Fire Season Has Begun — Janet Szabo

We had such a cold, wet spring that fire season seemed a distinct impossibility this year. I should know better. A fire started last evening along the route I take to get to Spokane. It blew up quickly—last report was over 200 acres—and Hwy 28 west from Hwy 93 is closed. Residents are being evacuated. This is about 40 miles southwest of us, but if it happened there, it can happen up here, too. The photos I’ve seen are sobering.

I will take January over late July and August any time. We won’t get any relief from this heat until the middle of next week, but it looks like the long-range forecast for August is hot and dry, too. Ugh.

***********************

I have found what I think is the perfect use for that Eloflex stretch thread. I used it in the looper of my coverstitch machine when I hemmed the Renee pants:

I’m going to try it on a T-shirt next and see how it does, but I think it looks and sews better than the wooly nylon.

I started reading Jenny Rushmore’s Ahead of the Curve fitting book last night, and now I’m rethinking that Tessa Sheath Dress pattern again. I will see if I can do a Zede boob bump on the unaltered side of the pink muslin, but if that doesn’t work, I might go ahead with my original idea to just put darts in the upper bodice and be done with it.

I didn’t get as much hemming done yesterday as I’d hoped because a “quick trip into town” ate up four hours. I had to wait for stores to open and for things I’d dropped of to be finished so I could pick them up again. Traffic was insane. Some stores didn’t have what I needed so I had to go to other stores. Did I mention traffic was insane? I thought I might go to Costco, but at 10:15—well past when they opened—the line to get in stretched out into the parking lot.

The Big Brown Truck of Happiness delivered my Amazon order yesterday. The box contained three large, brightly-colored rubber snakes. (I checked in town, but neither the Dollar Store nor WalMart had any for sale.) The husband thinks this attempt at keeping pests out of the garden is amusing, but I am desperate. Last night, I went out to check on things after dinner and when I stepped out of the greenhouse, I could see the raspberry canes moving. A couple of turkeys and four poults wandered out of the patch. These animals seem to think I planted this smorgasbord just for them.

We’ll see if the rubber snakes deter the ground squirrels. I’ve got a tray of arugula starts that I’d like to transplant, but I don’t want them to get mowed down as soon as they’re in the ground. I put the rubber snakes in strategic locations.

This cosmos made such a pretty picture the other evening:

I like having flowers planted among the veggies.

***********************

I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one here on the blog, but I think it’s helpful to mention what has worked for me in case it helps others. I have followed Dr. William Davis for several years—he is the author of the book Wheat Belly and a lot of his research in the area of wheat intolerance has been helpful for me. He is a huge proponent of probiotics. He is particularly fond of the strains of Lactobacillus reuteri. This microorganism was first isolated in 1962. It used to be found commonly in the digestive tract of human beings, but its prevalence has decreased significantly over the past 50 years—coincidentally, as inflammatory diseases have increased.

I’ve talked here before about the MTHFR gene mutation running rampant in my family. That has manifested as a B12 deficiency in my mother and a folate deficiency in me. I’ve been reading up on the benefits of L. reuteri recently (this is a good start), and it appears that some strains are capable of synthesizing both B12 and folate in the gut.

Hmmmmm.

I started taking an L. reuteri probiotic about a week ago. This isn’t the strain that synthesizes vitamins—I need to find and order that one specifically—but I can tell that something different (and beneficial) is happening in my gut. I’ve been front-loading and taking a capsule with every meal, although I expect to back off from that soon. I’ll post further developments as they happen.