NotSoThoreau

We had a little snow the other day. It was sunny today so most of this in the front yard has melted off. I had a few windows opened today. It was nice to smell the clean air. I’ve been sick with an upper respiratory infection for about six weeks now. I even went to the doctors but that didn’t help. I have been smoking mullein this last week. It’s an herb commonly used for asthma. My lungs are much clearer. If I can ever stop coughing, I just might start to heal. The weird thing is that smoking mullein does stop the coughs. I just have to smoke some whenever I get short winded. I have been able to work through most of it. I just didn’t manage much for the holidays

It’s really a drag to be sick at Christmas. I gave up on Christmas Eve and went to the clinic. They say it’s an upper respiratory infection. I feel like I’ve done nothing but cough for a month. I managed to send out a couple of small gifts to my aunt and to Lon’s sister Davey. I got something for Lon. And that’s about it. I spent the holidays hanging out at home and moving my web site over to new hosting.

Lon was concerned that I might not be able to bake cookies, so got some just in case. We are off the diet for the holidays. It’s interesting but I really haven’t missed the stuff we’ve eaten lately. I managed to make a regular dinner tonight and it was tasty.

And here’s the tree:

The tree is still outside! I did send Christmas cards out, fortunately most won’t travel far. I think I have my Christmas shopping done. I have promised to bake massive quantities of cookies for Lon. We’ve been very good about sticking to the diet but this is Christmas! I finally got around to ordering something for him today, so it won’t make it here in time. Oh well.

We are having a work crew out at the property tomorrow to try and pull up the two sunken boats. We have to get this done. We’ve made very small progress on this, although we did have a diver hook cables to both and we have the front end of one boat lifted up. If we can move them up enough to beach them, we can start to take them apart.

I am going to be moving my sites over to new hosting. I’m taking a little time off work for the holidays so hope to have this done soon. The site will be down possibly during the transfer. I think it’s going to be a good deal and saves me some money.

I am also going to re-evaluate the sites and figure out how I want to use them. I like having Quinnscove as a picture site, although I am not great about updating the pictures.
This site and the spindlitis site need work. I’d like to experiment with daily blogging this year, if I can come up with interesting topics. More fun ahead!

Oh and cute kitteh picture:

Office kitteh

I managed to update WordPress for my blog. And I have the turkey done and am working my way through cooking the rest of the meal. Quinn is back in Lincoln City. He’ll be back out here this weekend. Work continues to tear down the 2 story houseboat. We are supposed to have a diver out this weekend. He’s going to set cables on the two sunken boats we are trying to pull up and dismantle. Fun times.

Hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

I’m depressed about the election. What can I say? I had hoped that we might actually talk about the problems in this country and what to do about it. I guess having some sort of solutions isn’t required of the Presidency these days. I can tell you this administration is not going to look good when folks read the history books in a hundred years.

Quinn has been down for awhile. He’s tearing down the 2 story houseboat. We have to have that removed and also salvage two sunken boats by December 5th. We are probably going to need a diver to properly rig the boats. We worked on one earlier in the year and got it to move a bit. Also, we are still waiting to hear about converting the dock to a private dock in my name. I don’t know how that is going to work out. If I were on my own and there wasn’t property involved here, I’d leave the state. I’m tired of this area and would like to see a different part of the country before I’m too old to travel.

Work is going well. I drove to the office for training a few weeks ago. It’s weird because I really don’t talk to anyone when I’m there. And when I’m here, I get to have my office cats.

Ah, I’m depressed about blogging in general. I guess I’ve never really found my “voice”. It becomes just a public place to blow off steam. Sometimes it sounds more like those canned Christmas letters, where you only write about the good stuff. Life gets easier in some ways and harder in others. I seem to be doing better at commenting on other blogs than writing here.

I used to be intimidated by making mayo. Two things changed that: I got an immersible blender and I found the olive oil mayo recipe from Well Fed. This is so simple that anyone can make mayo. Just look–

I know you are wondering why you would do this. Basically you have mayo that does not use seed oils and does not have sugar. It tastes great too. You can use this for salad dressings and sauces. I like to make a pork and Chinese cabbage stir fry and add mayo with a little coarse ground mustard added.

My usual color palette is grapey purple, dusty green and burgundy. I just love those colors. Most of the clothes I’ve been wearing this summer are based around black, red and white. I seem to have a strong urge right now to go with classic fall colors. I’ve got a nice felted hat in orange. I’m drawn to more orange and gold colors. I just seem to be sensitive to color.

Life goes on. I enjoyed the Presidential debates last night and am looking forward to the VP debates. I am hopeful about the election and I want to see real change in the country, not just another four years of this same old crap. If you can’t lead, get out of the way of those that can. We are still making plans for the river place. It remains to be seen what will happen there long term. I get so tired of the leadership of this county and state. There are days when I would like to be able to live somewhere else, just to get away from it.

I don’t think I’ve posted anything about our success with the paleo diet. We’ve been on it about six months. No, we are not skinny, but both of us have lost weight and are moving around better. Lon has been able to walk much farther than at any time since his last hip replacement surgery. We do a somewhat modified Paleo. We still do some dairy and I still have a small amount of honey in my tea. We’ve also been able to eat smaller portions and neither of us has felt deprived on this diet. I picked up a copy of Well Fed (from The Clothes Make the Girl ) and it’s helped me a lot with how I cook. I make us an almond flour goodie about once a month. I am continuing to look for ways to improve our health. I joined the Vancouver Food Coop. I can’t say I shop there all the time, but it is a good place to get grass fed beef and I get a discount from being a Coop member. I also like to shop at a local Asian Market, where I can get all sorts of interesting greens. I haven’t figured out a way to do any sort of long term food storage without grains though. Most of the Paleo folks that talk about food storage admit that they would have to resort to grains if it came to that. Potatoes are allowed on some Paleo diets, but not if you are trying to lose weight. I continue to work with a naturopathic doctor too. I’ve found that taking adrenal support pills make a huge difference in my energy level.

For lunch today, we had ground beef cooked with onions and garlic, with some cabbage thrown in. I also added a few cherry tomatoes and olives with a little parmesean cheese on top. It really was tasty and typical of how we eat now. We’ve been eating a lot of spaghetti squash this week. Lon initially planned to do this for a year. I suspect that at the end of the year, we’ll still be eating like this.

I’ve been spending some time on what I feel are inspirational sites. I’m taking the Full Tilt Boogie class from Dispatch from LA . I plan to do some work on that this weekend. I also spent some time at Walk Slowly, Live Wildly . I enjoy reading her site but decided this time to go to some of the blogs on her blogroll. Seems like at least a couple of the blogs had women that have given up their dreads. I find stuff like that interesting. I do find that it’s important to keep the creative juices flowing. I’ve not had a lot of time to put into projects lately, but I am determined to change that. I have a pile of beads sitting on my work desk to remind me.

I just really feel that it’s time for some changes in my life. My personal life is great and I’m very happy with Lon. I am less happy with the clutter in the house. I’ve tried not to make a lot of changes to the things in the house, at least for my first few years here. Now, I am anxious to speed up the process. I want to clear out a lot of the stuff that we don’t need or use. I’d like to pack up some of this and put it away or get rid of it. It’s not my stuff of course and that limits what I can do. I would really, really, like to spend less time trying to find stuff I need. So I will be making an attempt over this long weekend to clear clutter and find places for the things we need to keep.

we were talking about Fanny. She is now a jumping-off-the-walls big cat. She likes to sleep on me at night and will usually climb up on my lap any time I sit down. We went down to Lincoln City to visit Quinn and see the boat show at Toledo. It’s a nice show and I really enjoyed myself. Quinn is doing well and has been staying with Laura, his half sister. He’s working again and likes his new job at the Coho Inn. I hope he keeps at it. I’d love to be able to stay at the coast.

We are about to become the owners of a 1966 Ford F-250 pickup. It needs some work and definitely cleanup. We really need a pickup. There’s so much work at the river that we can’t do without a truck. We are still moving forward on the idea of moving there and renting out this house. I don’t even want to think what a mess it will be to pack things up. I hope we can start to get rid of some of this stuff. The clutter just drives me crazy.

I did not do any gardening. We do have chickens (including two Jersey Giant roosters that we need to get rid of. They were supposed to be pullets.) It’s still something that I want to do and I have a lot of plants in pots that will need to be transplanted. I just don’t seem to have much time to put into anything these days. I spent this weekend trying to rebuild Lon’s computer as his Windows partition got corrupted. I was able to pull all his files and pictures out through a Linux partition. I was able to get a fresh copy of Linux on a new hard drive and had him use that for a few days. I’ve spent all weekend fighting to get XP reinstalled. And that would be the tech rant of this piece. XP is obsolete. It’s ridiculous to have to go all over the place to download programs to be able to do the basic stuff. I couldn’t get the wireless adapter installed until I had Service Pack 2 installed. (Luckily I had another wireless card that I could install.) I had no problems with the card in Linux and the system was basically ready to go as soon as I installed it. I’ve turned my laptop into a dual boot machine. I run Bodhi Linux for my day to day stuff, since it’s so fast. I installed Ubuntu so I can sync my iPhone (which just doesn’t want to work in Bodhi.) I like having Ubuntu One do that automatic backup too. When I replace that laptop, I’m going for one that I can run Ubuntu on. It just feels like a real operating system. I don’t like the direction that Apple is taking and I’ve never been a big Windows fan. I let Lon know that I’m not rebuilding XP again either.

If there is one thing that I do not need, it is another cat. I have cats, many cats. I love my cats, but at some point, you have to say that you have enough. Having three cats on your lap while two others circle around, waiting to come in for a landing is a bit much. (And no, I do not have just five cats.)

But…..my boyfriend’s sister has a puss cat from the family Scottish Fold line. I guess my boyfriend picked one up and then Davey wound up with one. The cat kept having kittens by a Maine Coon cat and they either were not folds or were males. And my boyfriend wanted a female. Now, I have always taken my cats in to be fixed and don’t advocate bringing more kittens into the world. We took two fold kittens from her, both males, and I’ve yet to get them fixed. That is now a priority because I have this:

This is Fanny, out of the last litter for Davey’s puss cat. She finally had her fixed so there won’t be any more kittens. Davey wanted me to have her and so I do. The good news is that she is a very smart kitten. I’ve been around many cats and this is one of the smartest ones I’ve seen. Scottish folds should not be bred back to other folds as they have genetic issues from being too inbred. This is going to be bad news for the two boy folds. For now, I am enjoying having a kitten in the house again.

We had the Messabout last weekend and I will post pictures of it on the Quinns Cove blog. It was pretty small but it was definitely nice to see the guys again. I wore a long sleeved shirt but still was badly bitten by the mosquitos. We still do not have a boat that we can take out. We have another project boat, which has me hopeful. It’s a wooden row boat, that can be used with an electric motor. It needs to be painted and we are going to tackle that in the next week or so. We have an electric motor so it’s a nice fit for us. I’d like to be able to row a bit.

As far as other updates, we have now been on the Paleo diet for two months. Lon has lost weight, but we don’t know how much yet. He is starting to get back into shirts that he hasn’t been able to wear for awhile. I’ve lost some weight but think I’m starting to stall already. I have to keep my carb count really low to lose weight and it’s cherry season. I’ve been keeping my portions small, but will probably have better luck losing when I can cut out the fruit. I’ve been freezing raspberries from our bushes and am planning to freeze some blueberries and cherries for later on. And I don’t really have a garden again. I want to put a small grow box or two in the back yard. I’d like a fall garden so I can grow some Asian veggies. We use those a lot these days. It just doesn’t seem like I get a lot accomplished.

I normally post things about the river on the Quinn’s Cove blog. But it turned out to be a nice day. The river is too high for the little boats so the Messabout will be in a couple of weeks.

I have been longing to get back into riding a bicycle. Jeffrey and I used to ride back when we lived in Turlock and then when we moved to Portland. When we moved to the Gorge, that ended because it was no fun riding up and down all the hills. I picked up that three speed, but it just doesn’t quite work for me. I’ve been on the lookout for another bike, even missed a couple of nice ones on Craigslist. Today, I found this:

It needs some work, of course. I’ve wanted a Dutch bike, but prices are just too high for me. I would like to eventually have an electric assist bike. What I need now is just something to hack around on, something that is comfortable to ride. I believe this bike will do. I just wish I could find out more about it online somewhere.

I recently bought some clothes. I’ve gained enough weight that I couldn’t face wearing clothes that didn’t fit. I was down to one pair of jeans and just didn’t want to repeat my mountain hippie work clothes look any more. I bought my stuff from Etsy. The store is called Coco and Juan, with the business located in California. These clothes are not made in China. It’s a style known as Lagenlook. Basically you wear loose unfitted layers. I spent roughly $300 which is a lot for me. I bought a dress, skirt,pants, a couple of tops and several layering tees. Now I have been working with a naturopathic doctor on weight loss and am a week into a low carb diet. I can wear these clothes if I’m successful in losing weight. I don’t feel overdressed. And this is a very comfortable way to dress. I’m going to keep adding some pieces.

On the geek front, Lon has a new Atrix2. His old Flipside became unusable this week. He loves the idea of having a lapdock for his phone (which we’ll pick up maybe next week). I’m still not an Android fan but it seems to be a nicer phone than he’s had so far. This time, I’m going to teach him how to use it. If he’s going to keep getting smartphones, it’s time he really uses one.

I have a new favorite app, #todo. It’s very clever. Tags like #today, #nextweek, #work set up a due date or a repeat or just a tag to filter. #list lets you create a list within the todo. And you can add a picture to a todo. It’s not as full featured as Life Balance but it’s a fairly new app.

I have been happily using my G5 Mac with Tiger. It’s odd because I spend all day logged into my work PC which is XP. When I get out of the remote session, I’m back in OSX. I’d considered getting a copy of Leopard but think I will leave it as is.

Lots of other stuff going on but will wait until it sorts itself out before I post about it.

In Ponca City, Oklahoma, there is this statue tribute to pioneer women:
(The link can be found here: link)

These were women that left everything they had, to move to a new part of the country and give their families a better life. In some cases, these women became property owners in their own names. They were a major reason for the Western states granting voting rights to women long before the Eastern states got around to it.

And this is how the current adminstration sees women: Life of Julia Is this honestly what happened to the offspring of those courageous women? Are women too incompetent to live their lives without some government official taking care of them? Good thing those earlier women didn’t consider children as something they needed to be protected against. (And let’s just set aside for a minute how anyone can consider living on $12000 a year from Social Security “comfortable”. Julia needs what she can grow in that garden to live on, provided the Government lets her keep it.) More Americans now need food stamps. Fewer Americans have jobs. Are we truly so much more unhealthy now that all we can think about is finding ways to pay for doctors? Sarah Bush Johnston educated Abraham Lincoln on her own. She did not have a degree and there was no Department of Education telling her how to do it. There are few politicians today capable of matching Lincoln’s eloquence.

I don’t think that women have somehow gotten less capable over the years. I have seen, in my own lifetime, contraceptives go from being prescribed only to married women to being openly sold in grocery stores. We sometimes forget how far we have come, in our demands for even more. And while we have been so worried about the government in our bedroom, we seem to have ignored their intrusion into every aspect of our lives. In short, we are less free today. When you look to the government for protection and services, you give up your ability to run your own life. We are the children of strong, strong women. Don’t let them tell you that you are weak.

I picked this up about a month ago. It’s an old expandable file.

Well, I’m still happy with my iphone and still glad I went with the 3GS instead of the 4. One of the things I have discovered are apps that have beautiful interfaces and aren’t terribly useful. For example, I installed Audium, which is a music player. It looks great, but it doesn’t display most of my album covers to pick from. (And I understand there are reasons for this, but still..) I have Meernotes, Readability and Egretlist. I used to have Diacarta installed too. They look wonderful, but all are limited in functionality. By contrast, Life Balance looks like it has forever, but the backend is still a miracle. I guess, out of all the cool apps, Flipboard is the one that seems to deliver the most. The downside is that it doesn’t do landscape view. I guess you can’t have everything.

I have now tried Android (Lon), Windows (Quinn) and iOS (mine). For ease of use, I do think that the iPhone is much easier to use. The version of Android on Lon’s phone is really awful. I’m just not sure if I can convince him to use a touch screen phone yet. If I could, I think I’d get him a 3GS like mine.

Like I said, I’ve been on a pen kick lately. I bought a Noodler’s standard flex, then a Lamy Safari. My most recent purchase is a Noodler’s Ahab flex pen, which just came in yesterday. Here’s the collection (along with a Wing Sung.):

The small orange pen (poltergeist pumpkin is the color) is the Noodler’s standard flex. The large orange (Arizona color) is the Ahab. The Lamy is blue and the maroon pen is the Wing Sung. Here’s another shot of just the Noodler’s pens:

Since I’m taking pictures with my iPhone, I can’t get those luscious close ups that you see on some pen blogs. I am enjoying the flex nib pens, although I’ve not yet figured out how to get the full flex from them. I love the size of the Ahab. It’s closer to the size of my old Schaeffer and much more comfortable than the smaller diameter pens.

Along with my pens, I ordered 14 samples of ink. (I ordered this time from Todd Nusbaum of isellpens.com). Most are Noodler’s with a couple of Herbin colors. I did a few of the orange colors yesterday in the new pen. This are not very detailed tests. Here’s the Ahab loaded with Noodler’s Antietam on Moleskine:

Of course, I want to try all of it NOW! I believe I write better with fountain pens and I have a lot more fun with different inks to play with. Ink samples are very inexpensive and so are the fountain pens in the picture. It definitely brighten up my day to get my new toys.

Just wanted the world to know that I am officially engaged! We’ve talked about marriage off and on the last couple of years. Since this was Leap Year, Lon asked me if I was going to ask him to marry me. So, of course, I did. And since he’s accepted, that makes it official. We do not have a date yet as we have a few issues still to be sorted out. We do have a happy life together and I believe it will be a good marriage too.