Ikea: It also makes cat traps.

It seems that the last time I posted in my “cats” category it was an obituary for The Professor, late of epic legend. I haven’t had too much to report since then.

My other cat, Maybelle, is a cantankerous “muted” tortie – so called because her fur is mostly grey and washed out with subtle turns of tortoiseshell patterning. Her meow sounds closer to a frog than a cat. She has green eyes and a fairly surly disposition, or she looks like she does, but she’s really a sweetie. As long as she has no other cats in her territory. She’s a one-woman show.

About two years ago Maybelle had surgery for what turned out to be, of all things, breast cancer. Her upper left mammary gland developed an external tumour that was fairly fast growing. The appointments and surgery cost me just over a thousand dollars, and she wore the cone of shame for three weeks. My vet told me he was impressed that I didn’t cave and let her out of it early. He also told me that if the problem arose again it would likely be in the next gland down (there are 8). In fact, the problem arose in the gland over to the right, and has been, again, rapidly developing for while. It is absolutely amazing to me how fast a tumour can grow.

Shortly before the surgery, the first tumor ulcerated, which was a new experience for me. I was not all that comfortable with seeing my animal bleed. Unfortunately discovering the same thing happening now was not all that much of a shock, so much as a dismay.

I have been trying to decide for a while what I want to do about the recurrence. I declined the option of chemotherapy for her after the surgery. I don’t regret that choice, but the ulceration of tumour #2 has now sped up my timeline significantly. I know she’s uncomfortable, but I don’t think she’s in pain. Still, the situation needs to be dealt with before the site gets infected on top of everything else. Putting her through surgery again is not my best option. Eventually the recurrences will outrun the surgeries. Still, she’s my cat. It’s been me and her against the world since Professor went, and trust me, she was thrilled to see him go.

I am also a little concerned about, well, me. Although I have been trying, my support network here in Toronto is not extensive. I had a whole village around me the last time, and frankly, there was no choice with Prof. But right now I’m daunted. I know there will always be other cats, but Maybelle is the first who’s ever been solely mine. I’m possessive of that relationship.

Life kind of sucks today.

This song has become a favorite recently. Josh Ritter has made it possible to share his song player, so I’ve pasted it below. Select “Lantern”, and follow the lyrics.

From Josh Ritter » So Runs the World Away.

Lantern

Give me light for my lantern
Give me light for my lantern give me light
Be the light in my lantern
The light in my lantern tonight

It’s a hungry world out there
Even the wind will take a bite
I can feel the world circling
Sniffing round me in the night
And the lost sheep grow teeth
Forsake the lambs and lie with the lions

Where the living is desperate
Precarious and mean
And getting by is so hard
That even the rocks are picked clean
And the bones of small contention
Are the only food the hungry find

Where the thistles eat the thorns
And the roses have no chance
And it no wonder that the babies
Come out crying in advance
And the children look for shelter
In the hollow of some lonesome cheek

And the sky’s so cold and clear
The stars might stick you where you stand
And you’re only glad its dark cause
You might see The Master’s hand
And you might cast around forever
And never find the peace you seek

For every cry in the night
Somebody says, “Have faith!”
“Be content inside your questions”
“Minotaurs inside a maze”
Tell me what’s the point of light
That you have to strike a match to find?

So throw away those Lamentations
We both know them all too well
If there’s a Book of Jubilations
We’ll have to write it for ourselves
So come and lie beside me darling
And let’s write it while we still got time

So if you got a light hold it high for me
I need it bad tonight hold it high for me
Cause I’m face to face hold it high for me
In that lonesome place hold it high for me
With all the hurt that I’ve done hold it high for me
That can’t be undone hold it high for me
Light and guide me through hold it high for me
And I’ll do the same for you hold it high for me

I’ll hold it high for you cause I know you’ve got
I’ll hold it high for you your own Valley to walk
I’ll hold it high for you though it’s dark as death
I’ll hold it high for you and then gets darker yet
I’ll hold it high for you though your path is blocked
I’ll hold it high for you through the thieves and the rocks
I’ll hold it high for you keep you safe from harm
I’ll hold it high for you until you’re back in my arms

Today’s experiment is gluten-free bread.

Well hey. I’ve never made bread before, so let’s just jump in the deep end and see if we swim.

I’m using the Sandwich Bread recipe from Carol Fenster’s 1000 Gluten-Free Recipes (link goes to amazon.ca). I figure if I need to figure out whether this type of bread will work for me, I oughtta try the thing that will be most like Wonderbread. So here we go! I am writing this mostly as a play-by-play.

The bread is made mostly of potato starch, with some sorghum flour and tapioca flour blended in.

Firstly. When using gums such as Xanthan and Guar, they aren’t messing around with the sticky. It is super sticky! This bread isn’t kneaded, and the dough is somewhere between muffin and regular bread. Getting it into the pan was a two-spatula job. Then, to rise, but only once. While rising this exchange was had:

Me:  The bread is, theologically, rising.

BF:  Do you mean theoretically? Or is it rising due to its belief in spiritual beings?

Me: Lol. Yes! All of these things!

…love that autocorrect.

To my shock and amazement, it did indeed rise, in a little over half an hour. Science at work! Next step: into the oven.

Bready bread bread.

Baked an hour at 375F, which is either slightly to high or slightly too long for my oven, so I took it out five minutes early.  It’s a fairly thick crust as you can see, about 3mm thick all around (I measured it). The texture is not dissimilar from bread machine bread. The flavour is not unlike a soda bread, but a little yeastier and just subtly different from wheat bread… and the bread is not crumbly like soda bread. Once cooled, it tolerates fairly thin slicing.

I would like a little more rise. You can see that it didn’t get muffin-topped. More rise would require the addition or substitution of the poorly named modified tapioca starch “Expandex,” which I’ve yet to source in Toronto or Ottawa. Not that I’m certain about consuming something called Expandex.

Considering there is no gluten in this I am impressed that it is not crumbly. It has good elasticity and good bite. The tuna sandwich I am rewarding myself with is holding up just fine.

Verdict: Carol’s directions are fabulous. They tell me not only what I am doing, but why. The result is a totally sandwichable bread with a subtle flavour that doesn’t interfere with the filling.

Total time: About two hours and three loads of laundry.

…and 19 days to go.

Day 1 was hit and miss. Firstly, I was home sick from work, fighting back against yet another cold. (Well I am having none of that. It’s only been four weeks since I got over the last one. ) I started the day out well with one of the program recipes for breakfast – Sone’s Breakfast Fix, which is essentially a bowl of banana, strawberry and blueberry with a splash of honey.

The splash of honey didn’t work out so well. I don’t normally have honey in the house and as it turns out I have no idea how to handle or maneuver it, so it was really more like a generous helping of honey. (I didn’t have any honey this morning, and it was just as good.)

Day 1 lunch did not go so well. The course does not come with a disclaimer/warning for those who aren’t used to a raw food diet, and I certainly am not. Coleslaw as a main dish was way too much for my system on the first day. I had an unpleasant afternoon.

Day 1 dinner was leftovers that probably had some dairy in it – it was the rice casserole I made to use up ingredients a day or two before, and I made it with a cream of something soup. Broccoli, I think. At any rate despite my best intentions I was still annoyed at lunch, so leftovers it was. I had them again for lunch today.

Today I cleaned out my fridge. There were things in there already expired (salad dressing) and things that were simply not going to outlast me for three weeks (previously frozen cheddar – can’t refreeze that.) So all the dairy is gone. All the gluten is packed into it’s own “bad” drawer, too. I don’t wan’t to look at it for the next three weeks. I brought low-calorie Coffee Mate to work so that I can still have my decaf coffee, but I am drinking green tea instead of black now after lunch.

This evening’s dinner was a win. I made a root veggie stew with curry powder and lentils, and it is a) super yum and b) will be my lunch for the rest of the week.

Today’s journalling is about movement and exercise.  In thinking about it I have decided that while I’m not sure whether I miss bellydance, I miss how I felt when I was doing it, the zen of drills and the comraderie.  Food for thought.

For all intents and purposes of the blog, it may seem like I didn’t make it very far though this course. But just because there was a lull in writing does not mean there was a lull in thinking or experience. I wrote about hitting a wall, and I did. I haven’t completely overcome it yet but I continue to find other ways to move forward.

The Week 3 materials were all about prayer, in various forms, and personal spiritual books. Let’s talk about the book first. This assignment was easy for me because I had already done it.

Since becoming a pagan I have for many years been experimenting to find my optimal “Book of Shadows”. I put that in quotations because it is an idea I have discovered is not all that applicable to me. A few years ago I instead began to refer to it as my Book of Sunlight, into which went inspiring snippets, prayers, correspondences, card layouts & interpretations, etc. I’m currently on the 3rd revision, which is a lot of writing. The first book is the most filled, but much of the material is no longer relevant to my practice.

L to R: 1st, 2nd and 3rd Editions

The words on the cover of Book 2 are:

The feather, whence the pen was shaped that traced the lives of these good men, dropped from an Angel’s wing.
- William Wordsworth

An example of rune lore from the first book.

In Book 2 I tried to take all of the relevant material from Book 1 and simply copy it out, but I didn’t enjoy the sequence in which I laid it out. Eventually I gave up and moved on to Book 3. The format of Book 3 is compatible with the idea of the Journey Book in the Nomad course so I’ve simply continued to use it. Recently I’ve added these quotes:

There are no rules, and those are the rules.
- Cantus Fraggle

The people we become, well, they’ve never been the people who we are.
- Matchbox Twenty, “Busted”

Life is not tried, it is merely survived if you’re standing outside the fire.
- Garth Brooks, “Standing Outside the Fire”

The second quote in particular is a lyric that has made me think more than any other I’ve ever come across. It has always resonated but it took me years to figure out why. Now that I am wholly different than the person I was when I first heard the song more than a decade ago, it makes sense to me. It still resonates.

And so the Book of Sunlight goes on. I am certain I will eventually have 4th, 5th, 6th editions, but for now I will focus on filling up the 3rd. Have you any favourite inspirational quotes that resonate so much you had to write them down?

My lifelong relationship with food has been, overall, fairly healthy. As a kid I usually liked whatever was put in front of me, and we didn’t eat out too often. By the time I was about 21 I had figured out that there were foods I felt worse when eating and foods that didn’t set me off. Over the course of the last decade or so I have been playing games of cause-and-effect and process-of-elimination.

My main issue is canker sores/mouth ulcers. There still isn’t a whole lot of research out there on cankers, mostly because they are not life threatening in any way. They really just hurt. Some theorists thought they were caused by the same bacteria that causes stomach ulcers, but that theory is no longer popular. Nowadays research is focused less on the Why and more on the What Do We Do About It? and frankly, that’s fine. Cankers are not contagious. I’ve spent years doing my own personal experiments on them. My laboratory is just very small.

SLS – sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate – is the biggest factor and is well-known for its impact on the lives of canker sufferers. It is also a main ingredient in 90% of toothpastes. I was pleased when Sensodyne released Pro-namel, which doesn’t have it, and which is thus my favourite toothpaste ever.

I’ve also taken to avoiding overly salty or acidic foods, certain preservatives (potassium sorbate in particular) and hard candies. Am I allergic to any of these things? Doubtful. But avoiding them has made my life 100x better than it was before.

Cankers conquered (say that 5 times fast!) – mostly,  I started to move on to other things that made me feel less than great. Potato chips, and all high-fat foods, do not agree with me even though my brain says they’re delicious. It turns out that eating fewer fried things was key.  Over the last several years I also cut down on refined sugar, and all sugar. I’ve reduced caffeine. I cook and bake more of my own food with less salt and no preservatives.

When the opportunity to try a gluten-free program appeared before me, I was interested. I have yet to crack the code on what my skin wants me to eat (or not eat) to be happy. There is also some research that suggests gluten may have an impact on anxiety. Out of curiousity I signed up for Goddess Leonie’s Radiant Goddess e-course, and starting Tuesday will be going as gluten- and dairy-free as possible for the next 21 days.  Will I go totally veg or totally raw? No. But I’ll do what I can and try to stay on the baseline of no wheat or dairy, and go from there… Let’s see how I feel in three weeks!

I don’t really understand how it’s managed to be ten days since my last post. I feel like all my spare time has been spent contemplating blog posts, so the fact that they have not magically materialized is baffling.

Where have the last ten days gone? My week was entirely slurped up by work, mostly. I worked late every night, I think. A couple of social commitments in the latter part of the week and poof! gone.

Lately I have been…

• Deciding on a new blog layout, something more springlike;
• Deciding on a soon-to-be new computer, as the little netbook is no longer serving me to the best of my needs;
• Budgeting (see above);
• Joining Leonie’s Goddess Circle;
• Preparing to begin the Radiant Goddess e-course provided by Goddess Leonie, including researching gluten-free baking;
• Out seeing Cabin In The Woods (so good!);
• Spring cleaning; and
• Reading The Bloggess’ book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened – finished it, too!

Things are stewing, ’round here. At the moment I am fighting off a cold, no doubt due to becoming run down from all that aforementioned working late. As such everything is very much in an in-between place, which I guess is fine but results in too much silence online. More than I’d like, anyway. Mayhap while I sequester myself away to get some rest I might be able to do some catching up. Maybe. It could happen.

In my previous post I mentioned my new pearl ring. Here she is.

She’s silver and 14k gold, with a pearl plucked from an oyster. I am assured that all of the oysters at The Pearl Factory die of natural causes.

For those who are not familiar, The Pearl Factory can only be found in a handful of places in the States, mostly of the touristy variety, however, in those few places they are abundant. They are based in Hawaii. My mom and I happened upon one (actually, two) in the hotel we were staying at while we were in Las Vegas. The first night, one nice sales rep explained to us how it worked. For the next two days we walked by the kiosk to and fro and to and fro, and on the last night I followed my heart and went down to find myself a pearl.

The pearls are still in their shells, and so are selected by sheer intuition. Once the shell is selected there is a ritual of tapping the shell 3 times and yelling “Aloha!” to say goodbye and hello as the pearl starts its new life with you. It’s lovely, and really fun.

The main lustre of my pearl is pink, with a green and gold catch. The “catch” is that reflective part of the pearl’s surface that you almost think you can pick up with your fingers.

There’s a lot of meaning packed into such a little thing. The colours, as with flowers or gems or anything else, have superstitions attached to them. Based on the colours of the pearl I chose, I was told that I will always be beautiful. That made me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Once you have your pearl, you can either have it as-is or have it set then and there. The setting I chose is, as I understand, a fairly traditional Hawaiian concept – Maile. Maile leaves are apparently reserved for special occasions, such as weddings and someone being honoured for something. They represent love, honour and respect.

The ring itself represents a new phase in my life inspired by the Nomad course and starting to attend UU church; my willingness to love, honour and respect myself and my spiritual needs; and, besides, it’s just so pretty. I have been wearing it nearly every day. I’m a child of Venus, so the pearl just seems very appropriate to me; very comfortable.

Things I have learned about pearls recently:

They need to absorb the natural oils of the skin, or they will become brittle. So: they need to be worn. This is apparently a factor in why pearls are often heirlooms. It’s somewhat intimate when you think about it.

Ocean pearls really are more lustrous than freshwater pearls. I compared my ring to my gorgeous strand of freshwater pearls. In comparison to the ring, my reflection on the surface of the freshwater pearls is similar to looking into a bathroom mirror while it’s fogged up.

As pearls are porous, they actually feel rough if you scratch one against your tooth. Comparatively, fake or costume pearls will be smooth. The more you know.

Today I…

• Slept in a bit;
• Drank tea instead of coffee;
• Got caught up on most of my lovely blogs;
• Exfoliated;
• Rinsed my face with cold water and used a masque;
• Had my V8;
• Worked on a (challenging) 2-year old knitting commission that wants to go home to its owner;
• Wore my new pearl ring;
• Left my hair down;
• Ate chocolate chip Eggos;
• Meditated in the sun;
• Signed up for the Soul Spackle Museletter;
• Sent in my registration for Red Spiral;
• Set my alarm for Unitarian Service o’clock tomorrow; and
• Went for a walk in the ravine.

A lot’s been going on at the Cottage, and at the same time, not all that much at all. The last two weeks have been quiet because I haven’t been here. First, I went to Vegas with my mom, the first time either of us had been, so I’ll give you a recap of that soon. But while we were away we both fell sick (I think it was a foreign American flu of some kind) and for the last week I’ve just been trying to recover from that. It’s taking a lot longer than I’d like. But it forces me to slow down and take care of myself, which like as not is necessary – and if I’d been doing that in the first place, I wouldn’t really be in this situation.

I’m not sure where all the time went this week, but what little I was awake was mostly spent watching Lost. I haven’t previously seen Lost and am watching it all at once right now, and am into the third season. I’m enjoying it but I am glad I waited to watch it all at once. Things are getting hairy! However, I’ll be happy to have my evenings back once it’s over. There’s a reason I only do this (binging shows) a couple of times per year.

Today I finally feel well enough to start doing some real self-care again, which has been low on my priority list recently. I would like to have a spa day, but failing that I shall make due with a masque, the same Elizabeth Arden one I’ve been using for a little while now. It’s made with wine grapes and smells so yummy, and makes my skin soft. My skin is very much enjoying the switch to quality skin care products. Say what you will about whether paying three times as much for moisturizer works any better. To me, it’s worth it.

There was other self-care that happened this week – I opened a savings account and retooled my budget to make sure that I get to do things this year, like go to Red Spiral, with a lot less monetary and mental stress than my trip to Vegas cost me.

Trying to get caught up on my blogs, however, that’s more of a challenge!