So, I was rescued by a couple of guys named Ernest and Carlos (father and son), who got me off the road, pulled my cell phone out and called the DH, and stayed with me until he showed up. Probably a half dozen other people stopped, inquired, or raced over to lend assistance. To everyone out there – my humble thanks especially to Carlos who held onto me while I was retching from the pain. I got lucky in the ER – mid afternoon on Friday is not so busy that I could not get seen right away.

Weirdest things about the ER:
The first question they asked me was not “Where does it hurt?” It was “Were you wearing a helmet?”
I was wearing my Rx sunglasses when I went in – they did not take them off until they sedated me
(and I mean “totally knocked me out”) to put my dislocated shoulder back in (which for some reason is referred to as a “reduction”). I must have looked very odd in my spandex shorts, bike shoes and sunglasses. Considering the amount of begging for painkillers I was doing, I do not think Lance Armstrong is going to be asking me to join LiveStrong any time soon.
The other thing is that I was apologizing constantly. I have no idea why.

I’ll be seeing the orthopedist on Monday. In the meantime, I’m discovering all the things I can’t do now because I don’t have the use of both hands.

This year, as we are reminded by our favorite weather prognosticators winter has come to the entire country. So, today I’ve got something for everyone.

Aunt Toby figures that by this point, most of the people in the US have got whatever form of heat they use cranked up about as far as it can go (or, everyone has unearthed their sweaters, hats, mitties, and long johns and are wearing them 24/7). And it has been that way for a while (for those of us who have had the heat turned on since November, this is not news; for those folks in the South, we feel your pain, truly). The air inside your house is dry and your eyes and your lips might be feeling dry too. Don’t forget to do what you can to put humidity into the air (hang laundry on racks, put out pans of water on registers and wood stoves, etc. etc.). And don’t forget to drink plenty of water.

But you might find that you or other family members are developing something that we refer to here at Chez Siberia as ‘Winter Itch’. When we had all the little Siberians at home, all it took for the first outbreak was for us to turn up the furnace (and the forced air heat). After about a week the kids would start to scratch. Our younger daughter was in such distress that we had to get a special lotion Rx’d for her which frankly had a little bit of cortisone in it.

What is happening (and I realize this hovers into “no, duh” territory) is that the dry air is wicking the moisture out of the skin, which starts to flake and that causes the itching. The trick here is to do two things:

First: get as much moisture into the skin (both internally and externally) as possible.

Second: Put a barrier in between the moisture on the skin surface and the dry air.

Getting moisture into the skin and keeping it there can be as simple as doing one or more of the following:

Take fewer showers and the showers you take, don’t use really hot water and use as little soap as you can (or a moisturizing gel or something like that; in a pinch, you can always use hair conditioner). If you swear you stink like a stevedore in August, you can always just rinse off/wash off those areas (you notice that no one gets winter itch in their armpits, right?).

After showers and baths, don’t rub every last bit of moisture from your skin; just pat dry and slather on cream or lotion that has a good component of oils in it. Cocoa butter is good; any product that calls itself ‘body butter’ is good. In a pinch, believe me you can use really light olive oil. Mix a couple of teaspoons in a spray bottle with warm water, shake up and spritz all over and smooth on.

When you buy products, check the labels:

Any product that claims to help with dry skin should contain stuff that does the following:

Water — this should be the first ingredient on the list.

“Occlusive” – these are things that block the evaporation of the water. Common ingredients that perform this function are petrolatum, acetyl alcohol, lanolin, lecithin, mineral oil, paraffin, and stearic acid. Popular silicones that act as occlusives are dimethicone and cyclomethicone. I am not particularly fond of petrolatum, mineral oil and paraffin – these all come from the processing of petroleum. If you want to just make lotion, use something that is liquid at room temperature such as a nut or fruit oil.

“Humectant” – these are things that attract moisture from within and without and are usually combined with the ‘occlusive’. The most popular humectant is glycerin.

Now, almost everyone has a tube, tub or bottle of some sort of lotion or cream at home that when they get dry skin they can smooth on. When you have winter itch, however, these do not necessarily have enough of one of those items listed above to really produce the effect you need. Most of the time, the issue is that the ‘occlusive’ is not thick enough or there is not enough humectant. Here are a few items that people many times have at home that can improve the result:

Vitamin E and lecithin capsules: If you are taking either of these, just take one, take a needle and poke a hole in one end of it ad squeeze it into your hand. Put a glob of cream on top of that and a little bit more water and rub your hands together. Smooth that over the effected area.

Let’s say that you want to make your own and don’t want to deal with chemicals. Well, hike yourself to the local drug store and look for a small bottle of glycerin and a small bottle of liquid Vit. E. Or, if they don’t have that, ask for Vit. E capsules. If you want to get fancy, ask for Lecithin capsules too. Put a drop of glycerin (teeny) in your hand, the Vit. E and/or lecithin and as much water as you can hold in the palm of your hand and rub your hands together. If you want to make up a bottle, fill a bottle that can hold up to three ounces of water half way with water, squeeze in the Vit. E and/or lecithin and fill the rest of the way with glycerin. Close, shake up and use. This will be like oil/vinegar dressing — you’ll have to shake it up every time you use it.

If you really want to go all the way, check out your grocery store in the international foods section for rosewater or orange flower water (this is used in Greek and Eastern European cooking). You can use this instead of the water in the bottle (or substitute as much as you want for the water, up to 100 percent, though they really have a very strong fragrance so you might want to go 50/50 with water) along with the glycerin, etc. and you will have produced a very traditional hand lotion that has a lovely fragrance. You may find that you need more Vit. E. as an occlusive, but this is the basic stuff.

Let’s say you want something with more ’staying power’ – then you will want to make a cream rather than a lotion, which means that you will want to use something as an ‘occlusive’ that is at least semi-solid at room temperatures, such as cocoa butter, coconut oil or beeswax. If you can find a beekeeper source, you can ask for beeswax cappings that still have honey in them. Honey has the added benefit in moisurizers that it is hygroscopic, so it fulfills the humectant role and the wax is the occlusive so you have natural products there. Depending on the type of beeswax you can get, the honey will have a different fragrance, so you will be getting something that will add fragrance to the hand lotion or cream you make. If you use beeswax, you will have to warm it up in order to mix it together with your other ingredients. Do this in a double boiler (beeswax melts at about 140 degrees F – it actually has quite a high flashpoint but I would take the melting process seriously and not turn on the stove and leave it there).

A basic formula for this would be:
1/4 cup beeswax
1 cup of oil (you can just use one oil, such as almond oil, a very light olive oil, coconut oil)
1/4 cup of water (or rosewater or orange flower water)

Put in the beeswax and melt first and then add the oil and stir together. Last, add the water or rosewater or orange flower water and stir together and pour out into whatever glass or ceramic container you are going to store this in (an empty small jar with a screw on lid is a good choice). The mixture will harden up and then you can use it when you need it.

So, now you have products to use on the dry skin. You can get an improved result with the following: Just before retiring for the evening, take a light warm shower and pat dry. Smooth on as much cream or lotion as you can and put on something to wear in bed. This will hold the moisturizer next to your skin for a longer period and it won’t rub off on the sheets. If you have cracked hands or feet, do the same thing and put on socks.
( Dry earth photo courtesy of Martin Knaapen)

“Most American women should consume no more than 100 calories of added sugars per day; most men, no more than 150 calories. That’s about 6 teaspoons of added sugars a day for women and 9 for men. The 2001-2004 NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) database showed the average intake of added sugars for all Americans was 22.2 teaspoons per day or about 355 calories….Soft drinks and other sugar-sweetened beverages are the No. 1 source of added sugars in the American diet. A 12-ounce can of regular soda contains about 130 calories and 8 teaspoons of sugar.”

The US sugar industry’s response was actually what you would expect from an industry lobbying group:
US Sugar Assn.

“The Sugar Association is very disappointed that a premier health organization such as the American Heart Association (AHA) would issue a scientific statement titled “Dietary Sugars Intake and Cardiovascular Health” without a higher standard of evidence to support its contentions and therefore mislead the average consumer….Every major systematic review of the body of scientific evidence exonerates sugar as the cause of any lifestyle disease, including heart disease and obesity. In 2002, after its 3-year comprehensive review, the expert panel assembled by the Food and Nutrition Board within the Institute of Medicine at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences stated publicly that the body of scientific evidence did not support the establishment of an upper level (UL) for total or added sugars intake based on data available for dental caries, behavior, cancer, risk of obesity and risk of hyperlipidemia…”

So, we know what side they’re on. But I digress.

One of the things about the AHA’s announcement that I think is a little confusing for consumers is the whole dependence on teaspoons of sugar as a measurement that supposedly consumers can use. When was the last time you picked up anything, turned it over for the nutritional information and found ‘teaspoons of sugar”?

Right. Never. That is not how the items are measured and put out there. The measurement that is done is in grams.

So, today, Aunt Toby is going to talk about grams, teaspoons, and how to convert one to another. Print out this chart, tape it to a 3×5 card and stick it into your wallet. As a matter of fact, print out this chart multiple times – and also stick those cards into cookbooks, recipe card files or however you do your cooking thing. And by the way, in general white and brown sugar is basically the same.

Sugar:
1 cup……………..48 teaspoons………………192 grams
½ cup……………..24 teaspoons………………96 grams
1/3 cup…………..16 teaspoons……………..64 grams
……………………….1 teaspoon………………..4 grams

Honey:
1 Tablespoon……3 teaspoons……………………16 grams

Molasses:
………………………….2 teaspoons…………………..5.86 grams

The reason I’m putting this out there is that getting our arms around that limit of 6 teaspoons of sugar a day (9 if you are male) is a little bit tough if you are looking at printed nutritional items. Here are a few to get you started.

Item………………………..What’s printed on the pkg……………what that translates into
12 oz. Can of coke…………….40.5 grams of sugar………………………10 teaspoons
1 4.3 oz. Hershey bar…………….24 grams of sugar………………………..6 teaspoons
½ cup, vegetarian baked beans…14 grams of sugar………………….…3.5 teaspoons
1 Tbl. Ketchup………………………..4 grams of sugar…………………………..1 teaspoon

So, as you can see, eating commercially prepared products, whether they are canned, baked or whatever will add up rather quickly to being over the new limit on added sugar in one’s diet. We won’t even discuss activities such as the number of teaspoons of sugar that people put into coffee or on cereal.

Better to eat non commercially prepared items?

Ah, but baking and making your own have issues too – but that has to do with more than serving size. For example, commercially prepared cranberry sauce has 16 grams of sugar in a quarter cup serving, which translates into 4 teaspoons of sugar per serving. The recipe on a bag of Ocean Spray fresh cranberries calls for a cup of sugar, which translates into 22 grams of sugar in a quarter cup serving – over 5 teaspoons. So, making your own according to their recipe will not save you on sugar.

On the other hand, I have made cranberry sauce by only using half the amount of sugar called for (and probably could have cut it back to 1/3 cup) and adding a cup of frozen blueberries. The sauce gelled up extremely well and tasted wonderfully. With half the sugar used, a serving has 11 grams of sugar, or fewer than 4 teaspoons of sugar in a serving. If I cut the recipe back to 1/3 of a cup of sugar, a serving would have less than 8 grams or fewer than 2 teaspoons of sugar per serving.

Again, thinking about what we are eating during the day is always a good exercise in terms of capturing information about what nutritional content of the food we eat actually has – and what items we would like to take in fewer of.

(sugar bowl photo courtesy of britmum)

This has all come to mind because the DH has had a death in his family recently – and it certainly is hitting him quite hard because this is a brother who is very close to him in age and was not the eldest. But the DH has a Mrs. Briggs-Smith in his family too – his mother’s father, who died extremely young of a heart attack. His mother had to leave school at the age of 13 to go to work to support the rest of the family because of her father’s death. There were four original children to live to adulthood – two have already died from heart attacks.

The point here is this: We come into this world with no choices over what DNA cocktail we’ve got. And we now have more information and analysis than ever about what long term effect choices concerning exercise, work environment, types of foods we eat (and their inflammatory effects or not), smoking, drinking, and drug use can have. But the DNA – your genetics – is the environment that has the ultimate effect on how those choices effect YOU.

On the other side of it, however, we tend to not discuss ‘family health history’ a whole lot, especially with siblings and cousins. People are afraid to even know what is out there – and that makes things very dangerous for us. There is always a certain amount of delusion that we all play with, especially when we are young. For the young, people who are not young are old. There is no stage in between ‘my age and how I feel right now’ and “old, sick and ready to die’. Young people do not understand that the decisions they make today and tomorrow and the day after that are going to effect who they are and how they feel when THEY are no longer young. As Satchel Paige said, “If I’d known how long I was going to live, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

And this is where ‘family-based healthcare system reform’ comes in. No matter how all of the broohaha settles out in terms of national healthcare system reform (and goodness knows we need it), we still all need a big dose of family-based healthcare reform and that starts right from the point of looking at our families as far back as we can get, putting it all down on paper and plotting out the possible connections. Do it like a genealogical diagram, with the folks farthest back at the top. Call, write, email, FB..whatever it takes to find out as much as you can so that you can put it all down and look at it from the dispassionate position of a researcher. What happened? Who ‘touched’ whom? It is not just “I’ve got Grandpa’s chin” – it is also “I’ve got Grandpa’s crappy knees and his disc disease and perhaps some other things as well.” Or, ‘Great-grandma died of breast cancer in her 40s; she had three daughters and one died of ovarian cancer in her 40s, one died of colon cancer in her 50s and one died of breast cancer in her 40s. The one who died of ovarian cancer had a son who died of prostate cancer in his early 60s.”

It’s all connected. But if we don’t know about it, there is no way to share the information with our families so that we can help our kids with early choices at home and help them make decisions later on that will help them have better health as adults. We are part of ‘healthcare reform’ too – and we are the part that has a certain amount of control over what happens..but we can’t make informed choices if we don’t know what’s out there.

Well, sometimes, Aunt Toby feels that way about KCE. I have to make sure to keep some of the ongoing things up in the air and revisiting them from time to time before they..well, they won’t go smash on the floor, but the story may not be fresh or interesting any longer and all of my little buggers might lose interest.

So, this post is a bit of a catch up.

Chicks: Well, as we saw last time, they stopped being chicks a very long time ago and are now pullets and cockerels and are now behaving a lot more chicken-y. The cockerels are getting quite annoying for the pullets now, and by the end of July, the pullets will have turned, magically, into hens and will start laying eggs, which means that they need places to lay those eggs IN..nesting boxes.

The DH, having gone through the experience of building the first chicken ‘tractor’ felt that he’d worked out the bugs from that and was now ready to build a ‘new and improved’ tractor complete with nesting boxes. No white wall tires, electric windows or automatic watering devices. In any case, no matter what, we would have two tractors and could theoretically pick and choose our way through our little flock to find the boys and the girls so that we could for sure get the girls into the ‘condo’ with the best roosters and leave the rest of the boys in the first tractor. You would think that knowing a boy chicken from a girl chicken would be the easiest thing going, and for the most aggressive and sexually mature cockerels, it is pretty easy: they are the biggest ones with the combs and wattles. It is a lot harder to select out the least mature cockerels, whose combs have not really started to develop and who do NOT have wattles. But we had to do it, if only for the space factor. There are all sorts of types of combs; our chickens because they were bred for cold northern winters, have what’s called a ‘pea comb’ which is teeny and lays close to the head. In the photograph, you have what people think of as a rooster with a comb – the farther south the chickens are, the better it is for them to have a big upstanding comb like this one because..combs radiate heat out of a chicken’s body. Those red things under the rooster’s chin are what are called ‘wattles’ and I have no idea what their function is, if anything.

As lonely as that sounds, it is not a whole lot of fun to be the cockerel who is NOT the biggest or best because that means that you are constantly being picked on, being shouldered away from the food, and being pecked. You are, as the saying goes, at the bottom of the ‘pecking order’. The ‘last guy’ as it were, is really in tough shape. So, by taking out the biggest (which turns out to be the most aggressive, most sexually mature, nastiest and so on) roosters out of the flock to put in with the pullets, it was as if we had completely reshuffled the deck for the rest of the roosters. They immediately got a lot more room than they had been able to occupy before, had less competition for the food, and a whole new pecking order had to be established. This did not, however, help the little guy at the bottom of the heap; frankly, he is still at the bottom of the heap but he will be able to avoid being pecked a bit more, be able to get a bit more food and will grow a little better and a little bit faster now.

It will also mean that he will probably be the last to go ‘a la Pepperoniville’ as we say at Chez Siberia. But I’m sure that being the last to ‘turn off the lights’ is not going to be much of a compensation for a lifetime of being the guy at the bottom of the totem pole.

The Garden: One of the things about gardening here in Upstate New York is the telescoping nature of time. We really do not get a very long spring, so keeping up with harvesting early things like lettuce and spinach becomes a race against the plants’ bolding as the days get longer and warmer. Needless to say, we have eaten spinach in as many permutations and combinations as I can think of, though I think I might just blanch and freeze the rest to use during the winter when I make my own pasta.

Pick Your Own: Aunt Toby and Elder Daughter will be returning tomorrow to the strawberry farm to pick…snap peas, actually. They are rushing in and are still nice and flat and not woody. My plan is to pick several pounds, blanch a little bit and freeze them in seal-a-meal pouches for use in asian dishes this winter.

The Economy: I don’t care what the pundits are saying – it’s still stinko.
And that is all you need to know.

Anyone who has a child who graduated from college this spring (as we did at Chez Siberia)knows that the overwhelming majority of these kids (unless they are engineers, computer programmers or accountants) are unemployed at the moment. My son’s estimate (backed up by a college intern we have at our office) is that only 1 of his friends had a job by the time he left school and that most of his friends opted to try to get into graduate school to sit out the recession. The Boy has a job for the summer but is looking…and competing with people with much more experience than he has.

We have assured him that Chez Siberia will not be going into the boarding house business any time soon and that he still has his bed to sleep in. However, by the end of the summer, we will no longer be able to cover him with our health insurance (hey people; write your Congressional Reps and Senators and DEMAND health care reform with a public offering). Luckily, New York State has a program that will allow him to buy his own insurance coverage at a not horrible rate.

If you have a child who graduated and is not going on to graduate school, you will need to check out what is available in your state to keep your kid covered — they are only covered for 90 days after their date of graduation. Trust me – for some reason, they can go through an entire four years of college with no more problems than an attack of acne…and as soon as their coverage lapses, something will happen and they will need major healthcare or dental work.

(rooster photo courtesy of nal in miami Juggler photo courtesy of Robbie Veldwijk)

Right?

Broccoli – now THERE’s a word that has a good feel in your mouth – very Italian and dramatic — brock–o–li. “Chard” has no charm at all; they should have stuck with the name that they used to call it, “Silver Beet” – that at least has a little bit of charm to it. Even ’spinach beet’ which was another name for it, is better. Chard? A marketing specialist would have a field day with this – let’s find the guy who came up with ‘the other white meat’ – that’s the guy we want to rebrand chard.

Why Swiss chard? Well, actually it’s actually a clever method by which the French(kings of all things obscure and clever) in the 19th century differentiated between this and various forms of spinach(because the leaves look a little bit like spinach). And since a Swiss botanist was the one to figure out that it’s part of the beet family, that’s where the Swiss came from – but the plant has been grown and eaten in the Mediterranean area for thousands of years. Aristotle wrote about it in the 4th Century BC and it was considered a great health tonic in ancient times.

And they were right. This veggie is filled with vitamins, minerals, fiber and even a little bit of protein. It is frankly considered an ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’ source for everything it has. Nutritional content of chard

The only thing it hasn’t got is a bland taste, which as we all know, Americans especially crave in a vegetable. If a vegetable has pungency in any factor, Americans avoid it like the plague — really too bad since the more pungent a veggie is, the more good stuff, healthwise, that it has. Think about kale. Think about onions, Think about..well, think about chard. Regular chard(light green to white ribs and green leaves) is less pungent than ruby or yellow chard, but it is still good for you. I like growing ‘rainbow chard’(that is just a collection of seeds from all the varieties so that I get the white, red and yellow ribbed types all in my garden – it’s very decorative as well as yummy), but you can find individual types in terms of seeds.

Chard, like other beets, is rated ‘easy-peasy’ in my gardening experience. The seeds come in sort of a cluster formation and are easily handled and easily spaced out in a row. They are also pretty chill proof, so you can put them in early and I found with soil in the 50 degree range, they jumped right out of the ground in less than a week’s time and handled the early spring chill and rain very easily. The trick with chard is to keep it well watered and when you harvest it, cut it off leaving the bottom two inches of the stalks. Keep it well watered and the chard will come back so that you have a ‘cut and come again’ crop. Chard is at its best when it is young – only let it grow to be about 10” or a foot tall before you harvest it and use it right away. Tall chard with big leaves is tough and woody and very pungent, especially if it was grown on dry ground in hot weather. Early chard, on moist cool soil is much less pungent and very nice.

You can eat chard fresh or cooked. Just make sure you treat the leaves like spinach, in that you need to rinse them very very well to get off any soil or sand. There are a few recipes to get you started:

The way we serve it at our house: Wash the chard well. Strip off the leafy parts and chop up the stems coarsely. Sautee two cloves of garlic, coarsely chopped(you might like yours more finely chopped). Add the chopped stems and cover the pan until the chard starts to get limp; then add the leaves and cover to steam. Serve when the leaves are limp over pasta with grated parmesan or other Italian cheese.

Swiss Chard Asparagus: Choose young chard – the stems should definitely be less than 1 inch across at the base. Wash well and strip off the leaves – use them in salad just like you would spinach. Lay the chard ribs in a flat bottomed pan slightly larger than they are with a little liquid – try something interesting like white wine. Steam and serve.

Stuffed Cabbage a la Chard: Choose chard with the biggest green leafy parts you can find. Wash well and cut off right at the base of the leaf. If the ribs are not too big, you can use those for another meal; store in a plastic bag with a wet paper towel). Cut out the rib base of the leaf. Mix up whatever filling you would use for stuffed cabbage or if you like Greek stuffed grape leaves, for that dish. Put the leaves in a big bowl and pour simmering water over them to wilt. Take out and put a big spoonful of filling on each leaf, rolling and wrapping it just like making stuffed cabbage. Put into a pan with some liquid (again, could be a little water, a little wine, some tomato sauce; whatever you use for the dish usually) and simmer to cook. Serve.

Chard Recipes from a UK site – they are very big on chard in the UK
Food Network Recipes

Try it. Then try it again. Learn to like chard. If you have to tell yourself ‘It’s good for me’, then so be it. It IS good for you. Put more colorful and flavorful veggies into your diet. It really IS good for you.

Eat your greens. This is one of them.

If you aren’t already, you may want to sit down to read this, because the things I’m about to discuss are considered unpleasant by a lot of people. Physical discomfort and even sickness, throwing money away, and contributing to larger landfills – all of these things can and do happen when you use… disposable tampons and pads.

Betcha weren’t expecting that!

Let’s talk money. I just did a little quick and dirty math. I can buy a box of 30 non-branded tampons from my local Tesco (UK supermarket) for about £1.20 (roughly equivalent to $2US); I can generally go through one of those boxes in 1 month, since my cycle is short and heavy (a lot like me, in fact, and in case you didn’t already know, having a 28 day cycle is fairly atypical, not the norm). That’s £14.40 a year, and I’ve been menstruating for about 15 years now; I’ve spent £216 ($354US) on tampons alone. Factoring in pads and pantiliners to deal with the inevitable leaks, spots, very heavy days and accidents over the course of a month, and I’m up to £1116 ($1829US), spent in the last 15 years. Assuming that I’ve got another 20+ years of this ahead of me, I could potentially spend more than $3000US to bleed on some cotton and then throw it away. And those are conservative numbers; there are some who estimate that the average woman spends around $6000US in her lifetime on disposable menstrual products. Call me crazy, but there are probably a million other things worth saving $6000 for.

To add injury to financial insult, tampons are actually kind of bad for you. TSS (toxic shock syndrome) is now firmly associated with tampons in the mind of the public, but is there more to be aware of? Most tampons are made from bleached cotton and rayon. The chemical process used to bleach the fibers in tampons has been shown to produce dioxins, which the US EPA consider as probable carcinogens. (Remember Victor Yuschenko, the President of Ukraine? Yeah, dioxins.) While the amount of dioxins found within tampons is incredibly low, dioxins bioaccumulate (build up in fatty tissues over time), and some researchers argue that any amount is unacceptable. In addition, Snopes.com reports that “conventionally-grown cotton is one of the most pesticide-intensive crops in commercial agriculture. About 10% of the world’s pesticides and 22.5% of all insecticides are used on cotton.” So what exactly are we putting inside ourselves on a monthly basis? (As a personal sidenote, I know I’m not the only woman who finds tampons to be uncomfortable; I don’t need to feel like I’m getting a pap smear every time I take it out with the fibers scraping up my vag.)

The cherry on the cake (as if we need one)? Where are all those used pads and tampons going? Your local landfill. 14 billion tampons, applicators, and pads end up in landfills each year. If we don’t want the earth to look like WALL-E-World, surely we have an obligation to stop with this.

Ok, scaremongering over. There’s hope, y’all. After thinking about all of these things for awhile last year and doing some simple internet research, I found out that we have options!

Reusable Cloth Pads

Guess what – ladies back in the day weren’t out growing and bleaching cotton so they could make disposable pads to stick in their underoos; they were using rags and washing them out after use. We’ve upgraded a bit since then, but honestly, there’s no point reinventing the wheel, right? Most modern reusable pads have two parts: a “case” and a towel insert. They can be made out of a variety of fabrics, but the basic premise stays the same: you bleed on them and then wash them out. Simple, honest, easy. If the thought of handwashing your bloody pad sends a cold tingle down your spine, just throw it into your washing machine (on the cold setting to prevent stains setting). Or, some people, who I would consider especially granola, like to soak their used pads in a jar of water and then use that water in their gardens. You can buy reusable pads in a variety of online shops (seriously, just google search “reusable cloth pads” or “reusable menstrual pads”), or you can sew your own! (This site has excellent guides and patterns to work from, and a good section on reusable pads on a budget.)

Menstrual Cups

Forgive me while I gush (har-de-har-har, no pun intended) for a minute. Buying a menstrual cup has changed my life. I don’t have to worry if I’ve got a tampon with me while I’m out. I don’t have to worry about pesticides leaching into my uterus. I don’t have to spend money on something that I end up throwing away after 8 hours of use. It’s heavenly.

Menstrual cups are what they say they are – cups that collect menstrual fluid. I’m not going to talk about the disposable kind that sits right over your cervix (much like a diaphragm) because they’re wasteful and often leak; their only redeeming benefit is that they can be worn during sexual intercourse, but it’s not redeeming enough in my eyes. The other, more wondrous kind is bell-shaped and flexible, and either made out of latex or silicone. Menstrual cups have holes around the rim to create suction against the walls of the vagina so that the cup doesn’t fall out; unlike tampons or the disposable cup, these cups sit much further down, right at the entrance of the vagina. There is a stem that sits at the closed end to aid with removal if needed. Generally, cup brands have a smaller and larger size, and the volume of each cup varies by brand. Menstrual cups are made to last 10-15 years. I could potentially never have to replace mine! My cup cost £20 ($33US) – assuming that the average woman would have to buy, at most, 3 cups in her lifetime, that’s still only 3.3% the cost of what I predicted I’d spend with a lifetime of tampons and pads!

http://www.menstrualcups.org/ – This is an incredible resource, with extensive FAQs on cleaning, insertion, and cup brands, and a whackload of reviews. Highly recommended.

Please stop using conventional, disposable menstrual products. They’re not good for your body, they’re not good for the environment, and they’re really not good for your wallet. Do your research and find some better alternatives.

Update: Mr. Weiner, the gentleman mentioned above, succumbed to H1N1 and died Sunday evening.first swine flu death in New York City

For current updates on H1N1, see US CDC: Swine Flu Update

What Aunt Toby wants to talk about is this: Where the hell did this thing come from? Remember ‘bird flu” – remember all the hooha about THAT? And do you remember what happened with that, either?

Me, neither. Aunt Toby is sort of like everyone else – if it doesn’t come and bang on my door, then I’m not paying attention. And we should all pay a LOT more attention.

NC Hog Farm Birth Site of Flu
“The new H1N1 influenza virus that continues to spread through the United States has ancestry in a swine flu outbreak that first struck a North Carolina hog farm more than 10 years ago, according to scientists studying the strain’s genetic makeup….The current strain’s eight genetic segments are all associated with swine flu, said Raul Rabadan, a Columbia University scientist studying the new H1N1 genetic sequence that was made public this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….”
“This virus was found in pigs here in the United States,” Rabadan said in an interview. “They were getting sick in 1998. It became a swine virus.”
It spread among pregnant sows in Newton Grove, N.C., causing them to abort their litters. The virus then spread to pigs in Texas, Iowa and Minnesota –putting epidemiologists on alert about the new viral strain and the potential for a human outbreak.
Scientists don’t yet know when or where the current H1N1 strain first emerged. They know only that it was identified after people in Mexico began falling ill with the fevers and aches..”
“ A May 1999 N&O story titled “Disease detectives untangle mystery of mutant flu virus” (available in the paper’s online archives) reported that the 1998 bug — a pig virus “wrapped in a shell of human proteins” — was isolated by a [North Carolina] state government veterinary lab. Similar mutations are suspected in earlier flu outbreaks, including the 1918 Spanish flu that killed more than 20 million people worldwide.
According to that story, the virus was discovered in August 1998 at a 2,400-sow breeding farm owned by Newton Grove, N.C.-based Hog Slat Inc., a leading builder of factory-style hog farms. The company is also one of Sampson County’s largest employers — as is Smithfield Foods, the Virginia-based corporation that owns numerous hog farms near the Mexican community where the earliest case of the current swine flu was identified.” Swine Flu Genes

Smithfield Foods. Remember that name because there is a more recent story about them as well:
“For centuries…peasant farmers here have eked a living from hogs… Old customs and jobs are dying and the air itself is changing, however, transformed by an American newcomer, Smithfield Foods. Almost unnoticed by the rest of the Continent, the agribusiness giant has moved into Eastern Europe with the force of a factory engine, assembling networks of farms, breeding pigs on the fast track, and slaughtering them for every bit of meat and muscle that can be squeezed into a sausage….In less than five years, Smithfield enlisted politicians in Poland and Romania, tapped into hefty European Union farm subsidies and fended off local opposition groups to create a conglomerate of feed mills, slaughterhouses and climate-controlled barns housing thousands of hogs.
It moved with such speed that sometimes it failed to secure environmental permits or inform the authorities about pig deaths — lapses that emerged after swine fever swept through three Romanian hog compounds in 2007, two of which were operating without permits. Some 67,000 hogs died or were destroyed, with infected and healthy pigs shot to stanch the spread.”
Smithfield Takes Over Pig Production in Eastern Europe

Why pigs? Why this and why now?

Pigs are amazing creatures – they have this ability, unknown in any other mammal, to act as a cauldron for viruses (and as a ‘mix and match’ operation as well) of creatures totally unlike pigs. Even totally not mammals – the current ‘swine flu’ is actually a tricky little creature that consists of swine, bird and human virus segments – it’s a ‘threefer’ – and because it’s got that human virus ‘hook’ to it, human beings can get it. And for those folks who are yawning about now, I’d like to remind them that the 1918 flu epidemic which killed tens of millions of people (most between the ages of 15 and 40) around the world, was just such a ‘combo virus’.

Scientists who have been able to extract viral materials from the cadaver of a person struck down by the 1918 flu, have identified that killer virus as another avian-based virus – but how can human beings catch a bird virus? Because it got mutated inside the bodies of swine who can act as the intermediaries of both bird and human viruses – a bird-swine-human virus salad bar.

It stands to reason then that birds and pigs should not be hanging out together in great numbers, right? It really is a ‘no duh’ that we should be giving hogs and birds, especially domesticated birds, a whole lot of air space between them so that they are not playing ‘changing partners’ with their viral material, right?

Well, we don’t. Companies such as Smithfield Foods (and they are not the only villains of the piece here – but they certainly are now the largest and the fastest moving) have taken advantage of modern agricultural technologies and of places where people do not ask a whole lot of questions, to create mega hog farms, putting thousands upon thousands of hogs into confinement conditions, with moist bedding, little air transport, and a whole lotta disease stuff going on. On the Eastern Shore area of Delaware and Maryland, chicken giants such as Purdue do the same exact thing. We will not discuss the environmental impact of this – that’s a discussion for another time. But the outbreak of H1N1 points a finger at the swine flu outbreak in Eastern Europe in 2007 and the bird flu outbreaks in Vietnam and Indonesia in 2004, 2005 and 2006(two places where, interestingly enough, pigs, chickens and other domestic fowl are raised together on a traditional basis) and this year in Egypt and also Vietnam.
Is high concentrated hog and chicken farming lighting the fuse on a killer influenza epidemic on a pandemic scale? And is there anything we can do to slow or stop this?

Well, only scientists can say what they think about pandemics. This is scary stuff and frankly I don’t think any country’s government is ready. Tamiflu is just not going to cut it since viruses hop around and change partners at will and it takes months to come up with a new Tamiflu to combat a new mutation.
But we CAN do something about companies which take advantage of lack of regulation and enforcement to put in high concentrations of hog and bird raising. This type of agricultural practice has turned out to be disastrous from an environmental and public health standpoint. Wouldn’t it be better to look at the alternative? Which is?

Pasture raising. De-centralized agriculture. The way agriculture was in this country before the Second World War. What was raised in a state was, by and large, eaten in the state. I remember reading a study done by Rodale where they looked at how self-sufficient the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was in the 1930s versus how self-sufficient it was in the 1980s. The statistics were staggering – in the 1930s, the vast majority of food that Pennsylvanians ate, all year round, was raised in Pennsylvania. Now, the numbers have flipped; the vast majority of food that people in Pennsylvania eat is raised…elsewhere and trucked or flown in.

We have all gotten so used to eating veggies and fruits out of season through the miracle of long distance refrigerated freight, that we are now at the mercy of what happens in other states. Want a salad in January or February and there is really bad weather in California or Florida? No greens. Want grapes in the spring and something happens in Chile? Out of luck. Want affordable bread and something happens in the Midwest (like what happened to grain stocks a couple of years ago)? Bread gets really really expensive. And so does animal feed – which makes conventionally raised meat and chicken a LOT more expensive.
It really would be better for us all if we supported and encouraged out local (as in state and neighboring states) farmers to grow everything they can, under the healthiest situation they can. That means pasture raising meat, chickens and eggs – no houses with tens of thousands of pigs and birds, releasing thousands of tons of manure at one go. (remember the lagoon failures in North Carolina a couple of years ago? The Cape Fear River still has not come back from that) That also means having farmers return to crops and varieties that worked for them and technologies that work in the state’s environment. In Upstate New York for example, grain farmers are returning to varieties that were grown in the 19th century, and grain mills are being built again. It certainly is not the same sort of stuff that comes out of the Midwest, but it’s here..it’s close..and it will provide an alternative. Tomato growers in Western New York are taking advantage of greenhouse and hydroponic technologies to produce tomatoes all year round. Their tomatoes can be on customers’ tables within hours of picking.

Aunt Toby lives in a county that has not had a large agricultural industry in probably 50 years. Yet – I can go to my farmers’ market and find and buy pasture raised beef, pork, lamb, turkey (pasture raised turkeys?????), chicken and eggs – not from one farmer only, but several. This is amazing – and our county is not exactly what I would call wealthy. We’re not talking Westchester County here – we’re talking about a place that is one of those ‘used to be big in manufacturing’ sorts of places. It is not just a case of ‘kindness’ either(though that is a factor also) – it’s a case of people’s being concerned about their health, the health of the community and the health of the animals: pasture raising integrates manure and other products into the environment in a small, ongoing sort of way. No lagoons to fail. No ungodly ammonia from chicken batteries. Also, no hormones, no antibiotics (to also end up in the environment), and animals getting enough fresh air and sunshine on a daily basis so that they are not subject to viral infections that can be passed on.

The other thing is this: In those huge hen houses and swine farrowing facilities, there are people working under the same conditions as the animals are living – exposed to the ammonia, exposed to the manure, exposed to the diseases, and exposed to the viruses that are being cooked up by the swine. Under pasture raising, the amount of exposure to the animals is actually pretty limited to moving the animals to a new piece of pasture, in the sun and breeze.

A lot safer for all of us.

Concerned about swine flu, avian flu and the role of confinement animal raising in public health? Contact your state health department and your state legislators and demand that these types of operations be stopped. Not grandfathered. Stopped. Torn down. Eliminated. Also Contact the US Agriculture Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and your Congressional Representatives and Senators. What happens in North Carolina and Delaware and other states affects every single one of us. Those Smithfield Farms pigs in Mexico sure did not care that their viruses came from North Carolina – but the folks in Mexico and Texas and now places like Wisconsin and New York City certainly do.

And so should every single one of us.

(illustration courtesy of Hector Aiza Photo courtesy of Farm Sanctuary)

Brain Rehearsal for Job Loss

Obviously, other people take a different approach:

“..a few months ago, Ms. Hubbard, a graphic designer in Cambridge, Mass., began having panic attacks over the economy, struggling to breathe and seeing vivid visions of “losing everything,” she said.
She “could not stop reading every single economic report,” was so “sick to my stomach I lost 12 pounds” and “was unable to function,” said Ms. Hubbard, 52, who began, for the first time, taking psychiatric medication and getting therapy. …Anxiety is not just troubling those with much to lose, like older people and homeowners. Elizabeth Dewey-Vogt, 25, a paralegal whose bills and shrinking overtime made her move in with her parents in Alexandria, Va., said she began “constantly worrying about finances,” and having panic attacks, “rapid heart beat, choking sensation, chills or sweating, numbness and tingling in my fingers,” and feeling “almost removed from my body.”
Ms. Dewey-Vogt said that she now took anxiety medication, and that a therapist advised her to pull over or “concentrate on the license plate ahead” if she began panicking while driving and to grip on the handles of her chair when panicking at work.

People Entering Therapy Due to Economic Stress

As much as Aunt Toby is a big believer in ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’ and admits to never, ever having a license to prescribe anything other than a good bowl of soup and a hot shower, I think something is missing here: People are concentrating on stuff they cannot possibly control and getting medicated for the feelings that doing this generates.

I’m going to repeat something because I think this is key to surviving what will probably be at least a year if not two (or three or even five) of absolutely ‘in-the dumpster’ economy: Concentrate only (ONLY!) on stuff you can control. Do not concentrate on stuff that is in the hands of people or forces that are global or national in scope. Concentrate on you and your family. That’s it. If you can’t put your arms around it and hug it tightly to your heaving bosom, then let it go.

Do you have a say in what banks are doing with their TARP money and with how tight their corsets on credit are? If you do, I hereby give you permission to go out there, clean their clocks, fire the villains at the top, and make banking boring again. Oh, you DON’T? Well, then don’t worry about that. If you need credit in some form, then it’s time to think creatively: angel networks, your neighbors, businesses your business does business with, local credit unions, etc.

Do you have a say in what the Fed Rate is this month? If so, I think it’s time for you to go have a heart to heart with Ben Bernake. Oh, you DON’T? Well, then don’t worry about that.

Do you have control in how you do your job? How you are perceived at work? What sort of upgrades in training you will get for yourself? How many people you keep up with and network with on an ongoing basis? How you are taking care of yourself? How you are listening and interacting with your SO? How you use/or not your credit cards?

Ah. Stuff you can control.

As some of my readers know, Aunt Toby is “stone-like a rock-set off a bomb next to me and I won’t know it” deaf. I became deaf because I inherited a genetic disposition to something called Otosclerosis (which is to the little bones in the ear what arthrosclerosis is to the highways that push blood around our bodies). Although for the moment, I have a military-grade, ruggedized hearing aid that does a wonderful job of ‘making the dog bark louder’, it is the business of otosclerosis that eventually, it invades the aural nerve and that’s it. Yes, there are some amazing technologies out there(which all seem to revolve around someone drilling a hole in my skull and implanting something which requires me to smear antibiotic ointment everywhere around it; considering I get the creeps from the idea of putting contact lenses in my eyes, this is waaaay beyond ‘acceptable medical risk’ for your dear Aunty), but long ago, I decided to come to terms with a future without sound. I did the research, spoke to my doctor and audiologist, and although things have not gone exactly the way we figured (I thought menopause was going to be the ‘pull the plug out of the wall’ moment; the hearing has gotten worse, but I’m still hanging in there and so far, technologies in telecom and hearing aids have kept pace), the future still looks the same. Sometimes it gets really upsetting – there is no doubt about that. Sometimes, I get a bit anxious about what it will be like communicating with family members once the whole thing craps out. I do know that there might be a moment when my boss and I will have to sit down and talk about changing my job in ways that perhaps we had not expected before.

But I refuse to be afraid. I really have no control over how fast this process is going to be or when the ultimate moment is going to take place. I may literally wake up one morning and not even be able to say ‘good morning’ to the DH. Being deaf is not going to mean that I will become any better of a housekeeper or worse an accountant. It will mean that probably I will have to do more communicating through IM and email rather than over the phone. My boss is the sort of person who as long as I am really painfully straight with him over what is happening, he is a really good Joe. Not everyone’s boss is like mine; I know that. But I concentrate on thinking through what I can do to continue working, what I can do to expand my skills, what I can do to bring more value to what I do. I do not focus on stuff I can’t control – that sort of thing makes me anxious and upset.

Gaining a sense of control over various areas of your life is key to surviving crazy times. Spend your energies on you and yours – the rest will have to take care of itself.
(Umbrella photo courtesy of Purplemattfish

Such is the power of appearance; li’l Miz Scarlet understood that if she wanted to ask for what amounted to a huge chunk of change, she’d better look as if she did not need it. And logic means nothing under these circumstances, either – we’re talking right after the end of the ‘War between the states’ – and another one of her famous lines was ‘I’ll never be hungry again.” It’s not as if she felt she had a choice.

Hard times make for hard choices, and at times, that means making the decision to ‘keep up appearances’ can be really really important.

“The Wall Street type in suspenders, with his bulging briefcase; the woman in pearls, thumbing her BlackBerry; the builder in his work boots and tool belt — they could all be headed for the same coffee shop, or bar, for the day….
“I have a new client, a laid-off lawyer, who’s commuting in every day — to his Starbucks,” said Robert C. Chope, a professor of counseling at San Francisco State University and president of the employment division of the American Counseling Association. “He gets dressed up, meets with colleagues, networks; he calls it his Western White House. I have encouraged him to keep his routine…..“If showing pride in these kinds of situations was always maladaptive, then why would people do it so often?” said David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “But people do, of course, and we are finding that pride is centrally important not just for surviving physical danger but for thriving in difficult social circumstances, in ways that are not at all obvious.”
When All You Have Left Is Pride

In the case above, it’s psychological, but there is also a basis in the ‘tooth and claw’ world as well. As someone who raised livestock for a long time, I can tell you that the whole issue of ‘pecking order’ (whether you are talking about sheep, goats or chickens) is not only an issue of who gets to harass whom, but also a matter of who gets to stand at the feeder and eat…and who gets their feed stolen. Yes, it is a case of bullying in the barn. Yes, it is a case of the smaller, weaker, and less able to defend themselves being bullied by the others – and that stress showing up as greater parasite loads, generally weakened conditions, more disease issues, and sometimes death (direct and indirect).

As relatively educated human beings, we know what can develop when something terrible happens to people – whether it is a death of a spouse or a child, the loss of a job, being harassed at work or school and so on. People can become depressed, setting them many times into a spiral from which they do not recover. It becomes very easy, especially if one spends a lot of time at home in front of the computer, even while looking for a job, to frankly be doing it in sweats, flip flops and a coffee cup with three day old coffee (hopefully without cigarette butts in it). Even if you got the call for an interview that very day, would you feel energetic enough to pull yourself together, grab your things and head out to face the questioning?

Even if I have the flu and am feeling frankly like ‘death warmed over’, I usually can make myself feel 100% better if I get up, take a shower, do my hair, put on a bit of makeup and dress in good clothing. I remember once reading a piece about the morale-lifting effect of a consignment of red lipstick that was delivered to the female inmates of Bergen-Belsen about a week after the Red Cross had paid a call there. Supposedly, the women eked out that color for a very long time, using it not only as lipstick, but also as rouge to make themselves look healthier.

I know it sounds like blathering to tell you that if you are out of work, you should be devoting time and energy to making yourself look and feel good, but believe me, it works. When I was caring for my mom, who was suffering from dementia, the only thing I could do for myself (because I was also working a full time job and would race from the office back to my mom’s house to take over for the home health care aid), was to lift weights while watching my mom’s door to make sure she did not make a break for it out of the house. It gave me a feeling of empowerment that I needed to deal with my own feelings of ineptitude and lack of control under that situation. Gaining a feeling that you have some control over aspects of your life is terribly important when you have lost what for most people is the central defining activity of their lives.

So. in terms of this economy (out of work, struggling to keep your job, struggling with finances or whatever), aunt Toby wants you to make sure when you wake up every morning, that you first of all take care of YOU. If you still have your job, dress every day as if your being at the job is really important to you. If you are out of work, take the time to dress and look the best you can, perhaps not as if you were going to get the interview call that day, but at least so that if you wanted to go out and network, or go to a meeting, go to the bank or whatever, that, as Scarlet said above, you ‘look like a queen’. Best foot and shoe forward. Even sitting at the computer, you’ll feel better, you’ll have more energy and it will help. You may have to make yourself do it – but trust me on this one; it’s worth doing.

(photo above courtesy of booboogbs)