Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Ah, the Fourth of July. The summer weather, the fat, juicy burgers, the fireworks, the last day I didn't have a cold for over a month. I woke up feeling good, got a lot done, but by evening I didn't even feel like standing on the corner to see fireworks. I called in sick the following Monday and Tuesday. On August 4--one month later, I took a turn for the worse and saw a doctor, who wrote a prescription for antibiotics and cough syrup. I called in sick for the next three days. Then I went to work--still coughing, coworkers telling me it would be OK to go home--and picked up my natural desiccated thyroid (NDT). I started taking it that Saturday--and soon my cold started getting better. As the week went on and I needed to up my dose of NDT, the cough started coming back to the point that I thought about going back to the doctor. But I upped the dose--and again, the cough mostly went away. I was thinking I'd need Sheriff Grimes on the case to kill the cold that wouldn't ...

It's been quite an adventure riding this sparking and sputtering thyroid. It started back in the highly stressful year of 2014 when I had mountains of work on my desk, an hour-long commute, and aging parents who themselves were sputtering along and constantly needed me to come over to help them. Then my coworker quit and I had all the work to do. I asked if I could go live with her in Mexico, only half joking. My father died. My mother nearly died of kidney failure. Then stayed with me for two weeks during and leading up to the estate sale. We surrendered her dog when she couldn't take care of him. In thanks for my hard work, I was accused of elder abuse. (The county found no grounds for the accusations.) I had a root canal and three courses of antibiotics. Then I moved across the country: I bought one house before selling the other (albeit in Denver's hot real estate market) and had no permanent job lined up in Indiana. Then finding my best friend had changed quite a ...

Move over, Instant Pot--you're overly hot! My Suteck yogurt maker makes special yogurt for L. reuteri bacteria that need a long, warm fermentation. And it was only $32.99. Here's my Amazon review, with a few tips: I bought this product to make L. reuteri yogurt, which requires special preparation. I didn't have any trouble--the yogurt maker was easy to program, and both batches I've made so far turned out well. I did have to shake the final product in the jars because it separated, but the yogurt stayed homogenized after refrigeration. If you wish to add water in the yogurt maker, you don't need to keep adding it during the processing. A tip: use a canning funnel if you have one to fill the jars. Another tip: don't snap on the lids before processing--they pop off during fermentation. Just place the lids on the jars.

A few months ago, I joined Dr. Davis's Inner Circle to resolve some health problems. He recommends making "yogurt" with L. reuteri bacteria for its unique health benefits. Users reported vivid dreams after eating the yogurt. Having suffered from sleep paralysis long ago, I worried that it would return if I ate this yogurt. Sleep paralysis feels like a weight on you while you're somewhere between being asleep and being awake. You're paralyzed while it happens, and since humans tend to assume that things have agency when in doubt, it seems like it's a creature that's sitting on top of you. It's terrifying. It happened to me during the Satanic Panic , which added to my own panic. Decades later, I slept like the dead on a low-carb diet. No dreams, no sleep paralysis, just a very deep, black sleep. Wonderful. I took L. reuteri tablets as supplements for a few months. I dreamed, but nothing remarkable happened. I whipped up a batch of yogurt and ate s...

The other night, the Democratic presidential candidates all said they'd provide free health care to illegal immigrants. Not free emergency services, but free health care. Free in this case means paid for by the taxpayers.   I don't get free health care and I'm a veteran who works for a living. I pay both health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses because 1) I have a high deductible and 2) I order my own tests because most endocrinologists and gastroenterologists have no idea what they're doing. When these socialists are not pandering to illegal immigrants, the same people also say We have food deserts where poor people have a hard time getting groceries Some people struggle to afford health insurance Some people struggle to afford health care and medications Migrants in detention centers aren't being taken care of We have homeless people not being taken care of Health care costs for Americans are steeply rising (which we can all agree on) ...

This is why I don't take the newspaper anymore: I'm tired of the sob stories. The latest is an article in The New York Times about how people in flophouses can't afford unprocessed food. They use the term "working class" to describe people living with no reliable stove or refrigerator or pots, pans and other basic utensils, which annoys me as someone living in a working-class neighborhood. We have our problems, but a lack of a working appliances and cooking utensils is pretty unusual. Some of the people interviewed in a book the article referred to said they were evicted from their last place, but there's no reason given (there never is in the news). First, I have to wonder whether people without cooking utensils care about cooking. It's just as well if they don't--moving to a place with working appliances really should be more important than figuring out how to sit down to poached salmon and asparagus in a lemon-butter sauce at home. And I doub...

...and I said nothing because I wasn't a drinker of sugary sodas. Now, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York is coming for cauliflower, calling it "colonialist" in community gardens. Fox News' guest liberal, Cathy Arue, defended Cortez's statemen t, saying that cauliflower is a monocrop and the soil needs different plants to avoid becoming depleted, since the same old colonialist crops have been grown for generations. From what I understand, people rent plots in community gardens and grow whatever they like. If committees are dictating what crops are to be grown in community gardens in New York City, where Ocasio Cortez is from, maybe the committees, not the cauliflower, are the problem. In any case, is monocropping in community gardens a serious environmental problem? Looking at a few of New York City's 550 community gardens  on Google Street View, I didn't see anything that looked remotely like this: Photo by Gary Rogers. Wikimedia Commons...