Can you believe she was a Heroin addict for 15 years?

I just wanted to let you all know that Monica Sarli and I will be hosting a book signing at Changing Hands, 6428 S McClintock Dr Tempe, AZ 85283.   The signing starts at 7 pm Monday February 27th.

She’ll be signing and reading from her book (that I co-wrote), Men-ipulation, a memoir of addiction and recovery.  Of course if you have books of mine you’d like to have signed I’ll be happy to do so!

Here’s what other recovering addicts have said about this book:

“Your courage has given me the strength to share my fear/shame so that i can stop hiding from it.“–J.K. ”

… this was one of the best books I have read about addiction!“– S.Ann

But in all honesty I didn’t expect this calendar to do the trick…especially after I opened it and drowned in astrological/astronomical symbols.  Must be my dyscalculi.  I’m not dyslexic, which is letters; my eyes play tricks with numbers, hence dys-calculi, calculi meaning numbers.  4s are Rs to me.  Until I discovered Lotus123 (I’ve since moved onto Excell) I couldn’t add or subtract.

Anyway,  the biodynamic movement is about living into the wholeness of the natural world.  The idea of this calendar, not unlike the Farmer’s Almanac, is to chart forces that affect plants, only the biodynamic people are a lot more detailed than just moon phases, including in their calculations all the sun, moon, planets, constellations and the etheric, or force of nature.  Or maybe they mean that weird, wacky force that no one can explain: gravity.  Actually, the ideas espoused in the calendar remind me of quantum mechanics, the whole being more than the sum of its parts.

Neither here nor there at the moment.  I needed rigor and HERE IT IS! The calendar tells me when to do what.  And, it has a space beside each day where I can log what I’ve done….WOW!!!

Yesterday was a Leaf  day.  Leaf means anything that has leaves we eat, such as lettuce, spinach, herbs, asparagus (actually I guessed at that one, but it is the stem and unfurled leaves we eat).  So, I potted up spinach seeds like crazy, along with parsley, watercress, and specialty lettuce.  The 12 6-packs of asparagus–72 squares of soil with multiple plants in each square; not quite sure how I’m going to thin–I bought last week went into the ground.  I put them on the wild side of the ditch, which meant me sliding down the steep hillside into dirt so soft and black I just sighed.  Great stuff.  Leaf day also meant it was time to harvest the leaves we eat.  So I thinned the cold frame that plays host to my favorite Romaine varietal, Freckled Lettuce and the Pagano Winter Giant Spinach I planted in December.  I hadn’t tried them yet and was a little disappointed because although the leaves were beautiful the taste was far more mild than I expected.  Ed, on the other hand, loved it.

Today is a fruit day.  Actually all of today is a fruit day along with all of tomorrow and early Sunday.  Fruits are tomatoes, peppers, and anything else that turns a flower into something we eat.  I’ll be popping more tomato seeds into pots and putting them into the shower in the laundry room.  (Ed had a brilliant idea to turn that unused shower into an incubator.  He put a clamp light on the shower head and,  with the shower door closed, the enclosure maintains a nice 75 degree temperature!)

It's a lot bigger than it looks in the photo...off to buy straw!

As for the peas, fava beans,  peppers, eggplant, they’ll go down in the new lasagna garden, the one I have to build today!

Signing off so I can go buy straw now!

Not quite blooming. It's a good thing they don't taste good to javelina

It’s too early for Spring to start but tell that to the birds, plants, bugs and other critters who have decided otherwise.  I saw my first lady bug two weeks ago.  The bees are busy buzzing but what are they eating?  Okay, the peas in the greenhouse are blooming, but the door and/or walls aren’t always open for them.

I’m taking my cue from nature because it means getting tomatoes (okay, I’m cheating by starting the tomatoes a whole month before their time) and spinach in earlier than I expected…and NOT losing them to cold.    I hope.  Does this mean we’ll have a longer, hotter summer?  That’s not a pleasant thought so I’m not thinking about that either.  Instead, I’m building gardens.

I have plenty of seeds to put into the ground: spinach, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, parsley, arugula, mustard greens, beets and the list goes on.  What I’m out of is garden space in which to plant them.  So I’m converting the field between the barn and the orchard to various shapes and sizes of lasagna gardens.  Once they’re built and planted we’re going to have to protect them because the girls (who gave us nine eggs yesterday) want to run free like the wild chickens.  On their way to feral chickendom they’ve been pausing in these new gardens beds to do a little scratching and pecking.  They like them so much it took forever to chase them back into the coop this afternoon.

Here are the new gardens I'm laying out. Click on the picture to see a larger image.

Well, I chased all of them except Big Red.  She’s decided I’m her very best friend and likes it when I carry her.  “Whoop, woop, towoop, woop,” she coos to me as I tote her around under my arm.

Lordy, lordy.  What am I going to do when it’s time for chicken stew?

Here we are in Greece just before the orchard incident...

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone, but especially to my own precious Valentine. Thanks -for coming into my life, making me move 11 times in 13 years, letting me live in The Netherlands and Japan, getting me lost in a Greek olive orchard, running me down a hill in Brazil (at the bottom of which was a man with a gun), dragging me out to swim with the sharks in Tahiti, teaching me to pull sharks’ tails on the Great Barrier Reef, throwing me into a jungle river in Belize, and letting my son spit off the top of the Eiffel Tower (the wind blew it back into his face).

Thank you for introducing me to solar power, geo-thermal, and water wheels.  I hope you are as happy to learn about Permaculture, bio-dynamic farming and organic growing practices.  I’m so glad you love Mother Earth News as much as I do.

Thanks, too, for not getting too angry when I brought home the dog.  Really, she herded the chickens right back into the orchard the other day after she thought the kittens had tortured them long enough.  She even barked protectively at something the other day.  Surely that makes up for the dirt and mud she brings into the house after swimming in the ditch.

And thank you even more for turning around when I told you “If you want that place (meaning Green Acres) we need to turn around now and buy it today.”  If you hadn’t listened to me, we wouldn’t be living into our future on this almost farm and loving our life together more than we ever have.

Twenty-five amazing years and many more to come!  My life would be so empty without you.

]]> http://www.denisedomning.com/2012/02/valentines-day/feed/ 0 http://www.denisedomning.com/2012/02/curing-poison-ivy/ http://www.denisedomning.com/2012/02/curing-poison-ivy/#comments Sat, 11 Feb 2012 17:40:53 +0000 Denise http://www.denisedomning.com/?p=777 Continue reading →]]>

Western Poison Ivy

No, I did not take pictures.  At least not of my arms.  No one wants to see what that looked like.  Suffice it to say it was pretty darn ugly and may well leave my forearms scarred when all is said and done.

I thought I was being logical.  I was wearing two shirts, jeans, leather shoes and gloves.  The poison ivy was dormant so there were no leaves, just stems and roots.  Even Ed says he would have thought himself protected.

Who knew the irritating oil–urushiol (u-ROO-she-ol)– 1) wasn’t an oil but a resin (meaning it’s present in the stem and roots) and  2) could soak through two layers of fabric.  I’ve since learned, thanks to my nephew Lorne Lehr who’s a pharmacy student, that I could have purchased Ivy Block and used that to prevent the resin from reaching my skin in the first place.  Burning my clothing after the fact might also have been a good idea because, thinking nothing of having worked in the ivy patch for 2 hours and not yet reacting, I continued to wear everything for hours after the fact.

So there I was, three days later, with some really nasty looking burns on my arms and searching for the ultimate relief and cure for what ailed me.  It took weeks, but I finally narrowed it down to exactly what it takes to survive Poison Ivy.

First, if you have any of Dr. Bronner’s liquid olive oil soap on hand and you’re aware of the exposure I think you should try using it on the premise that new oil removes old oil.  That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it…  Now onto:

WHAT REALLY WORKED

What you need to survive poison ivy

Burt’s Bees Poison Ivy Soap…buy it as soon as you know you have poison ivy!  Better yet, buy it if you know you have any poison ivy in your area and there’s the remotest chance you might be exposed.  Or if you know you’re really affect by poison ivy.  It has Tea Tree oil in it (I’m allergic) but even at that it was the best thing I did for myself.  The second best thing I did for myself was:

HOMEOPATHICS

Homeopathics (the little blue bottles in the photo) work on the premise of the “hair of the dog that bit you”.  By taking a miniscule amount of poison ivy I was telling my immune system to go look for stuff just like that and get rid of it.  By the way, the nice thing about homeopathics is you can take them as often as ever ten minutes to get relief.  The worst thing that happens if you overdose on homeopathics is you get the symptom you’re trying to alleviate.  I once accidentally dumped a full bottle (about an ounce) of a homeopathic for joint pain  onto my leg.  Every joint in my body stiffened up for about half an hour then it was gone.  Can you say the same for any prescription drug you might take?

Boiron Rhus Toxicodendron which is (I’m not making this up) Poison Ivy.

Boiron  Apis Mellifica or bee sting.  I had a lot of swelling and taking this made a huge difference.

Traumeel.  I used this like a lotion, spreading it over every inch of affected skin.  It’s both analegsic, pain killing (by the way DO NOT  take acetominophen, better known by it’s trademarked name Tylenol.  Stuff goes into your liver and lodges there forever, thereby lowering your body’s ability to get rid of the very thing you’re treating with it.) and anti-inflammatory, swelling reducer.  It stings a little going on but gave me consistent 2-3 hours of itch and pain relief.

Dr. Christopher’s Original Black  This is stuff I keep on hand all the time.  It’s a drawing ointment, meaning it’ll pull the poison right out of you.  I used it on my inner elbows when they got so swollen I couldn’t bend my arms.  I didn’t use it too long because Ed hates the smell.  I think it smells like bacon, so I didn’t mind.

OTHER REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF

Sea Salt, Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar (with the mother), Epsom Salts.  

I bathed several times a day for the first week, nightly the following weeks, using either Sea Salt (about a quarter of one of those round boxes) and about a cup of the Bragg’s Vinegar ( I figured the Mother (bacteria) in the vinegar was helping to eat away the dead skin), or Epsom Salts by themselves (itself?).

Gauze, lots of gauze.  Rather than try to stop the oozing, I kept my arms covered with gauze and changed it often.  It felt better air dried.

Witch Hazel. I didn’t get to this until well near the end of my recovery, but I wished I’d thought of it earlier.  The witch hazel is soothing while the alcohol is drying.

Aloe Vera Sunburn Gel.  I didn’t use this a lot, but it did really seem to take away the burning.  I wished I’d had a more natural version of this, like maybe just the aloe vera juice itself.  That would probably have worked quite nicely.

THINGS I TRIED AND DISCARDED

Caladryl.  Caladryl went on like a layer of plastic.  True, I didn’t ooze while it was on my skin but it felt horrible.

Golden Seal/Bentonite Clay Poultice  This was something several people recommended.  The bentonite clay is supposed to draw while the golden seal is supposed to be good for rashes and such.  I kept the poultice on for half an hour and it felt so awful I never went back to it.  After I got the Poison Ivy soap I didn’t need it anyway.

Comfrey  Trying this was worth it just because the co-op store sale assistant described wet Comfrey powder as “mucilaginous”.  Oh great.  Snot.  And boy was it ever SNOT!  My skin crawled the whole time I wore it, which was for about half an hour.  It actually made my skin feel much better, but the experience was not worth repeating.  Besides…after I got the Poison Ivy soap…did I say that already?

So there you go.  For anyone out there reading this because you’ve got third degree urushiol burns somewhere on your body, my heart goes out to you.  Get the soap and get into a salt water bath ASAP!  Good luck!

PS…DON’T EVER BURN YOUR POISON IVY!  If you think it’s bad on the surface, you’ll hate it on the inside because the urushiol become airborne in the fire and you BREATHE it in.  So, NO BURNING!

My first hole is in place!

“It’s time to plant trees.” That’s what Ed said yesterday, surprising me because I had just that moment been thinking we needed some trees for our lower field. We both agreed immediately on Cottonwood trees. Why such huge trees for a field we’re going to use for veggie planting? Because the soil’s dead in that field; it’s been compacted by horses staked and standing on it for years. Not only will the tree roots break up the soil but its leaves will keep the ground cool (preventing the annual summer bake-off) and release moisture into the air that will drop to the ground to keep it damp. I’ll be adding more smaller trees and shrubs as time goes on for the same reason. I dug the first hole yesterday–I LOVE the tractor for digging holes! (otherwise it’s too noisy)–and there wasn’t so much as a worm to be seen. I’ll be adding plenty of horse manure, chicken straw and leaves before the Cottonwood’s roots touch the soil.

So you can’t imagine my surprise when I asked Judah my granddaughter (her mother is my stepdaughter from my second marriage) what she wanted for Christmas.  “A sewing machine,” she said with as much excitement as her brother says “I want a Star Wars General Grievous Starfighter because it’s the only one I don’t have.”  (Okay, he didn’t say that this year, because this year he’s into Ninjago.)

“Really?”  I mean I didn’t even know kids these days knew what sewing machines were much less wanted one of their own.  “What do you want to make?”  Me, because I’m the oldest of six, expected her to say clothes.  When I was growing up the family clothing allowance was pretty darn slim and our sewing  machine got a workout with us older girls turning out shirts and skirts and dresses.

“Pillows,” Judah replies.  I probably blinked a little at that, but then I realized how perfect this was.  I could get her a sewing machine, then go visit Bakersfield for a few days to make a couple of pillows.  Sewing machine plus a few lessons equals One Great Christmas gift for both of us.

The Janome 2206 on Judah's desk

The only problem was the sewing machine.  What to get?  Frankly, I was thinking about a nice 1960s Singer with the easy dials and no digital interface like I’ve seen at the local fabric store.  Programming the machine to run isn’t the same as sewing.  Instead, I found a Janome 2206, which prides itself on being “a great machine for the beginning or returning sewist.”  We had one beginning and one returning, so what could be better?  Well the price, for one.  It was under $150.00!

The sewing machine made it there for Christmas.  I didn’t arrive until the 28th.  And unfortunately, Judah was a little under the weather so we didn’t hit the fabric store until the next day.  For the first time in years, I sat down at the little wooden desk every fabric store has and opened up a Simplicity pattern book.  It was a blast into my past.  These days my “wish books” are seed catalogs but from the time I was twelve until my mid-thirties, it was pattern books.  I’d stare at those layouts, the models dressed in beautifully sewn garments made with fabrics that didn’t always find a home in my local fabric store.  But I could dream, walking up and down the aisle, my fingers rippling across linen, broadcloth, calico, satin and silk.

the beginnings for pillows

We went straight to the Home Decor section and the first pattern offered was perfect.  It included on “Tootsie Roll” pillow, one square pillow, a pillow case and, should she decide to take a stab at it, a bed spread.  We did look at the others, but that first one,  Simplicity 1960, was just what the seamstress ordered.

Then it was time to do the dreaming.  We started down the cotton aisles, which now are organized for quilters.  That makes dreaming a lot easier because you can see what coordinates with what.  But, Judah is a girl after her Oma’s own heart, because she took a left at the remnants.

“These are cheaper,” she told me.  She apparently has a friend who sews and who has already informed her of the treasures available in the remnant bin.  We pawed through it for a while, but couldn’t find anything we loved.  Then we saw the sale cotton.  There was a pretty pink fabric printed with butterflies outlined in glittering silver.  Judah combined it with bright turquoise and hot pink fringe and, after adding a seam ripper, some batting and white thread, we were good to go.

While Amberly, her mom, went off the the gym (she’s been dedicated to working out since beginning her training for the 3 day 60 mile breast cancer walk which she completed back in November), we laid out our fabric and cut out two pillows.  Judah had chosen to make the Tootsie Roll (okay, I know that’s not what it’s called but it ought to be) and the small rectangular pillow. As usual, I’d bought more fabric than we needed just in case and after the pillows were cut out I was thinking there’d be enough for a third.

Judah threading her machine

We pinned the first seams and she sat down at the machine.  I can’t even remember the first time I sat at a sewing machine it was so long ago.  We threaded, rethreaded, filled the bobbin, installed the bobbin, took it out and did it again.  With everything in place, she pushed the fabric under the foot and pressed on the pedal.  WHIRRRRRRRRrrrrRRRRRrrrrrRRRRRrrrrrRRRRRrrrrr.   It’s no easier controlling a sewing machine pedal than it is the accelerator of a car.

The rectangular pillow was first because it was so dang simple.  She was thrilled when it was turned and stuffed.  Now it was time for inset fabric.  With each seam we got closer to the quiet steady whirrrrrr that the machine is supposed to make.  She got more comfortable with holding the fabric straight as it went under the foot.  Corners were made.  We learned how to baste and how to back up when you sew too far.  We even sewed right over the bumpy fringe with no trouble.

The only mistake made was made by yours truly.  Dang, I knew she had that turned upside down when she ran it through the hem stitch.  That’s when I got to tell her that the seam ripper is your best friend and that I’ve never made a project that didn’t have mistakes in it.  The key is to recognize the mistake, remove it or work around it and KEEP GOING.  No quitters allowed.

She was having a great time.  Two pillows were finished and now she’s eying the leftover fabric.  “Do you want to make one more?” I ask.  “I think we have enough to make a pillow case for your sleeping pillow if you want.”

The scissors and pins came back out.  This pillow case had to be pieced, and learning how to make a sheet of fabric from bits and pieces is a priceless lesson to anyone who wants to be creative.  Before long we had our pieces joined and the pillow case half made.  Then the creeping crud overtook her.  One minute she was sewing; the next she was promising she could keep her eyes open to watch while I finished.  It really wasn’t much more than a seam and the hem.  I told her to go to bed and she dozed while I put in the last stitches.

Here she is with her three pillows

But for all intents and purposes, she had made all three projects with just my supervision.

That’s my girl!