Gettin' All-Primal in the Applachians page 11

[Bess58]

Crabbcakes,

my condolences! Now your cat isn't suffering any more. And he must have had a great life with your family, and felt secure and protected until the end.

I'll write more tomorrow, today my daughter is still here. I love to live alone, but on the other hand, her visits are my greatest pleasure ...

Agree with Anne, I'm learning so much about the US - and the UK! May I add, from the perspective of someone who studied Anglistik (english philology) in Germany, that I'm learing more about your respective countries in this thread than I did an university.

"See" you tomorrow!

[annedawso]

Crabbcakes, so sorry about your cat, I can imagine how upset you and the kids are. That's the good thing I always think about religion it must be a comfort to know you will see them again.
Bess, you are right, I am learning more about cultures on here than in all my previous readings.
I thought it was so funny when Crabbcakes was talking about all the intrigues between the different religions. I cam just imagine it. About once a year we get Jehovah witnessses knocking on the door trying to convert us. I always feel sorry for them cos no-one wants to know. I just tell them I am Roman Catholic, it's the only time I say Roman!!! for some strange reason
I know it sounds corny but I would say football is the Religion amongst the working class in Liverpool. Quite often the first question you get is who do you support. My team are the underdogs but we're not doing bad.
It is a lovely day in Liverpool today so I am taking my 9 year old to the city centre, we will be going the Pier Head and getting the ferry over the River Mersey and going for a walk and some lunch.
I love the centre of Liverpool as there are so many beautiful old buildings, though we do have our share of modern monstrosities.
The attached is a picture of where we are going to
Pier Head - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thinking of you all Crabbcakes and enjoy your daughter's visit Bess.

[Bess58]

Hello crabbcakes and annedawso,

now I'm back to writing. My daughter stayed from thursday morning to friday evening, and we had a nice time. We hadn't seen each other for three weeks, which is rare. Normally she stops by more often. But she had been to see the other part of the family - father, younger half-siblings and aunts - near Hannover.

Crabbcakes, I imagine that the whole family is still sad about cat's passing. I hope you have a good, peaceful weekend anyway.

Anne, thanks for telling us about Liverpool. How interesting to hear about your dialect. I had never heard any of the words before. As soon as I read your sentence about your trip with your son, in my head I heard the old song "Ferry Cross the Mersey". And the picture on Wikipedia is very beautiful. Very stately buildings! You can see that Liverpool is / was an important port. How is the economy today?

Today I hit the gym again after the weather finally cooled down and it rained all night. It is weight training, but only with machines. The gym belongs to a chain that has studios mainly in Germany and Switzerland. But I think they lately opened one in London (Kieser Training). The weight machines are derived from the classical "Nautilus" machines that originated in the USA. I like it, because it is "no nonsense" and plain, and there are people from all ages and of all body shapes. One trainer told me that our oldest member is 90 years old! Anne, congrats for going to zumba! My daughter also wants to try out a zumba course in her village.

Crabbcakes, my god (literally), how many churches you have! Cologne is a catholic stronghold, with the cathedral and a very rich and important diocese. But there are also protestant churches. One of my friends - the lady that I went to the old town with - is a presbyter / elder in a protestant church. Personally I have to admit that I am an atheist. Fortunately, that has never been a problem between us.

I have a sad story to tell. We have a very big and beautiful zoo in Cologne, not far from here, and I have often been there. Today a siberian tiger killed a warden. The woman could not be saved, and the zoo director shot the tiger. It is said that the woman was careless, but nobody deserves to be killed by a tiger in the middle of Europe ... It put quite a damper on a lot of fond memories of the zoo. Last summer I spent a wonderful evening there with some friends. The zoo had declared a "long summer's night", and all evening, until far into the dark, there was classical music everywhere in the zoo, played live by individual artists or small orchestras. We took a picnic and also visited the hippopotamuses (is that a word?) who despite of being so big are absolutely cute!

I wish you and all the readers of this thread a nice weekend! Here half of it is gone already and it's Saturday evening. Crabbcakes, do you know if you in the US are ahead of us or behind us time-wise? I suppose that you are behind us, because Mark's blog post for the day appeards punctually at 5 o'clock p.m. here, but I'm not sure.

"See" you soon!

[Bess58]

Congratulations, crabbcakes! I see that your journal has got five stars now despite only being eleven pages long so far.

[annedawso]

Hi Crabbcakes and Bess,
Bess, what a terrible thing to happen at the zoo. Careless or not it is a terrible tragedy, there have been some terrible things happening in the UK this week. A 4 year old boy slipped off the end of a pier and died this week and 2 young children were killed by a hit and run driver. I get really upset when I hear of things especially if they involve children.
I've got that way I hate watvhing the news.
There is a big annual festival in Liverpool this weekend that my 19 and 16 year old sons will be attending. I always worry until they are home.
Dashing off to pick John my 19 year old from his voluntary job in a hospice, although he has passed his driving test the car insurance is £3000 so he can't drive. My insurance is £300!!! Insurance for young people in Liverpool is very expensive.
Write more later.

[Crabbcakes]

Hey Bess and Anne (and everybody else who might be reading...)

Thanks for all of your good wishes - they felt very nice as I read them.

Bess - I am in what Americans call the "Eastern Standard Time Zone" (shortened to EST), which makes me 6 hours behind Cologne, and 5 hours behind London, except when we move in and out of Daylight Savings time and Germany does that a week after us in the spring and a week before us in the fall. We move our clocks FORWARD one hour at 2:00 a.m. each second Sunday in March, and move them BACK again one hour on the first Sunday in November. The "lower 48" (what we call the 48 contiguous US states - that leaves out Alaska and Hawaii, and assorted islands like American Samoa) has four time zones - east coast is Eastern Standard Time, go just a bit west to the Great Plains states and you have Central Standard Time (CST), go further west to the Rocky Mountains and you have Mountain Standard Time (MST), get across the Rockies and from there all the way to the west coast we have Pacific Standard Time (PST). Alaska gets its own time zone (AKST) as does Hawaii (HST). There are a couple others (one further off the Atlantic coast, and way past Hawaii there are two more) as well, for a grand total of nine time zones.

We constantly use time zone abbreviations like EST or the phrase "local time" to get our times straight since Yanks/Amis travel a lot and talk to people all over the country even more, not to mention the news and television channels and such.

Just because I wanted some distraction, I went to the link anne gave me about Pier Head, and continued to read about "leaver" birds and the Liverpool crest and all that. Very cool and interesting stuff. I especially liked the word list you gave me, anne. "Minty" for dirty seems downright contrary.

Glad you got your weight training in, bess. I got mine yesterday by digging a hole for Cat's coffin, and gave myself a huge thumb blister. Huh. Your way is definitely more fun.

Just for some cultural fun - around here all of the kids in the county started school 8/22. The last school year ended on 5/31, so we had all of June, July, and until August 22nd for summer vacation. The next federal holiday is Labor Day, September 3. Schools, banks, doctor's offices and out-patient therapy centers (but not hospitals), and government offices are closed, but the stores are all gearing up for a huge sale weekend. Labor Day is the traditional end of summer, and lots of folks like to have a huge cookout party to celebrate. I plan on having lots of bunless bratwurst and just whatever produce my favorite farm stand has on hand.

[annedawso]

Just back from collecting my son. Torrential rain here, though we are all in a good mood as Everton our football team won again today. First two games and we have won both -wayhay. Been to the gym today and done what I call a heavy weights session. Though when I look at what others do it is not a heavy weights session. Well it is for me cos I can't lift any heavier.
Anyway I did squats, deadlifts, dumbbell rows and chest press.
Had sprinted yesterday so didn't bother today.
Bess -ferry across the Mersey is a very famous Liverpool song. There were loads of foreign tourists on the ferry. My son and I really enjoyed it. I felt quite sentimental as when we were kids we often had a day out going on the ferry to a sea side resort called New Brighton. It was very shabby when we used to go but my mum used to tell us stories of how popular it was in its heyday. It was a famous Victorian destination and I can remember seeing old photos of ladies in long dresses on the beach.
In Liverpool we have two Cathedrals -one catholic and one protestant.
In the words of another famous Liverpool song

In my Liverpool Home, In my Liverpool Home
We speak with an accent exceedingly rare,
Meet under a statue exceedingly bare,
And if you want a Cathedral, we've got one to spare
In my Liverpool Home.....

The statue the song refers to is one of a naked man nicknamed Dickie Lewis' above a famous now closed Department store in the city centre. And of course with having 2 cathedrals we have one to spare.
In answer to your question Bess the economy in Liverpool is quite run down. There is a fair bit of poverty, though looking at the rest of Europe maybe we are not too bad off. I feel so aorry for the working class people in Greece. Most of the UK wealth is in the South of the country and looking at the news there seems to be a lot of Russian oligarchs and rich Chinese moved into London.
The weather is better down South so imagine that is another reason people don't usually settle up here.
Hope all is well Crabbcakes.
We are off on holiday Monday to the Lake District which is a 2 hr drive from here. My husband won't drive any further. So our holiday destinations are within 2 hrs or we go abroad.

[annedawso]

Just seen your reply Crabbcakes, glad all is as well as can be. Our kids go back to school first week of September. I think I have bought all the uniforms !!!!!
I have been googling Ohio and Cologne as I am pretty nosy (in case you can't tell.)
Though as Bess has already said we find out more in conversation.
I am rubbish at understanding time zone differences, I sometimes have to organise telephone conferences for academics in different parts do Europe with different time zones. I go into a cold sweat with worry that they will all be ringing at the wrong time.
Though I have recently found a good website that converts all that even I can understand.
Right I am going to pack for my holidays. Will be taking my trusty iPad with me to find out what is going on.
Good night and god bless as my mum and gran would have said.

[Crabbcakes]

Dear Journal -

We had the family pet burial last night for Cat. Hubby went to the garage (and the table saw) to build a wooden box. First transferred Cat to the box and tucked him in with small blankets, and the rest of us wrote notes and drew pictures and collected whatever it was that we wanted to add for his journey to the afterlife. I gave Fourth his cat collar and brass i.d. tag. We took pictures of him in his box before we closed the lid, and took pictures of each of us helping shovel or hoe earth on top after the box was lowered into the hole. (The photo thing might seem a bit macabre, but we have used digital cameras for just everything for a long time - I sometimes make Third small photo albums of special events and her surgeries that are too hard or involved for her to describe using her own words so her teachers, relatives, and therapists can use the albums (with my added captions) to discuss stuff with her. The rest of us use them just to help emotionally process hard events.)

Cat is the fourth of our felines to be laid to rest in that corner of our property, and the sixth cat I have had die while in my care, and it doesn't really get easier with practice - still hurts just as much. Cat was physically the largest of our felines - at 17 pounds and with a monstrous bone structure, he was a huge physical presence (as far as cats go), and the house seems empty, even though I still have 5 more in residence. I guess I just like a lot of life in my house.

I managed not to succumb to any non-Primal stress eating, even though I have a rotten sweet tooth this week. I did help myself with a can of Diet Coke (on two separate occasions), but the kids sipped some each time, and by the time they all had had a sip or two, half the can was gone, so neither they nor I had much. Hubby tried some soda with me and actually said "YUCK" - which is astonishing because he used to be the biggest soda consumer in the house. He actually said that it no longer tasted like anything he wanted to drink. Wow. Like my new friend annedawso says - gobsmacked. (VERY cool word.) I still am in awe of what NOT being a sugar-burner has done for me - if Cat had died last year, before I had the Primal, I would have drowned my sorrow in potato chips, dip (one of my all-time favorite snacks), and soda, and taken the whole house with me on the snack run. (And everyboy would have gotten their own big bag of chips. Due to allergies, though - one bag grain-free/dairy-free for Third, one bag gluten-free/dairy-free ffor Second, and then four according to personal preference. Nobody wants to share their chips here... we take that stuff seriously...!)

I brought out a new notebook this morning, and began making my personal Primal cheat sheet with it. I wrote down the Ten Primal Laws, and then some ancillary stuff that I didn't want to forget, like barefooting, cold thermogenesis, yellow light, vocab from Mark's new post on IE (Intermittent Euphoria), and all that. The notebook is just a catch-all thing where I will put just anything, from blog addresses to whatever, so I don't have notes and folded sheets of paper and such everywhere.

I did find the coolest website this morning. I was thinking of water quality (after reading about sunshine and negative-ion exposure) and started poking around... I found FindaSpring.com – Online Spring Database and this site is a location clearinghouse for anybody who knows about a spring where folks can go and collect pure, natural water. My Oma (German word for "grandmother") has a spring behind her house, and it has the tastiest, cold water ever. I found a spring maintained by the small city where we travel weekly for therapy for Third, and you can bet that on Monday, I am bringing my one-gallon BPA-free bottle to try this stuff!

Still no YAYOG, and I still don't care (although I haven't given up on that as a goal). I must be doing something right, because after shoveling (with hubby) our cement-hard, rock-filled crap we call earth on this property (I even had to fill Cat's hole with water and slosh it around to loosen that stuff enough to even break it up) down to 2 feet-plus deep, I am not sore today. I was definitely tired, but not sore. Slightly injured (thumb blister - come on, say it with me.... awwwwwwww), but not sore. Between my last official Journal entry and this one, First and I managed to bike another loop (from the house down to the stop sign and back - two mile loop), and I still can't manage it without getting off the bike and pushing it up the hills, but hey - we were out there.

For dietary tribulations, we all are feeling the lack of margarine in this house. By consensus (well, by benevolent dictatorship) I haven't restocked the margarine in the fridge once it ran out. The members of this house love their fats, and always have, so we were huge consumers of all the traditional Primal fats like pan drippings and butter and the like, but Second and Third cannot have dairy, so I bought them Earth Balance for most of their lives. Now that I am convinced of the rancid seed oil/omega-6 overabundance thing, I am turning our table habits regarding margarine around and am having a hard time with it. Second doesn't like ghee (thinks all dairy is disgusting - has been dairy-free her entire life) or coconut oil. Third doesn't like coconut oil either - I haven't tried ghee with her yet. Hrmph. Third, especially, is upset - she has sensory problems with food and will only eat if there is a sauce and/or buttery topping of some kind on each food on her plate. We stop-gap with evoo-homemade-vinaigrette, but there must be other solutions I can add to the arsenal.

I just might throw out a recipe thread today - they are really missing this stuff, and I don't have many ideas.

So, journal-mine, that is all for today. The goals for next week are the same - more Primal eating and cooking, maaaaaaaybe a little YAYOG, and a way to WOM. Until then -

[Crabbcakes]

Everton our football team won again today. First two games and we have won both -wayhay.
(snipped)
In my Liverpool Home, In my Liverpool Home
We speak with an accent exceedingly rare,
Meet under a statue exceedingly bare,
And if you want a Cathedral, we've got one to spare
In my Liverpool Home.....

(snipped)
We are off on holiday Monday to the Lake District which is a 2 hr drive from here. My husband won't drive any further. So our holiday destinations are within 2 hrs or we go abroad.

Hey anne - I looked up Everton on their website. Holy crap! You don't really have any English players on that team! I don't know of one single player of American football in the pro-league who isn't American. I am showing my almost-complete soccer ignorance, but is this normal for professional Euro soccer?? I mean, England has enough people and enough soccer-mad men to populate a team, so I am perplexed.

The Liverpool Home song is entirely too cute. I think you English are very good at making up lots of ditties and songs and popular poetry and stuff.

The Lake District sounds really nice. I'll be googling and bing-ing that for photos as soon as I am done with this post. Ummm - one last question... why does hubby not drive further than 2 hours? That is really restrictive, from an American standpoint, unless there are mitigating circumstances (like advanced age, disability, very young children in the house, no money for gas, etc). In this family, we max out at 4 hours one way for a day trip - when you double that for the return trip, that is 8 hours of driving in one day. We do go farther, but then we just need to plan for an overnight stay.

Have fun!