Joan's Journal

This is the first lecture I've ever created as a specific request. Craig sent me one of the links that started me investigating this issue and then urged me to work up a lesson on it and present it ASAP. Once I dug into it, I realized he was entirely right to do so. It's a short one, only four pages, but the lecture I had planned for Monday's class isn't a long one; I can tack this on at the end.

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Bisphenol A and Phthalates
Radical Nutrition Fall 2009

This is a short lesson I'm adding to the main one, even though it's off topic, because there's some news in the field, just this month. It's about unstable plastics, plastics that ooze some problematical chemical into any gas or liquid they're touching, whether that's air, water, chicken soup or some human bodily fluid. ( Read more... )

This was the vegetarianism lecture for Radical Nutrition, the class I'm teaching at the North Star homeschoolers' resource center. ignited_spark expressed interest in it, so I'm posting it.
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Vegetarianism
Radical Nutrition Class 6


We're going to talk mainly about the health issues because those are the difficult ones. It's kind of ironic. The political and economic and environmental effects of what you eat are invisible when you're sitting down to a meal, but they're straightforward and simple compared to the health effects. The health effects for you individually are right there with you wherever you are, but because the human body is still so poorly understood, knowing the effects of what you eat takes more than reading about it. You have to experiment on your personal body. You have to try things, or try leaving things out, and see what they do for you or to you. I'm going to talk about some of the major health-related issues around the choice to eat or not eat meat. Maybe some of it will be relevant to you.( Read more... )

Tuesday I found myself awake around 4;45 a.m. so I decided to get online. No can do. I signed onto the Wifi but couldn't get any pages. So I went downstairs and reset the router. Still no access. Craig comes down and reveals that he has not been to bed yet, that he was online at about 3:30 when his access went away and furthermore so did our landline phone service. Since we get them both from Comcast, it seemed likely that the problem was on their end. ( Read more... )

No, actually the yeasts made it. I just provided the right environment.

It started a week ago when I put butternut squash in to bake and forgot it. It wasn't burned (well, only slightly) but it was very well done, some of it caramelized. What to do with this stuff? Online, looking for recipes, I kept running into Pumpkin Ale. I've had store-bought pumpkin ale and liked it, so I decided that this would be my first attempt at brewing something like beer. (I've been reading a book called Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers which inspired me with how easy and uncomplicated some of them are, and gave me enough confidence to go forward with this.) ( Read more... )

Many years ago when I was living in Ithaca, NY, I developed a wheat-free vegan brownie recipe. The basic idea was this: the ideal brownie texture is dense and gooey. Wheat flour isn't naturally dense and gooey. To get it that way, the cook has to load it down with eggs and milk products. Rye, however, is naturally dense and gooey, as you know if you've ever tried to substitute it for wheat in a recipe. In Ithaca there was this coarse rye flour available that responded very well to a combination of carob or cocoa powder, maple syrup, mashed banana, salt, baking powder and whatever oil happened to be handy. (I was much less clued in about healthy eating then.) It turned out well enough that some of those who tasted it thought I should make it for sale.

When I moved out of Ithaca, I no longer had any place to get the coarse rye flour and the recipe totally didn't work with the fine-ground rye flour sold in New England, so the recipe laid fallow. Then over the last few months I have got to thinking: what if I sprouted whole rye berries and ground them up in the food processor? ( Read more... )

LJ addresses are being used to spread viruses by email. I just got a couple myself. One purports to be from DHL, the package delivery company. The text is:

Hello!

The courier company was not able to deliver your parcel by your address.
Cause: Error in shipping address.
You may pickup the parcel at our post office personaly!

Please attention!
The shipping label is attached to this e-mail. Print this label to get this package at our post office.

Thank you for attention. DHL Delivery Services.

The virus is in the "shipping label".

The other claims to be from Microsoft. The text is:

Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721)
Brief Description
Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest level of security and stability.
Instructions

* To install Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721) please visit Microsoft Update Center:
[I removed the actual link in case someone's finger slips.]
Quick Details

* File Name: officexp-KB910721-FullFile-ENU.exe
* Version: 1.5
* Date Published: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:22:11 +0100
* Language: English
* File Size: 100 KB

System Requirements

* Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000; Windows 98; Windows ME; Windows NT; Windows Server 2003; Windows XP; Windows Vista

* This update applies to the following product: Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express

MS and DHL both have warnings about these viri on their websites. They don't need to be notified. If you get one, just tag it "spam" and toss it.

Can it be?

It is.

Snow.

Y'all can go out in your fur coats now.

Thing I forgot about having shingles or any virus: the body will divert energy from other things to deal with it. I went for a walk, about a mile each way, level ground, the kind of thing I ordinarily do with no problem. About halfway back I had to stop and rest. I never have to stop and rest, not if I can go at my own pace, which I could this time. I just don't have what I usually have.

Lysine. More lysine.

It's a beautiful weekend morning, the height of Fall Color Season here in scenic Western Massachusetts, and I have the shingles.

For those of you who have never had the misfortune, shingles is what happens when the chicken pox virus, having done its classic performance on the stage of your body in elementary school, decides to go for an encore. Having less power in the adult body, it can only manage to infect one line of nerve branching out from somewhere on your spine, usually on the lower torso.

The first symptom is pain. In this case, it came on Friday night during the Orange Dance, forcing me to stop dancing and go home when I'd only been there an hour. I thought it was a digestive problem, a reaction to something I'd eaten. It took another 24 hours, eating only familiar and trustworthy foods, to conclude that this is something else entirely. By last night I had it figured out. Took a couple of doses of Vitamin B12 and it looks like the rash, which would have showed up by now, isn't going to come out.

Now I just have to have patience. Shingles is what they call self-limiting. It does no long term damage and never goes over into anything more serious. It causes discomfort and sometimes ugliness for a while and then it goes away. Maybe it'll respond to an anti-inflamatory. Maybe not. Gonna go do some research now.

Been hearing for years about a tree called the autumn olive. Foliage sort of looks like that of olive trees but it's a completely unrelated species. First I heard of them was that they are nitrogen-fixers and so can restore depleted soils. Second thing I heard was that they are very vigorous growers, so much so that they can crowd out other species, and in some areas have come to be regarded as a noxious weed. Nobody ever told me that they were a food tree.

Then Craig brought home a bag of the fruit, which he picked from a friend's tree. ( Read more... )