It snowed here yesterday.  Not enough to stay and pile up, just
enough flakes falling to get my attention.  It’s common to get our
first snowfall in mid-October, and in several of the years since
Greyfox has been here, including his first winter, first snow has
fallen on his birthday.

Other than the snow, about the only event worthy of note here yesterday
was Bobo the kitten falling into the slop bucket.  For those of
you whose homes don’t happen to have slop buckets, that’s something
lots of homes without running water and indoor plumbing have. 
It’s the place where we drain pasta, pour the excess juice off canned
vegies, etc.  For people who keep hogs, “slop” includes things
such as carrot tops and potato peelings.  In this household,
compost is a separate category.  The contents of our slop bucket
yesterday consisted mainly of the liquid off Doug’s ramen
noodles.  Bobo was unhurt.  We toweled him off.  His fur
was a little spiky afterward, but otherwise there don’t seem to be any
lasting effects.

One of the news stories coming out of Kashmir after the earthquake has
resonated with many Alaskans.  Over there, survivors trapped by a
collapsed highrise building couldn’t be rescued because there were no
hydraulic lifts nor concrete-cutting equipment to deal with the debris,
even though it is a historically earthquake-prone area, just as Alaska
is.  The head of their government had recently bought a
bullet-proof limousine. 

Over here, during recent winters the funds allocated for snow removal
on our roads have been inadequate.  Response to recent oil spills
and a big marine soybean spill have also been slow and/or inadequate,
in many people’s view.  We have no reason to suppose that our
government is any better prepared to deal with an earthquake in a
populated area.  We have been lucky that the big quakes of the
last forty years have done their damage in remote places.  Our
governor overrode widespread opposition recently to purchase a jet
airplane that can’t land and take off from any but a few of the biggest
airports in the state.  To get it, he sold a perfectly functional
plane with better operational flexibility.

Greyfox was hoarse and reporting discomfort and swollen lymph nodes
when he called last night.  I have been dragging around here with
more than the usual amount of dyspnea and sensorimotor
dysfunction.  Doug is largely absent, absorbed in his character
for the latest of his fanfic writing tournaments.  Koji has become
less aggressive in defending his food and water dishes from the
kittens, and Hilary has become less aggressive in defending her kittens
from Koji.  Basically, it’s situation normal around here.

Congratulations, Greyfox!

In honor of the fifty-eighth anniversary of your birth,

 $845.76 has been deposited  to our joint account

 in your name. **hehee**

Happy Birthday, Darlin’

Explaining the Inexplicable
(formerly broken link is now fixed)
Some of yesterday’s comments expressed bafflement or confusion about
11:11.  I share some of that confusion, but much less of it than I
experienced just a short time ago.  I have been learning rapidly
in recent days, finding connections between things I once thought to be
separate ideas, separating truth from delusion, and acquiring new words
in which to communicate.  Unfortunately, most of those words don’t
mean much to most people, or they have different meanings to different
people and so are only useful for communicating with those whose
lexicon is similar to mine.

This morning, I decided to try and expand on what I’ve already
written.  For help, I googled “11:11″ without any other modifying
terms.  It returned 35.5 million results.  In just the first
page of
them, meaning those that were most frequently accessed, most were links
to sites related to CSICOP or other such “skeptical”
organizations and individuals.  Adding “-csicop” to the search
terms
eliminated almost five million of the results.  Taking Solara out
of the mix (“-solara”) didn’t significantly change the number of
results, which surprised me.

Putting “csicop” back in (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of
Claims for the Paranormal [or something like that] the Astounding
Candy’s, I mean, Amazing Randi’s group) and eliminating only Solara, again returned “about 30,700,000 results,” same as with Solara and without Kandi,
er, Randy.  From this, I suppose it is safe to infer that
virtually every site (at least when rounding off to hundreds of
thousands) that mentions Solara also mentions hoaxbuster Randi. 
That comes as no great surprise to me, now that I think about it.

The most problematic aspect of a web search for a number string is that
the results returned include things like bus schedules, Biblical
chapter-and-verse, and dates.  By adding minus terms to eliminate
extraneous results one-by-one up to Google’s 32-term limit, I got the
number of results down to below seven million.  (That search is here)<<<That link should work now. 
I had hoped to come up with a search that would “explain” 11:11 to the
uninitiated curious without a lot of extraneous “noise”, but that
effort didn’t succeed.  This, too, upon reflection, makes
sense.  Reality itself cannot be explained by any one person
without a lot of idiosyncratic BS and extraneous noise creeping
in. 

The search did bring to my attention some websites I hadn’t known
about.  However, every site I found that related specifically to
the “11:11 phenomena” basically approached it from something close to Solara’s
“Starborne memory” angle, from George Barnard’s “Urantian Midwayer
channeling” angle, or from the Amazing Randi’s debunking
viewpoint.  My Spirit Guides have steered me into the “channeling”
model of reality.  They say, in contradistinction to what Solara
claims, that just because this information is revealed to us within our
minds and not through our physical senses, it does not mean that it all
originates within our own memories.  They are eager enough to
communicate with us that they are willing to overlook our
misunderstandings regarding their nature and origins.

Although Solara does have a loyal following that appears to be larger
than George’s, it is nowhere near as large as Randi’s following. 
These numbers make a great deal of sense to me.  The vocabulary of
the Urantia Book is only available to those who have read the book, and
it is a big, thick book containing a lot of new words that occur
nowhere else in English literature.  Thus, Solara’s message is
more accessible
to those who
are receptive to such messages, and she makes it attractive with
colorful decorations and strokes to her followers egos.  In our
culture, however, those
who believe in mainstream religions and those who believe in the dogmas
of Science are likely to reject both Solara and the Urantia Book.

Solara lives in a non-ordinary reality.  It took me several hours
reading time on the websites by and about her to grasp what she is
saying and to sort the gems of Cosmic wisdom in her dogmas from the
colorful window-dressing and her money-making activities.  I had a
lot of help from my Spirit Guides in that effort (Thanks, Guys!) 
I realized that my earlier judgements about Solara’s work stemmed from
the baby-with-the-bathwater syndrome.  I was so repelled by what I
saw as silly and unnecessary ritual and ceremony, spurious
“explanations”, and blatantly venal profiteering, that I was blinded to
the gems of wisdom.  I’m glad to say that I’m transcending that
bullshit. (Thanks, again, Guys.)

The Guys tell me that rituals are unimportant to them and to the entire
Celestial Hierarchy, but are mostly harmless for those who feel
comfortable performing them.  I get a clear impression from Spirit
that the human tendency to ritualize various practices is viewed from
on high as part of the same continuum of human behavior as
obsessive-compulsive disorder.  The entire continuum, they say,
involves a mixture of Love and Fear, an effort to control reality and
to impose a local and personal level of order on the spontaneous
universe.  They would prefer that we simply observe and become one
with the natural Divine order, but they don’t condemn us for our human
shortcomings.  Regarding profiteering, they consider it a
regrettable indicator of human fearful selfishness.  They point
out, however, that it in no way negates the actual value of a certain
teaching if the teacher chooses to put a high price on
it.  Price and value are totally independent of each other. 

These “high hookups” that I have been calling “my Guys” are referred to
by others as angels, midway creatures, Celestials, faeries, entities,
ghosts, shamanic power animals, Space Brothers, and a host of other
names.  Solara doesn’t acknowledge their existence, and says that
she doesn’t “channel” the revelations on which she bases her business,
but “remembers” them.  Some people, programmed with fear-born
superstitions, also call the “sources” demons, devils, etc.  The
channeled materials and Solara’s “remembered” information agree in
several important ways.   They emphasize love and oneness,
and they say that the “11:11″ phenomena are a call, a signal, a
“prompt” to get the attention of  certain humans, to bring us
together for the benefit of the planet, and by extension, of the
Universe.  If you don’t see elevens everywhere, no problem. 
If you do, welcome to the Work.

The Guys themselves recommend that when in doubt we look within and listen to the “truth bells”
for that ring of truth (as opposed to relying on the logical
correspondence to a pre-existing conceptual framework).  No
learning can occur for one who believes he knows it all already. 
To transcend ignorance and misinformation, one must be willing to
abandon preconceptions.  Only the empty cup is capable of being
filled.

P.S.

Yesterday, I started out to write about this and about exopolitics,
remote viewing and some other stuff.  A phone call yesterday
distracted me before I got where I was headed with that blog. 
Today, I had so much more to say about 11:11 that again I never got
into that other stuff.  Maybe I’ll get to it later, or maybe you
could google for that info yourself or surf away on the links I left
yesterday.  Just remember, much of reality is incredible but true,
while even more of it is totally believable bullshit.  Choose a
reality where you feel at home.

11:11, exopolitics, remote viewing, and all that jazz

My husband has referred to me as a “professional weird person.” 
He oughta know.  I know that by some standard definitions, I’m
nuts.  I diagnosed my own obsessive/compulsive disorder after
I had transcended it.  By that, I mean that in childhood and early
adulthood I exhibited many signs of OCD but nobody else ever pointed
them out to me.  Those behaviors fell away while I was in my
thirties, and in my fifties my study of psychology revealed to me that
my earlier patterns of behavior had fit that diagnostic niche.  I
then had a label for it, and have subsequently come to understand the
trauma and environmental stressors that precipitated it, as well as
some of the brain chemistry involved.

Likewise with my Type II Bipolar Disorder.  Through adolescence
and up to menopause I was frequently depressed and on rare occasions
manic.   Early on, I recognized the depression and learned to
self-medicate for it with amphetamines.  Then I learned NOT to
self-medicate with amphetamines — baaaad stuff!  It was only
relatively late that I learned to recognize my own mania.  That
seems natural enough.  Being manic can be fun.  While one is
in mania, it is difficult to think of it as pathological.  It is only
later, while trying to pick up the pieces left in the wake of one’s
manic episodes, that one might gain some perspective on it.  Here,
too, I now have a perspective on the brain chemistry involved, a
perspective that lies somewhere between that of a lay person and that
of a neurobioelectrochemist.

Those are the flavors of madness that I own and acknowledge.  Then
there are the dubious and/or spurious labels that have been applied to
me by psychometric technicians whose clever little test questions often
require me to choose one option out of two or more, none of which
really fits.  These self-deluded, self-important, self-appointed
experts have said that I am borderline paranoiac (nonsense–I can tell who
is out to get me and who isn’t) with schizotypal characteristics. 
That latter bit, “schizotypal,” is applied to me because I admit that I
have been labeled “psychic” by people who don’t believe that I have any
“normal” means for knowing what I know.  The only response I hear
from the voices in my head, to that “diagnosis”, is laughter.

The foregoing is preface to the following.  Some of you know that
I hardly ever just jump into a topic without providing
background.  This time, it is intended to filter out some of the
inevitable comments.  Nobody needs to drop any propz here just to
tell me that I’m nuts.  In my opinion the self-styled “skeptics”,
who choose to disbelieve everything that lies outside their tiny little
reality bubbles, are the crazy ones.  I have chosen not to be a
True Believer in anything.  I will accept as a working hypothesis
anything that appears to work.  “Effectiveness is the measure of
truth.” (the seventh Huna Principle) 
My only prejudice is against those who prejudge.  In the mood I’m
in right now (pre-emptive defensiveness), I’m likely to delete, and
block the authors of, any and all scoffing comments I receive on this
entry.  Now, to get to the point of all this….

It started five weeks ago.  I was doing web searches for certain
passages from the Urantia Book I wanted to send to someone I was
counseling.  I don’t recall the chronology of events here… in my
mind it all seems to have come simultaneously.  I found the
passages I wanted; I found references to some names I recognized (Vern
Grimsley and Emma “Christy” Christensen); I found references to a
“Teaching Mission” and “Correcting Time” that came as news to me; I
found sites where the Teaching Mission and Correcting Time were
associated with 11:11; and my Spirit Guide spoke to me and said I need
to get back into doing more channeling.

The 11:11 references triggered some negative associations.  While
Greyfox and I were publishing the Shaman Papers, we had received for
review some books by Solara about 11:11.  Greyfox judged them to
be total airy-fairy, woo-woo New Age metafizzling nonsense (he was at
the time a staunch believer in the Archaic Revival, dragging his feet
over being forced into the Aquarian Age).  Even though I had
noticed inordinately numerous instances of 11:11 showing up on my clock
and elsewhere, I wasn’t favorably impressed by Solara’s interpretation
of the phenomena.  I don’t think we ever reviewed her books in the newsletter, both
of us having been unable to figuratively choke down one in its entirety.

I knew Vern Grimsley to have been unpopular with the founders and
leaders of a Urantia Book study group I had attended in Anchorage in
the 1970s.  In contravention of the Book’s strictures against
priesthoods, gurus, and “pastors” interpreting spiritual texts and
interceding between Spirit and individual mortals, he had set himself
up as head guru of the Family of God.  That was all I knew about
him.

I had met Christy, the last surviving member of the Urantia Book
Contact Commission, the people responsible for channeling and
publishing those materials.  She and another blue-haired old lady
from that circle had traveled up here and visited our study group
during a retreat we held in ’79 or thenabouts.  She struck me as a
sweet but rather vacuous old bird, so some of the things revealed by my
subsequent web searches came as quite a surprise.  That old bird
had a lot of clout.

That was just the start of a big intellectual, psychic and spiritual
adventure, from which I have taken a little time off now and then to
blog here.  I just wasn’t ready, I suppose, to integrate this
blogging part of my life and that new branch of the reality tunnel that
had just opened up for me.  From time to time my life does get
somewhat compartmentalized, but in the long run Integrity R Us,
folks.  Welcome to my world, v.2005.10.

Solara still doesn’t make total sense to me, despite having spent a few
hours reading her stuff online.  The version of the 11:11
phenomena that does make sense to me is here. 
The difficulty I have making sense of Solara, and the ease with which I
joined the 11:11progress group, could be a simple matter of
language.  Having read the Urantia Book and gained a high degree
of respect for it, I had the vocabulary already and was predisposed to
think in those terms. 

The U Book and this group speak of Midwayers, Angels and
Celestials.  I have seen parallels between these ideas and those
of others who speak of their “sources” in terms of faeries, dragons,
UFOs, vibrations, planetary energies and ancient gods.  Each of
those groups to some extent rejects the messages of the others, but I
am more inclined to look for similarities and find
correspondences.  However, regardless of the vocabularies used by
others and how closely their ideas parallel mine, my vocabulary and my
mind remain firmly and comfortably in the camp of the Angels.

This does not keep me from exploring concepts expressed in a different
lexicon.  I am determined to transcend as many language barriers
as I can.  For example, there’s the UFO model of reality
exemplified by Exopolitics:

BTW, as has been pointed out several times on the 1111angels board,
since calendrical confusions and revisions have “rearranged” time so
that the birth of Jesus Christ actually occurred in what we now call
the year 7BC, this year is really 2012.  Since the Mayans probably
hadn’t been influenced by “our” calendrical reforms, and since
presumably whatever beings were speaking to Terence McKenna when he was
inspired to create the Timewave Zero software knew about those
discrepancies, any worries that the world will end this December might
be premature.

I do go on and on, until my readers’ eyes glaze over, and on beyond,
don’t I?  I shall probably go on and on and on some more. 
Stay tuned… or not, your choice.  Choose to believe that you
choose your own beliefs.  But reality??? Now that’s another matter.

Florida biologist says, “Be afraid, be very afraid.”

Nobody knows how many Burmese pythons, descendants of pets released
into the wild, live in the Everglades.  At least 150 of them have
been captured in the past two years.  Recently, a 13 -foot Burmese
python burst after swallowing a six-foot alligator. 

The introduced snakes compete with predator species and threaten many
already endangered species of reptiles, otters, squirrels, woodstorks
and sparrows.  Joe Wasilewski, the biologist I quoted above said
they can even be a threat to unwary humans, especially children.

I quoted him out of context, however.  What he actually said is, “This is not a, ‘Be afraid, be very afraid,’ situation.”

Boston Globe

Giant squid photographed alive in the wild for the first time.

A Japanese research team used sperm whales to guide them to a location
frequented by giant squid.  Squid beaks had been found in the
stomachs of many sperm whales, indicating that they are a primary
predator of the giant squid. 

The film made by the researchers answers questions and resolves
theoretical controversies regarding these animals which are among the
largest of invertebrates and who have the largest eyes of any
animals.  They are seen to be active predators, with great
strength and quick movement.

National Geographic

Prosthetic dog testicle developer wins.
Gregg
Miller of Oak Grove, MO, won this year’s IG Nobel prize for
medicine, for his invention of prosthetic testicles for neutered
dogs.  He mortgaged his house and maxed out his credit cards to
pay for mass-producing this humanitarian thingamabob.

Other winners this year include:

PHYSICS: Since 1927, researchers at the University of Queensland in
Australia have been tracking a glob of congealed black tar as it drips
through a funnel — at a rate of one drop every nine years.

PEACE: Two researchers at Newcastle University in England monitored the
brain activity of locusts as they watched clips from the movie “Star
Wars.”

CHEMISTRY: An experiment at the University of Minnesota
was designed to prove whether people can swim faster or slower in syrup
than in water.

LITERATURE:  The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, “for creating and
then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus
introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters – General
Sani Abacha, Mrs Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq.”

FLUID DYNAMICS:  Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International
University Bremen, Germany, and the University of Oulu, Finland; and
Jozsef Gal of Lorond Eotvos University in Hungary, for “Pressures
Produced When Penguins Pooh – Calculations on Avian Defaecation,” an
actual study published in 2003 in the journal Polar Biology.

ECONOMICS:  Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides.

NUTRITION: Yoshihiro Nakamatsu, for photographing and documenting every meal he has eaten for 34 years.

Associated Press

You Passed the US Citizenship Test

Congratulations – you got 10 out of 10 correct!

Could You Pass the US Citizenship Test?

I’m a gorilla.

    You are known within your circle of friends as a
rock solid, steadfast caretaker. You protect those you care about, no
questions asked. Perhaps some see you as a little rough around the
edges, but if you’d just stop baring your teeth, people will see
straight through to your heart of pure gold.
    Still, you don’t have to abandon your in-your-face
attitude, just lighten up a little and give people the chance to get to
know you. Because when you make friends, they’re often friends for
life.
    Interestingly enough, you might find that the people
who are most drawn to you are those most unlike you, people who are
excessively quiet and self-conscious. But that may be because they’re
secretly attracted to the way you can comfort and care for people. You
might not really attract other gorillas until it’s time to settle down.
Otherwise, there’s too much opportunity for you to butt heads with
someone as stubborn as you can be.
    Many of your gorilla brothers in the wild are
especially fastidious around their nests. For that reason, we could
understand if you’re the sort to take your shoes off at the front door.
Just be sure to warn visitors if this is the case. No telling what kind
of temper tantrum could flare up if they don’t wipe down the sink when
they’re done with it.

What kind of “monkey” are you?

a little bit of personal stuff, and an ambitious proposal…

This week I am happier than ever about having had my volunteer job
eliminated.  Although it was only one day every two weeks, those
trips into town to drive the van from the rehab center to the NA
meetings took a lot of energy.  There was always expense beyond
just the gasoline for travel, and when I got back home it took days to
recover from the effects of the fatigue.  Right now the colder
weather and mold spores in the air are enough to make me about as sick
as I can handle.

I told Greyfox that I was so sick I might as well have gone to town; I
wasn’t getting any work done anyway.  He pointed out quite
reasonably that I’d probably be much sicker if I had gone to
town.  He blogged yesterday about the debilitating aftereffects of
his recent trip up here for a dental appointment.  Hard on him, it
helped me out.  He brought groceries and that means I can postpone
going to town even longer.  So, I have a reprieve, a little
respite.  I appreciate it.  Now, if some of the myalgias and
allergy symptoms will ease off, I can enjoy it.

I can’t stop thinking about Pombo and his accomplices who want to sell
of 23% of our national park lands to oil and gas developers.  Go
ahead and drain every drop of petroleum from the planet, burn it and
pollute the atmosphere, increase the greenhouse effect, never mind the
long-term damage and destruction.  Just stay focused on this
fiscal year, the bottom line, and your own comfort and convenience.
  I understand the profit motive of those in the oil
industry.  What I don’t understand is how easily they gain the
compliance and complicity of so many others.  Good PR, I guess.

And speaking of PR, I’ve been thinking about that plan to sell naming
rights for some of our national parks.  Specifically, I’ve been
thinking about Mount Rushmore National Memorial.  I have a grand
plan that would not only bring in ad revenues to the Park Service, but
would actually enhance and improve the vacation experiences of many US
citizens and foreign tourists who visit South Dakota.  It might,
if done right, even take some of the sting out of the defacement of the
sacred Black Hills for the natives there.

As far as I’m concerned, they can change the name of Mount Rushmore to
that of the highest bidder.  Neither Exxon Mobil, nor Jack
Daniels, nor Betty Crocker, nor JP Morgan Chase would be any more
objectionable to me than the name of the New York lawyer who is now
honored there.  But I’d take it farther than that.

I would install a system that could drop huge banners like window
shades over the faces of those dead white men, either one or two at a
time or all four at once, and use them to display advertising. 
How, you might ask, would that enhance the experience for those many
visitors who pose before the sculpted mountain for a photo op?

Well, first of all, the majority of those who go there can’t recognize
and name more than two of those faces before they’ve read the
interpretive signs or listened to the rangers’ talks.  Many leave
there as ignorant as when they arrived.  For those who do know and
care who is honored there, some of those dead white men are deemed more
worthy of honor than others.

White supremacists would surely prefer being photographed in front of
an ad banner that blocked the entire middle half of the stone
quartet.  Thomas Jefferson, after all, sired a long and growing
line of descent with his Negro slave Sally Hemmings, and Abraham
Lincoln… well, we know what he did, don’t we?

Teddy Roosevelt can’t be too popular with animal rights activists,
vegans, and those who still suffer for his encroachments in Central
America.  I suppose there are even a few people who don’t like
George Washington, just on principle, as the father of this misbegotten
and misguided government.

More than just the revenue stream (ongoing and capable of being raised
to compensate for inflation), which would be far better than a simple
one-time fee for naming the place, the mechanism of the banner display
would provide jobs for its construction and maintenance.  South
Dakota could use those jobs.  It would even be possible to arrange
the banners in such a way that once or twice a day those ugly dead
white men could be covered by a display simulating the mountain as it
looked before Gutzon Borglum took his jackhammers and dynamite to
it.  I’d pose for a picture in front of that one.

OH, GRRRRrrrrr….

Gaea’s enemies abound.  California Republican Congressman Richard
Pombo, flushed with victory over weakening the Endangered Species Act,
wants to sell off 23% of our National Parks land to oil and gas
companies.  He wants to sell sixteen parks, an Alaskan preserve,
and expand California offshore oil drilling.  His other plan, to
sell naming rights to other parts of the park system, doesn’t sound so
bad.  Verizon National Park doesn’t have such high associations as
Zion, but turning Everglades into Kraft National Park or Capitol Reef
to Capital One would be better than turning them into oil fields.

Kurt Vonnegut was right when he wrote Cold Turkey.

 

That Time of Year Again

It’s just chilly outside, not frigid yet, but I felt it when I zipped
out there with the camera this morning to catch the sunrise.  I
was in pajamas and slippers, of course, had no time to get dressed or
I’d have lost the light.  As it was, by the time I was across the
road and past a few trees, some of the color had faded and only the
bottoms of a few clouds were glowing.

I was hurrying toward the muskeg, watching the sky through my camera’s
viewfinder, and looked down just in time to avoid stepping into the
water.  I haven’t been out there for a while and hadn’t realized
that the muskeg is flooded again.  In August, I walked across it
on the trail that has been packed by 4-wheel ATVs.  Then, the
ground was moist but seemed solid enough until I stood still and began
to sink into the surface.  Now, there is standing water right up
to the tree line on the most direct path from here.  Until it freezes, I won’t be
able to get a clear unobstructed shot of a sunrise without getting my
feet wet.

Papa Pilgrim arrested

Alaska Railroad Special Agent John C. Waychoff arrested Robert Sunstar
“Papa Pilgrim” Hale this afternoon on railroad property near Eagle
River.  He is being held in the Mat-Su Pretrial Facility in Palmer
on $50,000 bail for 30 counts of incest and sexual assault committed on
his daughter over a seven year period.  Hale had been a fugitive
for two weeks.

Kittens Abroad

Until
yesterday, adopted Albion had been the only one of Hilary’s kittens who
followed her outside when she went.  Yesterday, when Doug opened
the door to let Mom out, everyone went out, except for Nemo (Auntie
Orange, whose mother, Greyfox’s cat Frankie, is also Albion’s
mother).  Nemo just took a look out the door as usual and turned
back into the house.  She might at least have gone out to baby-sit a bit, and help Hilary ride herd on the kits.

Doug
followed the cats out and then ducked back in the house to ask me if I
wanted to come take some pictures of the kittens.  I handed him
the camera, instead.  All these shots are his.

At
first, Hilary was upset about all the kittens being outside, just as
she had been upset when they all started creeping out of the nest and
onto Doug’s bed, then again when they began tumbling off his bed and
wandering all over the house, and still even now whenever Koji pays too
much attention to any of her little ones. 

She is the nervous type and very protective.  In the shot above,
I can imagine her saying, “Where are you going?  Get back in the
house where you belong!  Don’t you know there are eagles out here,
and foxes and lynx?!

In the foreground at right are “Al and Al,” Alice and Albion, who seem to
have a strong bond with each other.  Cecil is above them, and
Beau, or Bobo, or Bobobo-bo Bobo-bo, is in the upper right corner.

Granny Mousebreath was either asleep in the house or off somewhere
hunting, but Muffin was out there with the kittens.  She doesn’t
appreciate the interest that Bobo and the others show in her tail.

There are five cats in the picture below.  Do you see Muffin?

Everything had to be examined and investigated.

Hilary did her best to keep an eye on her kits.

But there was no way she was going to keep up with this wild bunch.

Gluten-Free Pancake and Muffin Mix

Three events coincided recently, and the result was a big tub of
pancake mix.  First, I had been getting tired of eating muffins
all the time.  Greyfox found a big old (maybe older than I am) octagonal
griddle that works on a single burner on the stovetop, where my old
griddle is oblong and requires two burners.  Also, cooler weather
had arrived.  It wasn’t cold enough to warrant constantly stoking
the woodstove and having a roaring fire, but just cool enough that a
fire in the evening was nice, and the house was uncomfortably cool in
the morning until solar energy took over.  Getting the griddle hot
and making pancakes is enough in such times to get us through a chilly
morning.

In warmer weather, a batch of muffins in the freezer to be microwaved
when needed saves time and energy, but last month I was in the mood for
pancakes.  At no time does it ever make sense to me to mix up
small batches of batter, with all the attendant fuss.  I combined
enough flour, Splenda, salt, baking powder and other dry ingredients to
fill a large yogurt tub and that mix lasted me for a few weeks. 
When it ran out, I was ready for muffins again, but this time when I
started combining ingredients, I decided to mix up more dry ingredients
than I needed for muffins and keep the surplus for pancake mix.

The following measurements are approximate — I seldom really measure
for this type of baking.  My usual method is by guess and by golly.

5 cups sorghum flour
3-4 cups masa harina de maiz (corn flour)
2 cups garbanzo bean flour
1 cup tapioca flour (tapioca starch)
4 cups nonfat dry milk
1 cup granular Splenda (that measures cup-for-cup like sugar)
2 Tbsp. salt
3 Tbsp. double-acting baking powder
2 Tbsp. baking soda
2 Tbsp. xanthan gum (to make the gluten free products hold together)
1 Tbsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. Chinese five spice

These ingredients need to be whisked together thoroughly and kept in a
tightly-closed container until used.  It doesn’t hurt to freeze
them; they keep better that way.  This time when I was done making
the mix, I had two yogurt tubs full.  No problem and no regrets
about that.  The resulting products have been good, so I have a
reliable source for more of the same for weeks to come.

For muffins, I combined:

6 large beaten eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3 cups plain yogurt (I prefer Mountain High Original Style, made with whole milk because low-fat yogurt is too glycemic for me.)
1 1/2 cups cold water
1-2 tsp. vanilla extract (to taste)

Mix 4 cups of the pancake mix with 1 cup almond meal, then stir in the
liquid ingredients and any nuts or dried fruit you care to add (this
time I added raisins).  Bake at 425 degrees F, for 12-15 minutes
or until browned.  This makes about 3 dozen muffins using 1/2 cup
batter each.

For pancakes, I put what looks to be a sufficient amount of mix in a
bowl, make a well in the center and pour in enough water to make a
batter that’s not too thick and not too runny.  Experienced cooks
can do this by sight; others probably should rely on the suggested
proportions in a recipe or on a Bisquick box.  Then I add an egg
or two, depending on how many pancakes I’m making (more if you’re
cooking for a crowd), a proportional amount of vegetable oil, and a
tablespoon or so of bottled lemon juice.  The lemon juice provides
the acid to activate the baking soda for leavening, which is provided
by the yogurt in the muffin recipe.  It tastes good and has
vitamin C, too.

Whip the liquid ingredients in the “well” a few strokes to break the
egg yolks and combine them, then stir around the edges and combine the
dry ingredients, taking care not to overbeat.  It’s okay if there
are small lumps of flour.  Be sure the griddle is hot before you
spoon the batter onto it, and wait until some of the bubbles in the
center of each cake break and stay open before you flip it.  Enjoy.