Flowers and Iron

This weekend, I was well enough to wear myself out doing landscape projects. I added to my shade garden, then spaded up an 8x30 foot plot on the corner. The next day, I put down some old bed sheets donated by a neighbor, weighted them down with bricks, and started setting out a hundred home-grown perennials in Xs cut in the sheets. It was hot, sunny and humid. Halfway through, a storm was coming. I worried the sheets would billow up in the wind and break some of the plants, so I threw down two bags of mulch, grabbed the clothes off the line, went inside and watched the rain come down in sheets. When it stopped I finished planting, looking like someone from Dirty Jobs when it was over.

Being too tired to cook, I got a low-carb burger and small fries at the drive-through and came back home. In spite of two days' hard work, from the street, the house looked like hippies lived there: tall grass, a missing picket, and of course the bed sheets and plants that were all either little or leggy. I hadn't been up to manual labor in chilly weather. I fixed the fence and a neighbor mowed the lawn (and a few ornamental sedges). I handed him a check. It's the closest contact I've had with another person since I went to urgent care last month.

Drivers are stopping at the stop sign by my house, which they hardly ever do. Maybe it's because the white sheets look like melting snow, or because the corner looks different now, or because the sheets are red, white and blue (nothing I planned--it's what my neighbor was tossing out), but people are stopping. A pedestrian even stopped to read the sign that says "Native wildflower planting. This area has been planted with native wildflowers and grasses, providing diverse habitat for pollinators, birds and wildlife." I don't want people thinking the plants are vegetables and taking them home. I've got critters in the back yard doing that with the tomatoes.

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I've come a long way towards getting well. I'm coughing less and less, and did a landscape project I was sure I couldn't do just a week ago. But there have been problems: it was the N-acetyl cysteine, a biofilm disruptor, not the shirota yogurt, that was giving me a stomach ache. So I've fallen back on Mucinex as a decongestant. And the lactoferrin (another biofilm disruptor) has done such a good job getting iron into my cells that I've felt like I have iron overload: too hot, and it's hard to sleep. A little-known fact: too much iron can raise your blood sugar and interfere with your adrenal hormones. I got a booklet last night called Iron: Impact on Health and Wellness that's full of information, mostly about iron deficiency, though.

Remember: minerals, then adrenals, then thyroid.