Pizza crust, bread, & crackers: a transportation vehicle than enables eating messy foods with hands instead of utensils...

Pizza crust, bread, & crackers: a transportation vehicle than enables eating messy foods with hands instead of utensils...

It’s a been a long time since I last posted - much too long. So much has happened to prevent writing a post. In early October, my husband went into Urgent Care one morning with abdominal pain that had begun the night before, only to learn that he would be staying the weekend after a late afternoon appendectomy. Surgery and recuperation were without complications, though he also had diverticulitis in addition to the appendicitis and needed to stay a few days longer for some IV antibiotics. Despite the lovely resort-quality view of the famous Torrey Pines Golf Course and the Pacific Ocean, he quickly became very bored with hospital life (& especially the awful packaged, processed, non-nutritious AHA and ADA approved food!). When he came home I filled him with billions and billlions of probiotics and homemade chicken bone broth and he bounced back very well. Due to the surgery and recuperation, he had to delay leaving for an important international protein meeting in Greece until he had his doctor’s ok. But he made it in time for the last few days of the meeting, when he gave the keynote address. Guy was really worried he might have to miss that.

If that weren’t enough, the hard drive in my not so old (less than one year) laptop wimpered and died. While it was being replaced, I used an old laptop of Guy’s but it didn’t have iWeb on it. Now my laptop is back with a new hard drive, but none of my old files. So I have to figure out how to get these new iWeb posts synced to the old ones, which are on the .mac server somewhere. That will take some time because I really don’t know how that works, nor am I really enthused about spending the time to learn more. But I will, eventually. And yes, I have learned my lesson about backing-up. In the meantime, I think you can get back to the original posts and site contents here. http://web.mac.com/gandasalvesen/iWeb/GandA/Blog/A284647B-7B11-4CE7-81FF-D05CDB8DDF14.html#comment_layer

While Guy was away, all Hell broke loose in Southern California with the seasonal hot, dry Santa Ana wind-whipped wildfires. Gabriel and I and the two cats evacuated a bit further north to the condo of some friends during the California wildfires, which were much too close for comfort. Our community was spared, but the air quality was very poor for quite a while so it was best to be somewhere else for a couple of nights.

Too many homes were destroyed and damaged not so far form us before the hot dry winds stopped blowing from the desert and the fire stopped racing west, but we came back home to just lots of soot and ash on everything outside. I got tennis elbow tendonitis from raking the blown leaves and sweeping the ash for two days. Our less fortunate neighbors in San Diego County and So Cal are still sifting through the rubble, so I feel very fortunate to only have a bit of cleaning and a sore elbow. Gabriel was off school for a week while the school grounds and buildings were cleaned and indoor/outdoor air quality was improved.

Our CSA (community supported agriculture) program was especially hardhit in the fires, because they have acreage in not one but two major fire areas, Rancho Bernardo and the San Pasqual Valley. The farm manager lost his family home and I understand the greenhouse, too, lots of tools and equipment, and irrigation lines were destroyed, too. You can read more about the damage and rebuilding efforts at www.bewiseranch.com.

So life is getting back to normal, such as it is, and I will try to get back to posting now and then with this blank hard drive. I’ve been keeping up on lots of issues and have lots of pent up topics for blogging - threats to raw milk sales in CA especially, but also the ridiculous Farm Bill and the usual low fat/high carb baloney to rail against.

Going Against the Grain

Sunday, November 11, 2007