, illness, and death are ugly, why is it wrong or unacceptable to show grief over these things?

I think that society today is very good at labels, professed concern, and intellectualizing feelings, but very poor at actually having them or dealing with them in real time.

Just Don't Get Hurt

I always tell my kids 'just don't get hurt, cause I'm not taking you to the emergency room!'

Why would I say a thing like that?

Have you taken a kid to the ER in the last few years?

If you have, you know exactly what I'm talking about! "So, honey, what really happened?" being the operative sentence, asked repeatedly and at length, with accompanying suspicious looks at the family.

When my youngest was about 6 he and his older brother were wrestling around in the living room while I made dinner, when the little guy started crying pretty hard and holding his arm clutched to his chest. We quickly decided this was something that required care, so we drove him to the ER, where we did the obligatory 4-hour wait. He was x-rayed, and finally we were told he had a condition known as 'nurse-maid's elbow' which is usually caused by an adult yanking on an uncooperative young child's arm. It's more common in preschool children. You've seen what leads to it, it's that thing that makes you just shiver when you see impatient parents/caregivers haul a little child through midair, flailing and screaming down the aisles of the local grocery store. It causes a partial dislocation of the elbow. It was easily remedied, thank goodness, but it was overshadowed by the adversarial attitude of the hospital staff.

I applaud the caution that doctors and nurses take with children in the ER, don't get me wrong, but there's a point at which it becomes over the top after repeated questioning, suspicious looks, and just plain old 'attitude' on the part of young doctors on their first rotation through a hospital. Despite what these barely-out-of-school-themselves people believe, parents who don't watch their children every second are not neglectful or bad parents. Kids are people, they move fast, they do goofy things, and when they're boys they usually have a bad case of  'look ma! no hands!!' to freak their parents out with.

It's sad enough to live in a world when the first thought we have when we see evidence of an injury is that it must be someone else's fault, especially the person that should love that child the most, but please give us enough credit that we don't have to stop and think twice about taking our kids to the doctor when they need it.

Wow..

Looked at my last post, and realized I totally lost track of time, and a lot of my fun. Well, it's time to start again.

Recently I bought a new camera, a Nikon D5000, very intent on gaining knowledge of running this thing after a couple of years without a camera in my hands. My old Minolta Maxxum 7000s were getting creaky and temperamental, and since I'm often in a situation when I have to have the shot NOW, I stopped having fun and put them away. I gotta say, the Nikon is fun! When I first brought it home it made me very testy, as there were no simple dials and knobs, just menus, but I'm getting there. Anyway... the point is that I was so overwhelmed by doing it "right" that I lost fun. Come on, most of us have been unemployed entirely too long and life is getting serious. We're exploring options that we would never have thought of before, and that reflection of hopelessness that is surrounding our world can often affect our personalities and playtime. Everything just turns brown, and we forget to look up and see the beauties surrounding us in creation. Everything becomes about making money, spending money, should we spend money, justifying the spending of money... Yeah. You know.

So I brought home this toy because I have a nephew getting married in a few months, and I'm the family's designated photographer. First thing I did was head to the library for a stack of wedding and portraiture books. Then I started sweating. Ooooo, gotta do it right, gotta be perfect... and forgot the nice work I'd done before with the geriatric Maxxums. All I could do was find fault. It wasn't technically perfect, it wasn't amazing, but my victims--um, subjects--were happy with how I made them look. Then I found this awesome book. "Mastering Photographic Composition, Creativity, and Personal Style" by Alain Briot. I have to say it brought me back to myself. It explores photography as inspiration, creativity, vision. It's an artist's photography book. Love it. (BTW, that's not a paid link, don't freak out)

So now we're having fun. The kids are half way between sick of being photographed, and hunting me down to take shots of their latest exploit. Now I just have to mentally prepare myself to walk away from the call to perfection and just let some creativity flow. Between picking up socks, washing dishes, feeding the dogs.... ;)