The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Ailsa Ek:

Boruch dayan emes.

Nancy:

That was beautiful. Thanks.

Guess I'm the only one who uses TextEdit on the Mac. I find it does everything I need to do quite nicely, although I still miss ProWrite. And, although I hate to admit it, for anything that uses words and pictures I tend to use PhotoShop. It works, I know how to use it, and most of my words + pictures things are CD covers, which are more about the pictures anyway.

Oh, and I didn't talk like a pirate yesterday, but I did join the Pirate Party.

My favorite juvenile pirate book is Jade by Sally Watson.

#349

Greg, you are evil. Just so you know.

I think I am going to swear off news for a bit. The story I ran across this morning about the chassid being thrown off the plane in Canada because he was davening just blew my buffers. It's all just so depressing and I feel so useless.

And at the same time, it's a gorgeous early Fall day here. I was out walking my dog around our little New England town, admiring the grass and the trees and the houses and thinking, "This looks nothing like the way I imagined a repressive dictatorship would look." Here's all this crap going on, and my day to day life has changed not a whit, outside of the stuff I know about and am upset by.

Re: stevia - Taste it before buying a bunch of it, though. I thought it was an excellent idea, but the one time I put some in my coffee, I handed it off to Adam after three sips because I just couldn't drink any more of it. Nasty, nasty stuff.

We generally have a month's worth of supplies on hand, although the meals would get a bit dull towards the end. Water, though, I am really lax about stockpiling. Assuming no disaster between now & moving, I plan to get better about it at the next place. Lehmann's has water storage bags that I rather like the look of. My mom uses old milk jugs as water transportation, but I don't trust them for storage, except perhaps for water that I was planning to use only as thermal mass or for watering plants.

I have this really neat book (Making the Best of Basics: Family Preparedness Handbook) on preparing for emergencies. According to it, one should store one gallon of water per family member per day for a two-week period. It'd be better to have more, of course, in case of emergencies, but the book admits that taking up that much space, especially considering how heavy water is, is impractical.

Granted, if we ever set up that water catchment system we've been fantasizing about, it would be a lot easier, but I'm not sure Adam wants to go to the extra bother & expense of installing filters to make it potable. (He was planning on using it for garden watering, etc.)

I have all these books about preparedness, living without electricity, etc., but I don't consider myself a survivalist. I grew up in a town where the electricity went out a lot, and I've lived in a number of them since. This summer, my neighborhood got hit by what we all thought was a small tornado but turned out to be a derecho, and we lost power for 36 hours (during the worst of the heat wave, no less!) - and of course floods and blizzards and ice storms happen with annoying regularity. So it never hurts to be prepared.

Not me. That'd only give me two years left, and I have way more things I want to do. But then, I don't like excitement.

Adam was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes a while back (my brain says a few months ago, but I think it may have been a bit longer than that by now). He's just started stabbing himself for blood sugar testing and has found that almost every time he feels lousy it's because his blood sugar is not where it should be. We use a fair amount of Splenda in our house.

Food is interesting here. We keep kosher, David has celiac disease, Adam had Type 2 diabetes, and I'm anemic, so my doctor wants me to cut out dairy to improve iron absorption. I'm being the least good about it, but my diagnosis is the newest too, and anemia doesn't seem to have as many nasty side-effects as diabetes.

I do the bulk of the cooking in our household. The celiac restrictions came in first, and I looked at those as a fascinating challenge (besides, they got David to eat, so they were more than worth it). When Adam was diagnosed with diabetes, it threw me for a loop (do you know how hard it is to make something gluten free and high fiber?) and the new dairy restrictions really piss me off. This Thanksgiving, when I also get to deal with my brother, who has no medical restrictions but is a majorly fussy eater, I may go postal. (But at least Thanksgiving is fleishig *sigh*)

All Knowlege Is Contained In Making Light, a variation on AKICIF (... Fandom).

And I believe part of the purpose of flax seed in GF recipes is texture, and it's supposed to have lots of lovely nutrients, too (which is a good thing, since a lot of GF flours don't have too many). So I guess flax seed is next on my list of acquisitions. Sooner or later, I want to get some mesquite flour too.

Hi all. "Open thread" means you can say whatever, right? Well, I came across a recipe that sounds like it would be good, but I need help translating it into American from Australian. Specifically, "caster sugar" and "raw linseed." The rest isn't too mysterious, as most of it is standard GF baking ingredients. I feel a little silly, as I know I used to know what caster sugar was, but AKICIML, and people enjoy sharing, so...

I'm lucky, my sleep dep hallucinations restrict themselves to "Different Trains" by the Kronos Quartet, but I can be really odd to talk to. The family still hasn't let me live down the grey cake with dragonfly wings or my suggestion that Adam just follow the ladybugs home. And for some reason they think my insistance that he keep the car out of the trees was funny. I still maintain that it's perfectly sensible advice.

I wish I could come up with something more interesting than "Good grief!" "Oy vey!" "Aiee!" or "2008 is too far away."

I am not at all surprised to see Sununu at the very bottom of the list. Hmm, one plus if we move to NH - I get to vote against him.

Duh, community college. That's what my daughter's doing. Forgot to mention it as a possibility because of my extreme infatuation with Warren Wilson. A year off after high school isn't a bad idea either. It's enirely possible to be all schooled out for a while and need a break.

I see the getting of what would usually be considered a crap job not as penance but as a good thing to do in the circumstances. On the one hand, it's nice to have an income and not have to ask your parents to pay for everything, and on the other hand, the job shouldn't ask for a lot of brain, and when you're tired from twelve straight years of schooling, that's a very good thing.

How's this?

HEART PATIENT
VERBAL DELAY
[home phone]
[Adam's cell phone]

Adam's would just have his name, diabetes, and his allergies. Dunno if Kathy's asthma, Abilify, and panic attacks merit a bracelet or not.

#340: One college she might like is Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC. Major social justice emphasis and service to the community and getting your hands dirty and such. If we win the lottery, I'm applying there myself. Haven't been there, dying to check it out.

I hate to be stupid, but, whose wallet? Adam's & mine, certainly (and possibly Kathy's as well, just in case), but my main worry is something happening to him on a school outing or something of the sort, or, heaven forbid, something happens to him during one of his escape attempts. He hasn't managed anything serious lately, but the whole deal with sucessful escape attempts is that they happen when you're not expecting them. And we're selling our houes and moving to a completely different part of the state, too, so I really need to have this figured out by then. (He's five, by the way, although developmentally closer to three, and about the size of a small three-year-old.)

Lots of kids with Down Syndrome are escape artists, by the way. We've been looking into GPS transponders (I hope I remembered the right word) as well.

This thread has inspired me to get bracelets for Adam & David. Adam's is easy - diabetes, allergies to seafood and iodine. Not sure what exactly to put on David's, though. "Down Syndrome" isn't useful - it's a syndrome, a set of possible problems, not sufficiently specific. The things the paramedics need to know is that he's a heart patient and that his speech is significantly delayed. (I'm assuming that celiac disease isn't quite as pressing.) I'm not sure how to phrase it, though. He's not "nonverbal" or "preverbal." He just has a limited speaking vocabulary and it takes attention to understand him. He understands a lot more than he can say. Anybody know a terse way of putting that? Those bracelets don't have a lot of space for words.

I wonder if that would work with soymilk? It's possible to find kosher Italian sausage, but not meatless sausage without gluten. (And if anyone can prove me wrong on that, please please tell me!)

Comment statistics for Ailsa Ek on the Making Light blog

Total: 55 comments. View all these comments on a single page.