Life, Love, Long Hair, Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth, and other mysteries

All this and more, from a semi-Serbian, slightly sane, former editor for physicians and surgeons, who is the mother of seven kids.


Sunday 28 October 2012

Dryer Lint

Those who know me well will know I'm not a fan of Halloween.  My reasons go back to the ancient history of it and how it doesn't mesh with my Biblical beliefs, but when I was a kid, I didn't know about any of that, and I did some silly things.

But have you ever heard of something THIS silly?

Without mentioning any names, I will tell you the story of some girls.

They were two sisters in their early teens.  One was cleaning out the lint screen in the dryer on October 31, when she got the twisted idea to give it to the soon-to-arrive trick-or-treaters.

Her equally twisted older sister laughed maniacally, grabbed some brown paper lunch bags, and started shoving wads of greyish blue dryer lint into them, closing the tops with a few staples.

I heard that the older sister even drew the middle finger on one of the bags.

Apparently, one of the girls filled another bag with an old holey pair of orange socks.

Who DOES this kind of thing?

They saved the "special" bags for certain people, such as the boy from across the road, who was a few years younger than the girls but had always been mean to them.

The girls, with such kind faces, bestowed a bag of dryer lint upon the unsuspecting visitor.

"Heyyyyyy, thanks!" enthused the boy from across the road as he beamed.

"You're welcome," I can hear the girls say as they stuffed their giggles beneath innocent faces.

I wonder what happened to the boy who opened that bag of lint.  Did he even remember who had given it to him?  Did the lemony smell of laundry soap get masked in his senses and confuse him into thinking it was some ghoulish sort of cotton candy?  Did he taste of it and suddenly develop a craving for other types of dryer lint and become a dryer lint addict?

Maybe that boy went on to roam the streets, reaching into dryer exhaust pipes in residential areas, looking for his next fix.  Maybe he wound up in a treatment centre and is still digging through his past to figure out the roots of his addiction.

Maybe, in one of his recovery groups, he ran into another person with a strange addiction - to holey orange socks!

Maybe I've just got a silly imagination.

I like to put a photo or a video in my blog entries, but couldn't think of anything for this one.  So, I asked one of my teenaged daughters, in a serious voice, "Hey, do you know any songs that might be appropriate to put in a blog entry about dryer lint?"

She burst out laughing and said, "Yyyyeah, I'll Youtube that right now, Mom!"

But she DID find something, and here it is:


So, tell me... have your eyes glazed over from reading this, or did you laugh, even a little?  :)


Like my writing?  More can be found in the archives to the right, and now - NEW! - the most popular recent entries are showing up over there for your clicking/reading pleasure.


Monday 8 October 2012

Quit Eating Sugar - Your Body Will Thank You

I used to catch every cold or sniffle that went around.  I'd get it worse than anyone else in the family and for a longer duration.  Sometimes it would turn into bronchitis, which would stick around for months at a time.

Two things made a positive difference in the above problems:

1.  I went to a homeopath.  They cost a bit more than a medical doctor (here in BC, we have medical coverage so it doesn't cost anything to go to a family doctor, whereas it's $40 to see my homeopath - BUT she spends at least an hour per session with her clients, and if the remedy she gives doesn't solve the problem(s) after a few days or weeks, she will give a different one).

The last straw came when I had a killer sore throat that would not respond to three different antibiotics prescribed by doctors.  It was so bad, I woke in the morning barely able to swallow, and I went to the emergency room twice during those few weeks.

I told my homeopath about the sore throat, and she gave me a remedy that cleared it up in one day.  That was four years ago and it has never returned, and neither have the bronchitis bouts, but I still went through too many colds for my tastes.  (I'd prefer none!)

2.  I went to my naturopathic doctor and he told me to quit eating sugar.  This was only part of the diet he recommended, to address a number of issues, but the omission of sugar has been, I believe, key to my no longer catching every bug that enters my proximity - and I've got seven kids, so there's plenty of opportunity for one or another to bring a virus home, not to mention from my trips to the grocery store etc.

A few times, I had sugar when a virus was going around, and next thing I knew, I was sniffling and fending off a sore throat by snorting and gargling sea-salt water.

It took a few weeks to break the sugar habit that had been in my life for 40+ years, but now, I don't crave sugar at all.  I use stevia to sweeten my green tea and my oatmeal.  Sometimes I will make a stevia-sweetened treat, such as my chocolate almond bark, or I'll add a bit of stevia to a fruit/vegetable smoothie.

I do have the unrefined sugars intrinsic to fruit and vegetables, but those come with the rest of the package required for them to work gracefully within the body to provide their intended health benefits.

I still get the odd cold, but it's nothing like the 6-10 per year I was getting for the first 40 years of my life.

I also no longer eat wheat, potatoes, corn, or dairy products.  Like with sugar, I have had them a few times since quitting them in the fall of 2009, and with almost every instance, something negative happened to my body or my mind, reminding me that what I had consumed was not for the best.

Here are some things I do eat:

chicken
turkey
fish
beef
almonds
sunflower seeds
rice
barley
rice noodles
rice crackers
various soups
various fruits and vegetables
chili
beans
hummus

Of course, there's more, but those are a few of the main ones off the top of my head.

Not only do I not get sick as often as I used to, combined with aerobic and resistance exercise, I have lost all of the difficult-to-lose weight I had gained from my past two pregnancies, and my skin no longer breaks out (unless I ingest some of the offending items).

I'd love to hear about it if you have eliminated sugar from your diet.  I've encountered very few people who have undergone the cessation of this destructive, highly addictive drug.

I dare you to quit.

(Speaking of addiction, here is a song that comes to mind.)

To your health!

Edited April 9, 2013 to add this link from another blogger: 


Dig my writing?  The links highlighted in this blog entry will take you to a few, but here they are again for quick reference: