I made mayo today. In a Mason jar: 1 1/4 C avocado oil, 3/4 C MCT oil (C8), 1 rounded tsp salt, 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar, 2 eggs, juice of 1/2 lemon. Using an emersion blender blend until the whole thing emulsifies.
Wow. Yummy. I held my breath as I blended the ingredients. Would it emulsify? Yes!!
So that's it? The UPS driver has been saving steps to the door by pulling into my driveway. And not very many steps. About twenty I think. The side of the driveway where he does this is damaged to the point that it is almost unusable now. These UPS trucks are huge. So this new driver thinks it's OK to pull a semi into my yard? I'm pretty sure UPS isn't good with that.
The driveway is on a hill, and where it meets the road at the top of the hill there is a drainage pipe that used to be underground. He fixed that. He backs into the driveway to get more traction, since it's hard for that behemoth to pull out of there on the steep hill. Then what? Spin the tires on my side of the pipe for more umph. Lately when I've tried to pull out of the driveway the car bottoms out. I'm afraid to go that way now because I'll damage my car too.
This new driver has another scary habit. Like at least one other driver, he either doesn't realize, or doesn't care about driving down a steep hill that connects to the road out of here. This hill is also on a cliff and a blind curve. I had quit going that way and taken the route that's a few miles out of my way, because should one meet the UPS truck on this cliff it is dangerous. He did meet me there two days ago. Did he slow down? No. What does he care? The little people have to get out of his way. This is not to mention driving way too fast.
He pulled into the driveway Friday and unloaded some heavy boxes out in the yard. These boxes were too large for me to move. And, it was an order I had cancelled. I called to him to wait. Well, he foolishly didn't drive away but he never answered me. I went inside to get a pen and paper because if a package goes back and I don't have the tracking number, I can be charged. That would have been $1000. It may still be $1000, because he loaded the boxes up in a hurry. I stood by the driver's door and called to him. He still didn't answer. Finally he felt like leaving so he came around, and said, "I hear you," with an annoyed voice. I told him I needed to get the tracking numbers from the boxes, but he said he didn't have time for that, and jumped in his truck. I had to walk in front of it to go inside to get to my door, and I had the eerie feeling he was considering running me down. The truck was gigantic. This man was a very large man, around 8" taller than me. Does he see that he has been a bully? Maybe he feels that I'm just the kind of woman that should be bullied. He wouldn't feel that way if he were 8" shorter than me I bet.
Did I call UPS and complain? Well, unlike some, I have their number, which is hard to get. I thought I would sleep on it anyway. OK. I slept on it. Will I say, "Tell that great big bully not to drive into my driveway anymore, and not to use the shortcut at the cliff" ? Yes. Will I mention how he didn't let me copy the tracking numbers? Not sure. I found them on the internet. What really bothers me is that I was frightened by him. Didn't I pay for shipping? I paid for him to give me a bad time? He was not threatening me verbally. Yet I felt threatened. I was picking up really bad vibes. Well, maybe he was in a big hurry to get over to his girlfriend's house.
I bought No Trespassing signs last week. I suppose I'll have to add, "This means you UPS trucks." Some have pointed out that UPS may decide I should pick up my packages at some distant location. Oh bull.
I have parked the cars at the top of the driveway to prevent UPS semis from coming into my yard and tearing up the driveway. And bothering me. I can just imagine what this driver's vexation will be when he discovers that.
This driver was not wearing any ID
The following is from UPS Dress Code policy 2023:
The UPS dress code is different for every individual. Typically, employees must wear a shirt with a name tag on the right, and slacks or dress pants. They are not allowed to wear skirts or jeans, and they should avoid any piercings that may cause a safety hazard. In addition, they can’t wear a necklace or earrings that may get caught in machinery. Moreover, they shouldn’t wear a tight-fitting dress or a skirt, as they can fall off their heads. In addition, they should dress in layers, so they can adapt to the changes in temperature and activity.
That's it!! I'm calling the sheriff!!
In the past I had an older model stun gun which I had used for rescue from spider bites, wasp bites, and also joint pain. It was a miracle. I had heard from a missionary friend that using a stun gun on a snake bite would neutralize the venom. Since he had been in a jungle a long way from medical help, and there were a lot of snakes, it was good to know. But if there was no stun gun, they used a 12 volt battery.
I did have a spider bite and reluctantly decided to try the stun gun cure. Guess what? It worked! I tried it on joint pain. That worked too. Why? I could only speculate why it worked on anything, but I thought it might work on joint pain because what causes the joint pain could be a toxin. Or it could be that the electric stun interfered with the pain signals on the nerves and prevented them from reaching the brain.
Disaster arrived in the form of a woman that my mother had invited to stay in my room while I was on a trip. Soon I was cleaned out and when I came home there were a lot of things I no longer had, among them the stun gun and also a laser comb that I also used for pain. Replacing the stun gun was a problem because it was a discontinued model that had generated 50,000 volts. They claim in ads that the new stun guns are stronger than that. I suppose this is hype and any old stun gun would work, but I hesitated at the higher volts, fearing I might knock myself out.
So about a week ago I was on Ebay and saw a little stun gun that looked like a mini flash light, that advertised 20,000 volts. I decided to buy it, and soon it arrived. I tried it out right away. Hey, this is nice! It doesn't have the punch my old stun gun had. Is that good or bad? Well, it doesn't sting as much anyway. I can't imagine this would be much of a defense against bad guys. It would probably convince a dog to leave you alone. In fact, that's another great thing about stun guns. Dogs are terrified of them. Should you go on a walk and encounter an aggressive dog a stun gun will scare them away. Probably.
My new stun gun is resting now, getting recharged. My new laser comb is on the way. ☺️
UPDATE
My new stun gun charged quickly and I decided to try it near my back. Things were going OK, and I was able to easily use it on one spot after the other without anything more than a tingle. But then the room began spinning. This couldn't possibly be from overdoing it with the stun gun?? That's never happened before so I really don't know. I stopped for a while. It helped the pain though.
This year I found a random listing for an accountant and told him my sad story. "Oh, yes. Debbie and her husband had an argument and he told her to stop preparing taxes." Weird. I told James I felt like a deer in the headlights. James spoke reassuringly about how everything was going to be OK and he would fix it. "Panic over taxes is common place." That was probably around April. I suppose James expected me to bring in some sort of tax documents. I had no documents. That was a lot of the trouble. What happened to them? I could only speculate. I got a call from James, who left a cryptic message, "Helene, please call me." I did call, and agreed to be in his office on Wednesday. But Wednesday came and went. Finally I decided to go today.
I couldn't find his office to save my life. I had been there before and thought I knew where it was. It had disappeared. I had an address, but there were no street numbers on any buildings. It was bizarre. There was a festival in town, and people were milling around in the street as if it were closed to traffic. I barely missed several people who had leapt in front of me. Well, enough of that. Finally I went home and called James again. James described his location. It was past "the church," across the street from "the laundromat," past "the car lot," and "the gas station." So it could be anywhere. Oh, and "the dime store." He told me the names of the streets on the intersection. I was drawing a blank.
I looked up all the laundromats in town on Google to try and get my bearings. I got the strangest directions. Oh, I made a mistake on my address. So I struck off again to find the mysterious accountant. Besides not seeing any building numbers, there were no street signs either. No wonder this was so confusing. Could that possibly be the building? It sure didn't look familiar. Thankfully it was the building, but it was so strange how far it was from where I remembered it being in the past.
I sat in James' office, pretty much shooting the breeze for a while. Finally he asked me to give him a power of attorney. What!!?? "Just for the IRS." I could see how this seemed to be the only way, having no documents to go by. He said he wanted to see what the IRS was expecting me to report. OK, fine.
He told me that the IRS didn't usually send anyone to prison. "But be sure to never, ever say to the IRS, 'income taxes are unconstitutional.' Then you WILL wind up in prison."
I'm safe at home now, for the moment.
This afternoon, to my joy and relief, the sound of a lawnmower outside my window was heard. I had been starting to wonder what I was going to do. My step brother came over and mowed my lawn. He apologized for not coming by sooner. "Oh, it wasn't an emergency," I said. He gave me a sidelong glance. "Well, it was starting to be an emergency..." I said. Yay!
And that's all I can remember. At 9:30 pm I realized something seemed off kilter, and I went to check on my mother. She was sitting in her easy chair reading. When she saw me, she decided it was bedtime. ???? Well, OK. I was puzzled over how dark it was.
I saw from the dishes that I had made her tomato soup for dinner. How mysterious.
Now I was hungry, and I found a can of navy beans and heated them in the microwave. That was nice.
I just don't know what I did today. Weird.
There are better months than January. But I'm starting to think summer is even less better than January.
Yes, I fired the yard person. I made up my mind that no matter how high the grass got, the yard person was history. Unless you are a woman you may not understand what can go on just steps outside your door. What's the last thing yard people think they should do? Anything a woman tells them to do. They have many crazy ways of making you wish they would go home. So, it got to the point that I told the yard person to go home. I even hired another yard person. The nuther yard person charged me $4000 for cutting the grass. Well, it had been around two months since it had been cut, and their mother told them to demand that. This happened during the alleged pandemic when the yard person came down with the dread disease.
So after that the yard person saw their true value. Since that wasn't going to happen, "they" began to punish me. Soon I decided that it just wasn't worth it to have the grass clipped. For one thing, every scrape of landscape had been demolished. Many rosebushes, more than ten, were torn down. Other ornamentals. No weeds though. Get out of town. After that I began to hike through fields of clover, very tall clover, to get anywhere. I wouldn't mind that so much, but there is another problem. A varmint lives in the fields of clover called chiggers. So a few days ago I walked through the grass and decided not to take the precautions of a bath, thinking that I had slithered through OK. Oh no. Pretty soon, every place on my feet where my shoes had been was bloody from chiggers. I had to take a bath in nail polish to calm things down. Meantime, I was unable to wear shoes because of the injuries. I guess the yard person knows this. I still haven't surrendered. I had started to think the unthinkable. "Am I capable of mowing the lawn??"
Today, for the first time in a week, I have put on my shoes. Have I learned my lesson?? What do you think? I have been pondering what to do. Well, I could take newspapers and boxes and make paths through the grass. I guess that's what it has come to.
Several years ago I went with my brother to a gun show in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We stopped to see a statue in honor of oil drillers, locally known as "Golden Boy." When I got home, I told Jim that while I was in Tulsa I had met Golden Boy. He nearly wept. I had supposed that the silly name would tell him right away that there was no threat from Golden Boy, but no. I had been swept off my feet by a statue.
After Orange Man returned, I came in the house and found a penny on the floor in the kitchen. There just wasn't a penny there earlier.
The last time I found a mystery coin was in January 2023. I supposed the mystery coin thing was over. It seems to involve the treatment of feral cats. And since most of the feral cats went to be barn cats on the vet's farm, that only left Ole Grey and Mrs. Cat. Neither of them are my favorite cats. So I guess one doesn't get a mystery coin for giving Ambien to feral cats.
Is there an angel that watches over feral cats out there?
Lazy River (1958 Version) - YouTube
Friend and former student (my first graduate student, and still one of the best) Don Mahin of Reno, NV, sent me links to these videos (c. 1993) from the TV show Unsolved Mysteries. They describe the case of Wally Spencer, who claimed to have discovered a huge 'underground river' (cavernous aquifer?) beneath Nevada. Spencer's 'river' allegedly was originally discovered by two prospectors in 1927, who dynamited the only known opening to keep their treasure (gold) from the landowner. Spencer was a rocket scientist who used satellite imagery and some kind of device of his own design to locate the 'river'.
I know nothing of the details of Spencer's work, but the show left me with the impression that Spencer was foiled by Nevada's 'red tape' vis-a-vis water rights. He had 'found' all this water and the state officials were jerking him around. Naturally, he was concerned that his secret would be stolen and he would be left with nothing.
I don't see it that way. Nevada was simply asking him to demonstrate that the water actually existed. Spencer supposedly estimated the daily flow at 17B gallons (c. 52,000 acre-feet per day) but there is no indication of where that number came from. That is a lot of water - the mean daily flow of the Colorado River is around 38,000 acre-feet per day). No wonder the state was a bit skeptical. I am, too.
Recall that Spencer never sunk a well to prove that the water was there. That step is critical whenever you rely on indirect data - such as remotely-sensed or geophysical data -- to ascertain whether there is available groundwater. You need to ground truth the data - drill a well. The folks in the oil patch know this all too well. All the data in the world may point to an oil or gas body, but until you put the hole in the ground you're just blowing smoke.
I like what Michael Turnipseed said - that Spencer, with his allegedly unproven technology - was little better than someone walking around with a willow stick divining for water.
Unfortunately, Spencer died in 2003 without ever drilling for water. The exact location of the 'river' remains a mystery.
You can judge for yourself, or maybe not, given the sparse information in the show.
Two weeks ago Orange Man vanished. It was on the same day as the tornado. BTW this tornado turned out to be an EF2, which is a dangerous event. So I connected the dots after a while and decided that Orange Man must have been whisked away in the tornado.
Then today he was sitting at the front door. I went outside to take out the trash, and there sat Orange Man. He began to howl, and I did my best to calm him, speaking reassuring words and petting him. Still he seemed freaked out. "This must be about food," I thought, and went inside to get him some cat food. He ate a little but pretty much ignored it. Well, that's odd. So he wanted to sit on the porch, and I went inside to do some chores. I brought him out a piece of roasted pork, thinking he would like that, but he turned up his nose at that, too. ?? OK. Suit yourself.
Where has Orange Man been all this time? Off visiting the ladies? I'm sure everyone will be thrilled to have a litter of cute orange kittens. He's probably repopulated the county. I'm surprised to see Orange Man after so long.
How do I plan to celebrate? Well, there are plenty of fireworks. They started last night. But the real party is food. Today I fixed spare ribs. They are not done cooking though.
Tomorrow? Another rack of spare ribs. I make BBQ nearly every day. But spare ribs are special. And? Maybe wine. Who knows. I made homemade mayo for asparagus and also tomatoes. I'll probably go to Walmart and get another supply of country ribs. You can't have too many of those. Deviled eggs for sure.
Oh, plenty of cantaloupe.
Happy 4th of July! ❤️
Since that time I started losing weight. I suppose it's due to less calories. I've lost around 33 lbs. The dairy issues have gone away. I was especially reluctant to stop putting cream in coffee, but started using Nutpods almond/coconut creamer. I can't much tell the difference in taste.
I've quit eating almost everything but pork, eggs, chicken and butter. No fair. Butter is dairy. OK. I get hungry sometimes. I don't even eat plants. Except for tomatoes. And the Nutpods creamer. Where's the beef? No beef either. Why? I guess I am suspicious of beef. I see what happened with dairy as extending to beef. I'm just done with moo cows. Along the way I started reading about mad cow disease. I didn't realize the magnitude of the problem in England around 20 years ago. By some estimates, more than a million people were infected with mad cow disease in England, however many are asymptomatic. Many people in England are not qualified to donate blood because of this. Did you know that swine are not very susceptible to mad cow disease? Do you think that beef producers would ever ever feed tainted feed to their herd or ship sick cows to market? Well, I know for sure they sometimes do. What if a cow comes down with brucellosis? Ship that baby to market quick! The local butchers have been 90% replaced with only four large meat packing plants in the country. When you buy hamburger it could contain the meat from as many as 1000 cows, which seems to me to increase the risk of exposure to meat from a diseased cow. I would guess that this risk would be less with a roast or steak. Add in the fact that livestock are given antibiotics and hormones. What about swine? They too get their antibiotics, but I don't think they get hormones, because that is mainly given to cows to increase milk output.
The nurse at the doctor's office was shocked about my diet. What about calcium?? Do you supplement? I thought this was silly. Calcium is not much of an issue. Everyone thinks women have osteoporosis because of low calcium. More likely it's due to too much sugar in the diet raising the need for more calcium in order to handle the sugar. But I do take supplements of multivitamins just to be safe. The one supplement I try to be sure and take is a B vitamin complex with MTHFR, which is a short for the ultimate form of folate that the body uses.
It seems like I eat numerous calories, but I seem to have lost about a pound a week since November. This amazes me and makes me happy. I think I'm almost as skinny as the little fairy princess in New York. ☺️
The Little Fairy Princess in New York
My method of avoiding bug bites is to take a bath, put my clothes in the dryer and change shoes after walking around outside. Today I thought I would go ahead and use insect repellant and skip the bath and changes of clothes and shoes. Then I went out and put some birdseed on the bird bench. So within two hours I had an itchy welt from chiggers. Then I took a bath, changed clothes and shoes, and put nail polish on the bite to smother the chiggers.
