Food:
-4 cans Lacroix sparkling water all day
-3 cups black organic coffee
Mid-day-
-1 piece uncured bacon
-1 can sardines (for calcium)
-3/4 cup beef bone broth
6:30 p.m.:
-4 oz. shrimp in butter sauce
-10 ounces New York strip steak
Observations: Good but some bad. But no bad with the diet. I wake up today with the sun shining at least periodically, and I feel good. One noticeable thing is that I used to wake up every single morning with a feeling of foreboding, of doom. That is gone. It’s an incredible change. I felt just a touch of esophageal pain which I had constantly before starting Keto, but it wasn’t significant this morning.. Probably the sardines. I will only eat them occasionally. My biggest concerns are calcium and vitamin C. Otherwise, all same: good sleep, better skin, weight loss, better eyelashes, etc.
But I make my way downstairs with the puked- on dog bed liner (this is a big deal since I don’t have a washer/dryer here at camp). So I wash out the liner and get ready to hang it on my drying rack next to the wood stove. As I wash it, I see I am still not alone: since I’ve returned I have seen mouse scat on the counters and even in the bath tub! This time of year (some years), I get invaded up here and have to find the hole, buy the d-con–the only thing that works. Before they came in around a water pipe that comes in from the outside, but I see insulation is disturbed over the garage door (I have a weird industrial camp. I made a living room/kitchen out of a huge garage, with four large picture windows to outside, smaller windows all around the kitchen, and we have an upstairs as well. With two bedrooms. The “garage” has 11 foot ceilings and 9 foot garage doors with a sleeping loft for extra sleeping. One garage door we replaced with floor to ceiling windows, the other we kept. We roll it up in summer and it opens onto a screened porch. Very cool.)
You can see the copper counter top (and the box of d-con sitting on it) –I just covered the guy’s work bench with copper and have all open kitchen storage. An old pie safe serves as my pantry. More pictures periodically. At any rate I notice I’m not yet alone, they are HERE! So I drop a note to my husband to bring stuff to fill holes. Yesterday I noticed mouse crap even in my claw foot tub. My husband comes up Friday to make a wood run enough for next couple months. He will get a double load and get it stacked.
So now he will have some other duties. My dog isn’t much of a mouser.
I had planned to write today about the solar and the storage batteries, but this has distracted me. I think they may also be coming in above the garage door and think I might have heard a bit of rustling in another storage pie safe out in the back hallway. D-con is the only thing that works and it can take a while, but the holes need to be addressed. This is the time of year they will join me if they do, and they were here Monday when I got back from downstate.
They must go.
But I pour almost boiling water into my French Press and sit in front of the wood fire I’ve just stoked for five minutes, waiting for coffee to steep, before bringing a steaming cup back to bed to type this. I’ll give the place an hour to warm up. I have a propane furnace that comes on if the temperature drops below 64 as the fire wanes. It was 65, but the place felt a bit chilly. Heat rises, so it’s warmer up here and the pine walls and oak floor give a cozier feeling. In an hour, I’ll be 69 or 70 and that is about where I like to keep it. Those few degrees make a difference. I ponder the day’s plan: warrior made workout, then research all day in front of the wood fire. Researching all aspect of dreams is fascinating.
Tomorrow I’ll write about the dream research and the solar/batteries here. I wish you a lovely Wednesday and then pleasant dreams with no critters in your world (other than those you want).
Dreams: I wonder how dreams affect my “dreams.” Funny our hopes and aspirations have the same name as our nightly escapades. Both, however, can and do come true. No Mom and no Nanna again last night. I am trying to invoke both of them to see if I can direct or participate in my dreams, lucid dreaming. They have both passed. But my mother “dreamed” the day before my son Joshua was born that he would have Down Syndrome. She said it wasn’t exactly a dream–someone “told” her. She told my brother this who was shocked and asked her why she would say such a thing. My grandmother had passed on while I was pregnant and when they put the baby in my arms, I thought he “was” her. I had never been overly religious, more spiritual, and had never considered reincarnation. Josh is such a gentle soul, and so was she, that I have never ruled it out. But this prophetic “dream” thing fascinates me and is the subject of my latest fiction project.
But last night I dreamed I was in a town like Houghton, Michigan (an old mining town) with another old boyfriend. We were parallel parked on a street for bit and another couple (significant or famous for some reason–who they were escapes me now), talked with us, seemed upset, then disappeared suddenly. I think it was snowing lightly as is common about seven months of the year in Houghton. We went into a bookstore and just as we entered, outside it, was a round table piled high with books. I expected it to be an anthology I’m in (called And Here, 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing). This is an anthology in which my work appears along with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Voelker, Jim Harrison, Jack Driscoll, and more famous Michigan writers. I imagine I dreamed this since I just ordered ten copies last night for Christmas presents. Lots of great writing in it besides mine. At any rate, it turned out not to be that book or any of my previous books. The rest of the dream seemed to exist of driving around the area.
Just as I woke, I dreamed I was scooping water down the drain in my kitchen sink with my hand–due to, I’m sure, having had to swish down the mouse crap yesterday, something I am about to do again as I make my coffee in the French press.
L.E.K. 