His Grand Poo-Bah
~ my great-nephew Kade, 3 months ~

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The Most Dangerous Ingredients in Conventional Foods

1) Sodium nitrate. Causes cancer, found in most processed meats like hot dogs, bacon, sausage. Used to make meats appear red (a colour fixer chemical).

2) Hydrogenated oils. Cause heart disease, nutritional deficiencies, general deterioration of cellular health, and much more. Found in cookies, crackers, margarine and many “manufactured” foods. Used to make oils stay in the food, extending shelf life. Sometimes also called “plastic fat.”

3) Excitotoxins. Aspartame, monosodium glutamate (msg) and others. These neurotoxic chemical additives directly harm nerve cells, over-exciting them to the point of cell death. They’re found in diet soda, canned soup, salad dressing, breakfast sausage, and even many manufactured vegetarian foods. They’re used to add flavour to overprocessed, boring foods that have had the life cooked out of them.

Source: a new book by Mike Adams, entitled Grocery Warning, which takes a scientific look at a plethora of problematic ingredients in the everyday foods we eat.

The kitten we found at the side of the road is in that small pink towel on the ground. Everett is burying her, after caring for her faithfully for weeks.

Her eyes were still gummy and although he was sure kittens usually get over this sort of thing, given time, I asked Scott to pick up an antibiotic from the vet. Two days later, the kitten was dead.

I blame the medicine. She was fine, except for her eyes, before we gave her that. We hated to see her go; she was a sweetheart.

***

Everett and I were doing dishes one day with the radio on.
"Who's that?" he asked.
"Bob Dylan," I said. "Very famous folksinger."
He said, "Ew! You know what he sounds like?
Like a teenager whining and complaining to his mother!"

And he went on to make up his own lyrics and sing them in the Dylanesque style:

"... and you MAKE me do ALL this WORK
and you DON'T even PAY me ...

Every time I need a chuckle now, I ask him to do it again. He's turned into a darn good mimic.

Here I am with my new haircut.
What do you think?

Scott tells me I now look like Beaker, from The Muppet Show or was it Sesame Street. Ah, men ... gotta love 'em. They like long hair on a woman; but I notice there aren't many men who want the hassle of having long hair themselves. Or, if a woman has really short hair, they suspect she's a butch dyke. Hmph. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as they'd say on Seinfeld.

Actually the photo is of a theatre puppet. Check out the Old Trout puppet workshop, based out of Calgary I think.

It's not like me to be absent from here for two weeks; can't explain it. I'm fine, just ... not writing much at all. Even now, I should be getting supper started. Have been in town all afternoon, just got home and dammit, I'm hungry.

Will leave you with this. If I've posted it before, forgive me. My memory's not what it used to be:

From time immemorial cats have been associated with magic and witchcraft, but do they really have a sixth sense which enables them to peek into the future? Scientists are working to understand how and why cats can predict dangers that even include earthquakes and volcanoes.

What do you do when your cat starts acting strangely? Do you ignore it when it begins yowling loudly and pacing fanatically around the house? That might be a mistake that could cost you your life.

On March 21, 1944, the town of San Sebastiano al Vesuvio was completely destroyed when Vesuvius, the nearby volcano, unexpectedly burst into life. A fiery torrent of lava and cinders half-a-mile wide cascaded down the hillside, killing 30 people. It could well have been 32 had it not been for the action of a two-year-old black cat called Toto.

Toto had been uneasy all afternoon and had to be coaxed indoors at dusk. Just after midnight, as Gianni and his wife Irma lay asleep, Toto clawed at his master's cheek. Gianni pushed him away, but Toto pawed at him again and again until the angry farmer got out of bed with the intention of throwing the cat out of the bedroom.

Toto was normally a docile cat, so Irma persuaded her husband that Toto was warning them of great danger. Quickly throwing a few things into a handcart, they set out to the house of Irma's sister some way off. Vesuvius erupted within the hour, destroying everything in its wake.

A more recent disaster was predicted by the cats of California. In August 1979, many cat owners noticed that their pets were acting strangely. Shortly afterwards there was an earthquake along the Calaveras Fault so powerful that it shook buildings 130 miles away in San Francisco. What is truly remarkable is that the cats predicted what 200 scientific instruments sited along the fault did not.

In Britain during World War II, many cats were able to warn their owners of approaching air raids by German bombers. A special medal engraved with the words "We also serve" was awarded to pets that saved lives with their prompt actions.

Meanwhile, the most amazing case is that of a cat named Poona, who could not prevent murder but led the police to the killer.

Poona's owner, Peggy Pease, had come to India as a governess before World War I. She married an army vet and on his retirement they stayed on in India to
run a small animal hospital. By the time of her murder she was a widow in her 70s, and lived with an assortment of stray cats, including Poona, and three
servants: a young boy, an elderly cook, and a middle-aged man who had recently joined the household staff.

One day two friends called at the house and found it deserted apart from the cats, which had been locked in a cupboard. There was no sign of Peggy and the servants. Poona and his companions, those who were still living, were desperately hungry and thirsty. One of Peggy's friends agreed to take in the survivors and care for them.

Each day Poona turned up at the police station and tried to get the attention of the officer on duty. After nearly a week one detective looked at Poona and had an idea: if dogs could follow a scent and track their owners, maybe cats could too.

Poona did not disappoint him -- he led the detective to a patch of vegetation near a river at the bottom of Peggy's garden. Searching the undergrowth, the policemen discovered a wooden mallet coated with dried blood and hair. The large tabby then headed for a flowerbed and began scratching furiously at the ground. The bodies of Peggy and her cook were found buried under more than six feet of earth.

The middle-aged servant was arrested a week later, but insisted he was innocent, swearing that he had been visiting relatives and had found the house empty on his return. The police told him that Peggy's cat had led them to the murder weapon and to the bodies and then brought Poona into the room. Poona promptly flew at the suspect, spitting and scratching at him. Totally unnerved, the terrified man broke down immediately and confessed to the gruesome crime.

Sacked for theft, he had come back to the house and battered the old woman to death, killing the other servants as well. He had then shut the cats in the cupboard before hiding the mallet, throwing the boy's body into the river and burying the other two bodies deep under the flowerbed.

Examples like these are numerous, and cats all over the world are credited with saving lives, but exactly how they manage to be so clever remains a mystery.

Do cats have a sixth sense? According to scientists, cats possess the vomeronasal organ, or organ of Jacobson, named after a 19th-century Danish anatomist. It is a small tube of cartilage, half an inch long, situated in the roof of the cat's mouth. The cat sucks air into the tube where it can feel, taste and smell it. It is suspected that this organ allows cats to detect information that humans are unable to sense.

Most scientists note that earthquakes are preceded by a marked increase in electrostatic activity in the air. Cats may be able to detect the presence of positively charged ions in the atmosphere. It is known that they are sensitive to changes in magnetic fields because their strong homing instinct is upset if they wear a magnet.

And most scientists are certain that cats supplement their sense of vision by using their whiskers to touch the environment around them. As well as their prominent cheek whiskers, cats have smaller whiskers on the muzzle, whiskers above the eyes and whiskers on their lower legs.

Cats also have excellent hearing and can hear sounds up to about 60,000 Hz. Humans, with a few unusual exceptions, can only hear up to about 20,000 Hz.
This means that cats can hear the ultrasonic noises made by rats and mice. In addition, according to Sarah Hartwell in her article "How Intelligent Are Cats?", they can pinpoint a sound source to within about 8 degrees thanks to their swivelling ears.

However, despite our growing understanding of cats, many people remain convinced that they are psychic, and have telepathic and extrasensory powers.

So you never know, one day your kitty may save your life! If you're a cat owner, do watch your pet carefully.

Thank you, kitty cats.

Main sources:
Bergler, Reinhold, Man and Cat: The Benefits of Cat Ownership, Blackwell Scientific Publications (1989)
Bradshaw, John W.S., The Behaviour of the Domestic Cat C A B International (1992)
Turner, Dennis C, and Patrick Bateson, The Domestic Cat:The Biology of Its Behaviour,Cambridge University Press (1988)

The stories about Toto, Poona and the brave cats of California and Britain came from Mirror Today magazine Vol 7, No.12 (Dec 1994), p.52.

2006/07/01 © 2006 Ohmynews

We are getting the most gorgeous weather lately. Not too hot, not at all cool ... it's breezy, and it's all I can do to spend any time indoors at all. Yesterday I biked about four miles, wondering how the mountain bike would fare on the gravel road in the winter. Supposedly I could ride on the road even when it's icy. Hm. We'll see if I'm that ambitious when the time comes.

Emil, Everett, and their great-grandmother
in her little room at the lodge.

My heinous plan to take advantage of Everett's playstation-love during the month of August worked beautifully. He had to earn his gaming hours by doing certain jobs for me. One of them was vacuuming out the van, for which he logged two hours.

He complained when I first explained the plan, but was soon happily marking up his earned time on a list on the fridge. Give that boy a list to make- any list- and he's all over it. He is motivated to "get ahead," he tells me, so that he can have an uninterrupted playstation marathon sometime.

He's washed some windows on the inside; obviously a first-timer, he might have to re-do some of them.

He's picked beans for Scott's mom, twice.

He's cleaned the downstairs bathroom.

And now ... he's gone back to school. Grade 9 this year.

There was one paying job Everett tackled. Weeds in half of the half-acre garden, unused this year except for the strawberry patch, had grown to four feet high. Scott couldn't get in there with the tractor, so they had to be pulled by hand. It's a big job and Everett thinks the 50-dollar fee he'll receive when it's done is big money. He's dreaming of what he's going to buy with his cash.

A farm in the vicinity had barn kittens to give away. I phoned and spoke for three, and Scott brought home six on the weekend. They are young adolescents, and one of them is enamoured of the dog, Sara. It follows her around, plays with her, sleeps with her. Sweet. I especially get a kick out of the baffled look the dog gets sometimes, when the kitten is directly underneath her body, walking along with her.

Everett feeds the cats out in the barn every morning, but there has been a dwindling population of them over the past couple years. We are not sure why; perhaps it's the roaming nature of outdoor cats and the cat-eating nature of coyotes and foxes.

i'm baking bread this morning. it's a sedate process. right now the dough is on its first rise, and i'm about to head outside for my morning constitutional. it's a hurry-up time of year for many, with the men on this farm geared up for their harvest and scott doing his fall shingling in town, hoping to beat the rain and snow that are bound to come. the geese, ducks, cranes and crows are flocking up in preparation to migrate, so there is lots of activity overhead.

yesterday four large hawks circled high above my head at the end of the driveway.

 

~ some likeminded ladies at work ~

On this day 48 years ago, Don Johnson and Grace Benson got hitched at a country church near Margo, Saskatchewan. They were 19 and 17 years old.

Dad planned to go golfing with friends today in Oliver, BC, to "keep busy."

Sometimes when I think of how often and how much he must miss her, I can't ... I just can't go there.