Cross Quarters

Samhain
(usually pronounced sa-wyn) at the end of October / beginning of
November, is the ancient Celtic New Year celebration. 
Astronomically it is one of four cross-quarter days, halfway between
solstices and equinoxes.

It follows the harvest festival and marks the dead-time, as the Earth
goes to sleep for winter.  This is the time when the veil between
worlds becomes thinnest and the dead walk the land.  People
disguise themselves to avoid being recognized by the spirits of those
they offended in life, perhaps even of those whose lives they took.

We carve pumpkins (or turnips) into frightening gargoyle faces and set them alight in our windows to protect our homes.

In some orders of Wicca, this cross-quarter is the Feast of the Dragon.

I’m not terribly thrilled at the ways in which Halloween has evolved in
my culture.  I very much prefer the Latin American celebrations on
Los Dias de los Muertes, the Days of the Dead, when people gather in
graveyards, decorate with flowers and lights, and eat skulls made of
sugar and candy skeletons.  Of course, I’d need to make mine
sugar-free.

Anniversary


Fifteen

…my
Pumpkin.
                                  


It’s so captivating.

You can be kinda scary.

You drive me batty.

Whether down to earth…

life with you is a cabaret,

and a fine kettle of fish.

SURPRISE!

The traditional fifteenth anniversary gift is crystal, so….

    

Happy anniversary, Greyfox.

**animations courtesy of

Well, Winky Jack’s body part pie is all gone.  When I went to bed
last night, I stuck the pan with the last piece into the oven, hoping
that if Doug didn’t see it he would forget about it and there’d be one
last slice left for me.  I had it for breakfast this
morning.  Then I started looking at Jack, thinking about how many
pies are there in what’s left of him. 

One problem:  I’m down to my last can of evaporated goat milk…
there are several quarts of whole goat milk in the fridge, and they
would do, but it wouldn’t be so creamy-rich.  It has taken me
three years to develop a good gluten-free pumpkin pie
recipe.  Previous attempts were adequately edible.  They
worked, but
this one SANG!  The downside to it is now Doug no longer thinks
that he
doesn’t like pumpkin pie, and there’s less of it for me.

There is a small clue to how food-obsessed I am in the fact that I’m
considering demolishing the jack o’lantern on the day before Halloween,
to turn it into pie.  Yes, the pie made from the scraps carved
from the pumpkin was very good, but even as I fantasize about making
another one RIGHT NOW, I know how absurd that is.  It can wait
until after Halloween.  Meanwhile I have a basket full of winter
squash:  delicata, uchiki kuri, blue kuri, and sweet mama, all of
which taste better than pumpkin.  The kuris are so sweet and
creamy that my pie craving can be satisfied just by baking one, without
the mess and fuss of making pastry.

In Sandcastles‘s
comment on the pie entry, she mentioned the expense of having “exotic”
foods shipped to Sweden.  It has to be more expensive than
shipping them to Alaska, but this is pretty costly, too.  When I
order my “alternative” flours from Bobs Red Mill,
the shipping charges amount to more than the cost of the flour, but by
buying in 25-pound bags I save a little, compared to what I would pay
in local stores here for the smaller bags.

The comment from maggie_mcfrenzie
also mentioned costs, saying that she has had expensive failures as she
tries to cook gluten-free.  That has been a problem for me,
too.  Even with my successes, I’m usually the only one in the
family who will eat these things I bake from bean flours and
sorghum.  My Scots-descended parents trained me not to waste food,
and in my youth working in restaurants taught me the rule of the
kitchen:  the cook eats her own mistakes.  Choking down some
of these things isn’t pleasant, but I try to console myself that the
food is at least nutritious and non-toxic for me.

I have had food sensitivities all my life.  Doctors recommended
that I not be given cow’s milk as a baby, and we fortunately had some
relatives who lived on farms and kept goats.  After my father
died, we moved away from there and I started drinking cow’s milk
because goat milk, when available at all, was very expensive.  It
still is expensive.  A quart of goat milk for me costs more than a
gallon of cow’s milk for Doug and Greyfox.  I rationalize the
expense by using it sparingly and thinking of the nutrition. 
Without adequate nutrition, I’m more ill, more of a burden on others,
less able to care for myself.

After my father’s death, my mother and I had to economize on many
things just to get by.  We ate a lot of pasta.  Beans would
have been just as cheap and more nutritious, but they took longer to
cook.  When we came home after work and school, the faster we
could prepare a meal, the better.  That was the 1950s, pre-crock
pots and at the peak of the quick-to-fix mix craze.  Spaghetti
dinners from a box, and mac and cheese, were staples for us. 
Often on a weekend, one of us would cook up a big enough batch of beans
to last a few days.

When I first learned of my sensitivity to wheat, Doug was small, I was
divorced, and we were eating cheap just as Mama and I had done
thirty-some years earlier, but I was working at home so the quick-fix
wasn’t important.  We ate so many beans then that he still doesn’t
like them.  But we didn’t stop using wheat products.  Maybe
if the kid had been the one with the wheat allergy, I’d have found a
way to get by without it.  I  had to get really ill before I
took the need seriously.

Almost without fail, when I tell someone that I have had to eliminate
wheat from my diet, I get incredulous looks.  It’s hard to
imagine:  no cheap spaghetti or macaroni, no bargain bread or
pastry, reading labels on soups and such to be sure the sauces and
gravies aren’t thickened with wheat.  I had already gotten used to
reading labels when I kicked the refined sugar habit, so that has
become routine.

The really frustrating part has been the scarcity and the relative
expense of foods made without wheat, sugar, nightshade family foods
(potato, tomato, pepper) or dairy products.  One of my favorite
foods, pizza, is made up entirely of things I’m not supposed to
eat.  I almost ate myself to death before I gave up on that one.

I tried macaroni made from corn.  Yeccchh!  It didn’t taste
bad, but the texture and mouth feel are all wrong.  Okay, no more
pasta for me.  That was rough, but then I discovered that I like
the flavor of sorghum-flour breads.  I was paying almost $4.00 for
a little 22 oz. bag of it, rationalizing the relative expense with the
very effective argument that cheap food would kill me, when both of the
Wasilla stores where I’d been buying it ran out.  After a few
months, during which I got by with rice flour, corn and bean flours, I
started asking about it.  In one store they said they had
discontinued it, and in the other one, the clerk told me she’d never
seen or heard of it.

I searched the web and found a family farm and milling operation in
Kansas where I could buy sorghum flour very cheaply in large lots, but
they wouldn’t ship by US Postal Service and the UPS air shipping (no
ground service to Alaska) was absurdly expensive.  By default,
that left Bob’s Red Mill.  Spending around $50 to $70 to get 25
lbs. of sorghum or garbanzo and fava bean flour shipped up here seemed
like a lot until I calculated what I had been paying at the
supermarket, and recalled how often they had been out of those two
flours that I like best.  I went for it.

One of the supermarkets in Wasilla has rice flour cheap in their bulk
foods department, and by buying Quaker masa harina (corn flour) in ten
pound bags, I now have everything I need for my gluten-free baking
(except, of course for the xanthan gum, which costs about $13.00 for a
half pound… good thing it doesn’t take much to hold a pie shell or
muffin together).  The rice, corn and sorghum flours all have a
gritty texture that is fine for bread and pancakes, but not so good in
pastry. 

As I was decanting the new bag of bean flour into a big old 20-pound
restaurant size coffee can for storage, I spilled some.  As I
cleaned up my mess, I noticed that it has a silky texture as smooth as
white pastry flour.  That was why I tried making yesterday’s pie
shell exclusively from bean flour and it was such a success. 
Another plus, as far as I’m concerned, is that in the raw state bean
pastry doesn’t taste very good.  After baking, it’s yummy, but I’m
never going to be tempted to eat big gobs of unbaked pie crust dough
again.  When I baked with wheat flour, sometimes I’d eat as much
of it raw as I baked.

P.S.  It’s snowing again here.  I still don’t have my winter
tires on the car.  If I can’t get that job done by the local
mechanic tomorrow, I think I’ll reschedule my Tuesday blood work for
after I’ve got the studded snow tires installed.  I didn’t enjoy
the skidding around last week.

gluten-free, sugar-free, no-cow’s-milk

Body Part Pie

I was not prepared to wait until after
halloween for the traditional jack o’lantern pie, so as I was carving
Winky Jack today, I carefully saved what I cut out of his generous
mouth, his one big sorta-roundish eye, the other more-or-less winky
eye, and both of the nostrils that turned out perhaps bigger than
nostrils should be — heck, I wanted enough punkin body parts for pie,
didn’t I? 

As he turned
out, if you use
your imagination, either he has little beady eyes and a mismatched pair
of ears, or he’s got a wink and a wide-open nose.  He isn’t
pretty, but he’s pretty scary, which is traditionally what jack
o’lanterns are spozed to be, eh?  Besides, the Body Part Pie
recipe won’t work with one of those fine-lined, pretty, artistic
new-fangled pumpkin carvings — not enough bulk to the dismembered bits.

After I microwaved Jack’s dismembered body parts in a covered bowl for
ten minutes and removed the rind, I mashed them with a potato
masher.  They could also be pureed in a blender or hacked up in a
food processor.  I like my pumpkin pie sorta lumpy.  After
the cooking and mashing was done, I determined that I had 2 cups of
pumpkin, enough for one pie.

I made more than enough pastry for one crust, for two reasons:  I
like a generous fluted edge on my crust so the pie won’t boil over, and
working with gluten-free flours, it is difficult to roll pastry thin
without tearing it.  Excuse me a moment, I’m starting to salivate here.  I’m gonna go and get another slice of coffee and a cup of fresh pie.

Mmmmmm.  That’s what I said when I tasted that first slice while
it was still a little warm, and I’ll say it again, but don’t let Doug
hear me.  When I realized my error the first time, I corrected
myself quickly, said, “I mean, yuuukk!  That’s awful pie. 
I’m sure you don’t want any of it.”    Since Doug had
his first slice of it, we have both been assuring each other that it is
indeed really nasty pie and we will each sacrifice him/herself to save
the other from having to eat it.  It’s over half gone, now.

PREHEAT OVEN TO 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pastry Recipe:

Whisk together:

Cut into flour mixture with pastry blender or two knives, or mash into it with a fork:

When the largest bits of butter are pea-sized or smaller, mix in with a fork:

This, of course, is rolled flat on a floured surface and gently fit into a pie pan, with the edge turned up and fluted.

This made more pastry than I needed for the pie, so I rolled the excess
dough flat, cut it into little rounds with a cookie cutter, brushed the
tops with a glaze made from Splenda and goat milk, baked them about ten
minutes at 425 degrees F, and we had some weird bean cookies while we
waited for the pie to bake and cool.

Filling Recipe:

Lightly beat:

Add to eggs, mixing after each addition:

(optionally,
you can also add 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves if you like cloves, or you
can substitute 2 or 3 teaspoons of Chinese five spice for the other
spices, if you prefer)

Pour the filling mixture into the unbaked pie shell and bake in the
preheated 425-degree oven for 15 minutes.  Lower oven temperature
to 350 degrees – LEAVE THE PIE IN THERE! – and bake for another 45
minutes.  When done, a clean knife inserted in the center should
come out clean.

Tell everyone that body part pie with bean crust is nasty stuff, and
keep it all for yourself — do NOT foolishly go “Mmmmm…” over your
first bite of it, as I did, or you will have to share.

HALLOWEEN IS COMING!

It’s time for spooky stuff….

like scary jack o’lanterns

and GHOSTS.

Try to be brave.

There will be ugly old witches,

ghosts and more ghosts,

…and even uglier witches.

Mean little kids
in frightening costumes…

will be begging for treats,

and threatening to trick you.

Think you can handle it?

to you

and a thank you to

for the animations.

a taste of what it would be like to have a life

If I’d had a choice, I would have stayed home today.  It is
snowing and the roads are slick.  The snow we got last week
disappeared after a couple of days of rain.  Then the skies
cleared and temperatures were down in the single digits Fahrenheit for
a few days.  Today’s snow is piling up fast on the frozen ground.

I had been running low on meds, the asthma pills and inhalers that keep
me breathing.  A trip to the neighborhood health clinic was
unavoidable, and I’d had this appointment for a while.  I don’t
like going there.  With my haywire immune system, I try to avoid
crowds, hospitals, and other likely sources of infection.  I’m not
germ-phobic, just cautious.

Besides that, I don’t enjoy the interactions with people who treat me
as if I don’t know more about my own body than they do.  Through
web searches and email newsletters, I work at keeping up with the
latest advances in rheumatology, neurobioelectrochemistry, and other
fields of specialization related to my condition or just of interest to
me.  The P.A.s at the clinic were trained in general medicine and
don’t have time to update or supplement the education they received a
decade or more ago.  They’re too busy seeing patients.  They
have their routines and their procedures and a patient who talks back
and **horrors** even sometimes rejects their conclusions and refuses
their prescriptions is so bizarre they can’t believe I’m real.

It’s not just the clinic, though.  I don’t go out anywhere more
often than I must, really.  My volunteer job was eliminated over a
month ago, ending that routine of town trips every two weeks. 
I’ve been sticking close to home since then.

The idea of just going somewhere to get away from here and break the
monotony doesn’t have any appeal for me any more.  Years ago I did
that frequently, but the “chronic fatigue” part of this syndrome I live
with has put an end to it.  A walk around the neighborhood today
would mean tomorrow would be a near-total loss, spent just on
recovering from today’s walk.  A drive to town and a day of
shopping and mild activity can require as much as three days of
recovery time.  I know I will pay tomorrow for what I did today,
so while I was out there I made the most of it.

As soon as I got off the rough gravel side road onto the asphalt this
morning, my wheels lost traction.  It was slicker than snot on a
doorknob.  I kept reminding myself to slow down gradually before I
reached the turnoff onto the Talkeetna Spur Road so I wouldn’t go
skidding past the intersection.  No worries:  just before I
got to Goose Creek, I came up behind an oversize rig with pilot
vehicles fore and aft, hauling a medium-sized building along at 35
MPH.  Behind it were a double-trailer rig and a tour bus.

Tour bus??  This time of year??  Must be either cut-rate
off-season American tourists, or more likely it’s Japanese aurora
hunters.  If it really was the latter, they’re cursing this
overcast and snow.  Our little convoy collected a few cars behind
me as we proceeded at a stately pace, and my turn onto the spur road
was uneventful.

I was spared the ordeal of listening to all the “you poor thing”
blather from my usual provider at the clinic.  She has had twins
and is taking a couple of years off.  The downside of that is that
I have to break in a new one.  She just happened to be the medical
director of the clinic.

We had a spirited discussion of inflammation, NSAIDs, type1
cyclooxygenase inhibitors, leaky-gut syndrome, the proton pump, and
related matters.  During the course of it, three times I told her
that I wanted some relatively safe NSAIDs (less side-effects than
ibuprofen) to lessen the inflammation from my ME, and all three times
she apparently misunderstood and came back with some bullshit about
“pain.”  I told her that I have a lot of everyday discomfort, that
I have an effective mental technique for dealing with it, but that I
haven’t found an equivalent drug-free means to relieve the fever, and
the fever makes the sensorimotor deficits much worse.  Finally, I
simplified it for her:  NSAIDs = less stumbling and fumbling +
less brain fog.

I don’t think I ever got through to her.  I could see that my
vocabulary impressed her, but she had a mental block against accepting
any of this stuff I’ve been learning online.  She patiently
explained her rationale for wanting me to take proton pump inhibitors
along with the COX inhibitors, and I finally gave up trying to tell her
anything different.  I just firmly refused the prescription for
proton pump inhibitors.  Just to make sure I’d gotten it right,
when I got home I went online and found several recent medical journal
articles that blew her argument full of holes.

In the aftermath of our little discussion, she took some time to read
my file.  Apparently my previous provider had made some notes
about my peculiar preferences.  She said, “I notice from your file
that you prefer not to have mammograms and pap smears.”  Then she
asked me about my family history and some other stuff that’s in the
file.  I guess she felt uncomfortable letting me sit there quietly
while she read.  She said, “I suppose you prefer not to get a flu
shot.”  I confirmed her supposition. 

I surprised her, though, when she hesitantly suggested some blood work
to check up on my kidney and thyroid function.   I told her
that giving a little blood was no problem, and I was willing to fast
for eight hours beforehand, but I wouldn’t guarantee that in such a
hypoglycemic state I wouldn’t go postal on them.  She didn’t seem
to see the humor in that.  I wonder how we’ll all do next Tuesday
morning when I go up there without breakfast to let them take my blood.

I stopped at the hardware store on the way back from the clinic and
bought a tarp for the woodpile.  The pile we got from Tim last
spring has had two more cords added to it this week and another one
will be here tomorrow.  The old tarps won’t cover all of it now.

I went to Sunshine Restaurant and ordered an enchilada platter for
lunch.  With a generous appetizer of chips and salsa, I filled up
on less than half of the food I was served and brought the rest of it
home for later.  At the cafe, I saw a few people I knew and
briefly felt like a social animal for a change.

Since it was just a short side-trip on my way home, I stopped at
Charley’s cabin for a visit.  I skidded past his road and had to
go the long way around.  While he was telling me about his
inability to contact any of his family on the Texas gulf coast since
the hurricanes, another neighbor, Cindy, stopped in.  While the
three of us were visiting, another neighbor, Donny, came in long enough
to determine that none of us was willing or able to do what he
wanted.  Then he continued on his quest and Charley, Cindy and I
caught each other up on current local events for a while.

When I got home, Doug had just gotten up and the fire in the woodstove
was almost out.  It hasn’t yet recovered and it’s a little chilly
in here.  Doug has gone out to split more wood and bring it
in.  I’m going to go blow on the fire and try to encourage some
BTUs.  Seeya.

SICK

I’m trying to understand my own response to what I have just seen and
heard.  Trying to understand… the reasons aren’t clear yet.

Last weekend I revisited my own experience of torture. 
I went carefully over the text I’d written three years ago, cleaned up
some grammar, syntax and punctuation, expanded on a few points and
clarified some facts.  I made no effort not to engage with the
memories.  I suppressed no emotions.  I was undeniably
affected, but my response to those memories was mild compared to how I
felt as I listened on NPR this evening as John McChesney described on
All Things Considered, the torture death of Manadel al-Jamadi at Abu
Ghraib Prison two years ago.

As sick as I felt, still at the end of the story when I heard that there was “more” at npr.org,
I went to the website.  Up to that point, I had felt saddened and
bewildered at the brutality I heard the MPs describe, and at the tale
of the man’s attempts to tell his captors and tormentors that he was
dying, that he needed help, and at the callousness of the CIA agents
who steadily increased the pressure on him after he lost consciouness
until he was obviously dead.

My
outrage didn’t set in until I saw the pictures.  The one of Sgt.
Charles Graner’s smirking thumbs-up over the iced-down corpse was
disgusting enough, but it was this shot that tore my heart out. 
That’s the man’s widow and son, holding up that picture of that
fresh-faced young American GI grinning over the corpse of their husband
and father. 

I relate to the pain in the little boy’s eyes, and I empathize with the
offended incredulity I see on his mother face.  For the life of
me, I cannot relate to the mindless grinning girl in that photo. 
What could she be thinking?

Maybe it’s because my torture was relatively brief and I survived, that
I feel so much more outrage and offense at what was done to Manadel
al-Jamadi.  I don’t know.  I have been taught that feelings
aren’t rational, so I’m probably wasting my time trying to make sense
of any of this.

The abuse that led up to Jamadi’s death was horrendous and
shameful.  That his corpse was desecrated and (as is evident in
the photo above) made fun of is at least equally shameful.  How
will we ever make peace, much less make friends, in the Middle East,
this way?

As if that were not quite outrageous enough, there’s this other story:

Five Layers

I was awakened by something
weird this morning at 3:33.  I’m not complaining because the same
weird thing that woke me gave me an answer to the question I fell
asleep contemplating last night.  I’m working on a new FAQ for KaiOaty. 
It’s about Light Work.  I’m thinking of titling it, “So you wanna
be a Light Worker….”  I know what needs to be said there, but
I’ve been having a really hard time putting it into words.  Maybe
I need to get over the idea that a FAQ must be longer than just two
words.  Really, “Wake up!” should do it, I think.  I’m
kidding, of course.  Anyone for whom such a simple answer would
make sufficient sense wouldn’t be asking the question anyway. 
Never mind, I’ll work it all out.

*giggle*  As I was typing that,
“Never mind…” I was vocalizing and my voice sounded like Marvin the
Paranoid Android from the old BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide series.  Do
you talk to yourself at the keyboard?

When I rolled out of bed today at 3:33, I slipped into my wooly fleecy
sheepskin slippers.  Before long, I realized that my feet were
cold.  I checked the thermometer:  6.6 F.  Above zero
outside, but cold enough, and below fifty in the house.  I went
back to my closet and dug out some winter footgear.  Now I’m
wearing my insulated panda sox, inside my pink and white polar fleece
booties with the traction-dotted soles, inside the green polar fleece
liners inside the down-filled blue booties with non-slip soles. 
Counting the down as a layer, that’s at least five layers, and even
more on the bottom where a couple of extra soles are stuck on the
outside and a pair of felt innersoles are tucked inside.

My feet are warm now, but there’s a draft whistling around my bare
ankles.  I’ll have to take off all the shoes to put on some long
johns and jeans.  Unnnngg.  No point in putting it off… be
right back.

…there!  That didn’t take as long as I anticipated.  I
opted out of the long johns and jeans and went for an old pair of polar
fleece pants that I could slip on over the footwear.  They used to
fit me when I was about 80 pounds heavier, and the elastic cuffs fit
down over the tops of my booties..  In these pants over the
sweatpants I slept in last night, and with the bulky shirts-over-shirts
look that I’m sporting today, from the neck down nobody would ever know
I’d lost all that weight.  But I’m warm. (and I’ve got a skinny
face)

 I have been feeding wood into the stove and encouraging the fire and I have it up to 57 degrees in here now.

for the sky freaks

Recently on an unrelated message board, one of the regular posters went
off-topic to post some pics he had just captured of some clouds over
the rooftops of his neighborhood, lit by the pastel colors of
sunrise.  He identified himself as a “weather freak.”  I
reciprocated with one of my favorite sunrise shots (taken by Doug),

 
…and one I captured, of a sunset.  I identified myself as a “sky freak.”

This started a thread in which several other people identified
themselves as weather or sky freaks.  Some of them posted photos
and a few of them, who couldn’t quite figure out how to do that,
verbally described their favorite sunrises or sunsets.

Of course, there is more to the sky than a sunrise and more to sky or
space weather than just clouds.  This aurora photo that Evan Steinhauser
captured last night in the Matanuska Valley is on today’s home page at adn.com.

I can’t do just one of these, so I browsed through the recent aurora gallery and found this one by Bob Hallinan

and this one by Daryl Pederson:

Not yet satisfied, I bopped over to http://spaceweather.com/ and found this one from Norway:

As a bonus, I found this neat animation of Mars retrograde.

God, how I love living on this planet!