Author Archive
What Grandmother Knew About Colds & Flu
Posted by: | CommentsWe are experiencing one of the most serious widespread flu and cold seasons we have had in a long time. Colds have been holding on for weeks and the flu is totally debilitating. I have had that awful cold; family and friends are suffering with really profound flu symptoms. So I’ve been having many ask me what I do for each. Remembering what my Mother did puts me in touch with my Grandmother as well. Seems like these ways of handling colds and flu might be helpful to others, so here goes.
Colds and flu are different. So the very first thing is to take one of the homeopathic flu remedies since homeopathic remedies have been proven to lessen or stop flu when nothing else does. The remedy that is the most common is Oscillococinum (ah-sill-oh-co-sin-um). Don’t wait until you decide if it is the flu or a cold or it will be too late. Just take it! If it is a cold, the effects will also be lessened by taking a homeopathic medicine.
Remember the old expression “Feed a cold; starve a fever”? This is not really the whole expression as I understand it. It was “If you feed a cold, you’ll have to starve a fever.” So change your eating habits as soon as the first symptoms appear. For a cold, eat lightly of very healthy foods more often. Focus on broths with rice and a few veggies like winter squash and greens; pure juices with no added sugar (or worse yet artificial sweeteners); honey; herbal teas or green tea with ginseng and honey; and half your body weight in ounces of water to help flush out the germs. If there is a mucus build up, eliminate all dairy and wheat as these will increase the mucus secretions. [Yeah, I know it’s hard, just try it anyway. You can do anything for a week, right?]
The other supporters for your healing process are good for both colds and flu. I use zinc lozenges with vitamin C and/or echinacea and elderberry; fresh citrus fruits; traditional healing teas for the symptoms present; homeopathics that also address your symptoms; and a Neti pot with the special sea salt that doesn’t hurt your nose and sinuses. If you don’t use a Neti pot, use a saline spray; I particularly like the one with Xylitol. Rest, rest, rest even if you have to just let everything go, and use a hot or cold vaporizer next to your bed! Other good additions to this regime are garlic capsules 4x/day (600 mg per dose), high B 100 mg sustained release, and emergen-C.
For the flu, you have to be even more aware that you must take care of yourself!!! If the Oscillococinum didn’t nip it in the bud, get the homeopathic from Boiron (the blue tube) called influenzinum. It’s for the effects of flu or flu like symptoms, and it really works! Now is the time to fast. That means get containers of organic broths or have someone make good hardy broth (recipe in next blog), and don’t give your body anything it has to digest until you are good and truly hungry with stomach rumblings! Honey, herb teas, broths, barley water, and water!A liquid fast is a better way to put it. Consume as much as you want, as often as you want to. You won’t be hungry until your body is ready for actual food. Then have a really ripe banana, add rice and greens to the soup, have a boiled egg, eat live cultured products (yogurt, kefir, kombucha that say active, live culture on it) and stay away from processed foods, refined foods, and especially refined sugar! Want sweets? Have honey and pure maple syrup, pure fruit juices and coconut water. Refined sugar is known to suppress your immune system by up to 90% for 4 hours after you eat it. That lets the germs regain their foothold and can lead to a relapse.
Last, but not least, STAY HOME! No one else wants it, you will just prolong the agony, and it will be much more dangerous and costly for you to go out. Sleep all day except when you are drinking, peeing, or clearing out your head. Stay warm! And get someone to support you in this process. Yes, you do need help!
** One last thing – the differences between Western medicines and herbs, and homeopathic medicines is this (in terms of taking them): take the homeopathic medicine every 30 minutes until the symptoms diminish or are gone; then take them a couple of times a day or as soon as a symptom returns. With Western Medicines, follow what the prescription or pharmacist says. If this includes antibiotics, take lots of probiotics! **
Send me your other remedies and suggestions so we can post them here also. Thanks and be well!
New Year, New Life – Really? Really!
Posted by: | CommentsGrandmothers know that when change lands squarely in your lap, it is time to accept it, adjust to it, and keep going. Now I don’t suggest that this is without some moaning and groaning, mumbling and whining. In fact I highly recommend some amount of whinging to clear that from your system. I have to love where I am to be there, so when I am ‘told’ it all must go, I’m not going to stuff it! It is hard to move on! So allowing the normal emotions to flow through me is the only way to get on with it for me.
This 2012 thing came at me in December with a will of its own. I ended last year with a bang – not a whimper! I learned that the lovely couple that owns the home I’ve been living in for the last 5 years wants to move in – for understandable reasons. So I’m packing. Then I learned that my email had been hacked and most of my email addresses are gone, my contact lists are gone, and my UrbanForager.co website had been taken over by a phishing scam. So it is closed for now. That pretty much sums it up. Oh yes, and since I had to have a new engine put in my car, it is not the same vehicle at all any more. Good car, but I don’t love it like I used to.
So I have given up my attachment to my car, my home, and whether or not I am an online presence at the moment. What I also know is that when it gets this messy, I look for the Hand of God/dess. Nothing else makes sense to me. What is Creator up to this time, I wonder? So I consult my personal Oracles and find there is no information at this time…Blank Rune, standstill, wait and see…hummmmm.
Taking one step at a time, I am packing as if I will be putting everything in storage. I am getting myself ready for some ‘walk-about’ time. I am sorting and letting go of all that does not serve me now and all that does not bring me Joy. Those are my prime questions for all that I have: Does it bring me joy? Does it serve me NOW? And finally – Do I want to take care of it any longer?
This is an interesting project. I have decided to let go of all the things that are ‘everyday’ and pull out all of the ‘Good Stuff’ I have been saving for…??? The translucent German china that breaks so easily? I’m eating on it until it’s gone. The crocheted placemats Grandmother made when my parents were young marrieds? On the table now to get worn out. You get the idea. Enough saving anything already! My children and Grandchildren get to hear the stories of these things now by being around me as I use them. They won’t know why I have it if it is in a box!
Some I will give away with the story of them attached. Some I will sell if no one wants them. I wish to be free of the ‘saving for…’ syndrome once and for all. It is NOW and they are here, so I will use them or pass them on. This goes for the books as well. I know where to get more, if I remember I want them again. Some I am reading fast, then putting them in the yard sale boxes. I will have no more than 3 or 4 boxes left, and ones I can lift I might add! Cooking and preserving books; plant, bird, and nature books; a few reading books; and some odds and ends like that. I am finding when I pick up a book that I loved and can’t get beyond the first page or two, out it goes.
An interesting idea is that I have shifted so much during the past year or so these books and things wind up being so Last Century, so Last Millennium that they no longer have anything current to say to me! I am climbing out of the sandbox and all the toys I used to love are now no longer interesting except in an historical way. I have neither the time, the energy, or the where-with-all to continue carting around that sort of history. <SIGH> What history I need is in me. This other stuff is really not relevant any more.
So off I go… Keep tuned and I will share some dreams for the future I do have in the next blog! Happy New Year!!
An Interesting Adventure!
Posted by: | CommentsSunday July 15th, I went down to New Mexico for the Sisters of Honua Grandmother’s Summit. I had cleaned all of the accumulated rubbish out of the car, had the oil changed, the fluids checked, bought new tires, got a wash and wax, and filled it up with gas. It was a wonderful (if a little too hot) day, with the clouds rolling across the blue bowl of sky and very light traffic. I love to take long drives with myself and I hadn’t had one in a long time. The road was smooth, the car road like a dream; though my gas got low quicker than usual since I was using the AC.
At Wagon Mound I stopped for gas and filled her up. Putting the trip gauge back to zero to see what kind of mpg I was getting, I wrote the mileage on the slip, and took off. Humming along the highway, going 80 on the 75 mpg road, the miles melted away as I got closer to Rowe, NM. I was going to spend the night at my friend Winnie’s home. She and I had met when I came to build a labyrinth on her land. She and her husband are truely self sufficient, no power lines go to their home. So I was looking forward to being out on their isolated piece of dessert paradise!
Suddenly there was a loud crack, bang noise! I had never heard anything like it before! Instantly I said to myself “You’ve just blown your engine!”. Then my ‘Carbaby’ began to shake and wobble on the road, and it took a lot of strength to keep her going in a straight line while I slowed down as quickly as safety permitted.
“Maybe I blew a tire?!” I said hopefully.
I was shaking, especially inside…a full adrenalin rush going through me. I turned the car off when I was as far off the road as I could get, rolled to a stop and I just sat there limp, gathering my wits. After breathing for a minute or so, and watching the steam lazily spiral out around the edges of the hood, I relaxed a little when that disappeared completely. Having lived in a dessert, the sunshades went up on the windshield immediately. Black topped convertible in 100 degree weather is a bit uncomfortable after awhile.
OK. Call AAA. Any bars on the cell phone?? Yes. Where am I? Oh yes…I’ve gone 14.3 miles south from the Wagon Mound exit. (So grateful I hit the trip button!)
“We’ll have the truck there in two hours or less.” Holy Heat!
I called Winnie so that she could meet me in Las Vegas, NM at the repair place. Then I sat there. Intermittently cars and trucks whizzed by at 80 or so miles per hour, rocking the car. I opened the windows despite the traffic noise to let a breeze in, and prayed for some more clouds to cover me. Sitting there dripping sweat, I realized that because of cell phones, no one stopped anymore for a car with blinkers on beside the road!
Now here’s the surprising thing – I felt no drama. I didn’t go into the future, and every time I started to, up came the “I don’t have enough information yet” statement. Wow! Have I come a long way! Instead of the old thoughts, I found myself saying “Isn’t this interesting! I wonder what will happen next?” I also hoped it would be soon as I was out of water!
An hour and a half later, I was delighted to find out the tow truck was a comfortable roomy double cab with air conditioning! The driver’s wife was with him, and we chatted while he loaded my car up. I snapped pictures of it through the rear window, wondering if she would be leaving my life altogether. I was so glad I’d cleaned her out! Only my camping gear, clothes, and give-aways for the Summit were in the car. We talked about where to take the car, and I voiced my doubt that a transmission place would be where I needed to go. That was the only suggestion AAA had. I went with the suggestion of the tow truck driver and found myself in the suburbs at a talented home mechanic.
He opened the hood and looked in. “I’ve only seen this a few times in my career!” He said. Then he started pulling walnut sized hunks of cast iron block out of the engine and showing me. The rod had punched a hole in the block. I knew that meant a rebuilt engine. Since I liked him immediately, I asked him to do a quote of rebuilt engine vs bluebook value of my car.
Then Winnie took me to her home! Ahhhhh!!! Nothing like relaxing in the wood fired hot tub, gazing up into a clear dark sky filled with a million stars, unclouded by light, haze or smog! I slept well that night.
After we walked the labyrinth in the morning and packed ourselves into Winnie’s jeep for our week at Taa-naash-kaa-da Sanctuary, we returned to the garage in the ‘burbs. James had my figures: bluebook value $2700.00; rebuilt engine and clutch (no sense doing the engine and not doing the clutch) $2700.00. I rounded it up to $3000.00 immediately. Something always comes up. I was pretty sure I wanted to rebuild the engine, and I also decided to think on it for the week I would be at Taa-naash-kaa-da.
Well, I just put 4 new tires on my car, a new battery, a new top…now a new engine and a clutch? Versus what kind of car I could get for the $3000.00? Hummmm…sounds like a no-brainer to me! 150,000 miles? For a Toyota Celica, that’s only half of its expected life! I said “James, fix it!”
My sisters at the Grandmothers Summit offered me four different rides home to Denver! My oldest daughter was also very generous and kind and immediately told me to go ahead and use her car while she was on vacation. However she came home Monday so I really need mine back. Time to ask James how long it will be.
OOPS! I don’t have his number because I had to get a new phone (the screen was not working right), and somehow it wasn’t on the SIM card?? I had called him on my old phone, but that one was gone. After a few attempts to get a message to James, or find the number on line, I finally used the yellow pages to find the tow truck driver. We talked a minute, then he asked if I was Kate Armstrong! When I confirmed this, he gave me his friend James number.
So I am tentatively planning to return to Las Vegas, NM mid month to get my car. The only ‘flies in the ointment’ are no short block available for my car until next week; and there is the Denver County Fair that I’m part of August 9th – 12th, so I can’t get back ‘on the road again’ until after the 13th. In the mean time let’s add winning the Publisher’s Clearing House money to my manifestation list! YAY!!
