Gettin' All-Primal in the Applachians page 17

[annedawso]

Hi all,
Very sad day in Liverpool today. 23 years ago 96 Liverpool football fans died by being crushed in a football stadium. The press, police and Government over the years have blamed drunken fans etc. there has been a further independant 2 year inquiry that has shown the police falsified over 100 statements to cover themselves. What I find most upsetting is that 40 of the deaths could have been prevented, one of the reasons being they wouldn't let the ambulances onto the pitch to treat the dying. I was as sickened 23 years ago as I am today. I can remember watching on the TV at the time as bodies covered the pitch including kids.
Sorry to be so depressing but it really has brought it all back. Those poor families.
BBC News - Hillsborough report: Key findings

[Bess58]

Hallo Ann,

this is really sad, and I can fully understand that even after over twenty years such a desaster is not forgotten. Good that at least now an investigation has been conducted. Indeed, those poor young people and their families!

One should think that such a catastrophe should serve as a warning, but alas, that is not so. Two years ago something similar happened not far from here. There was a music festival where up to a million visitors were expected. All these people had to pass through one narrow tunnel to get to the premises. There was a mass panic, and over twenty young people were crushed / trampled to death, hundreds got hurt.

I had been out with friends for the day and came home in the evening when I heard this. Imagine how shocked I was ... especially because my daughter was there. I couldn't reach her as mobile phone networks were down because everybody was trying to call friends and relatives. I think everybody who has children can imagine how I felt. I would have rushed there, but it was in another town and I have no car, so at least I sent my brother who lives there in her direction. Fortunately, after about an hour I got her on the phone, and she was all right. She and her friends had entered the premises long before the desaster and had left on a different route that the police had opened meanwhile, without knowing why they were directed this way. She and her friends obviously had a guardian angel this day, but many others didn't ...

I'm getting all emotional again writing this. Good night to all who read this (here it is 10.30 p.m.)!

[annedawso]

Hi Bess,
I always get all emotional over anything like that and I can imagine how sick you must have felt. I know of several, similar disasters in the UK over the years. It is upsetting thinking of them even when you have no-one directly involved.
I don't know how I would cope if anything happened to my kids, doesnt bear thinking about.

weather has gone rather cold here now. We have put our winter quilt on the bed. I have a microwave hottie that I love using in the winter while I read my book.

Crabbcakes - have you tried the yoga yet, i do a DVD now and again which I enjoy but never find the motivation to put it on. Was laughing at the thought of you doing exercises with Third. I bet she is made up.
My middle son was diagnosed with hypermobility when he was younger. He had terrible pains in his joints and very tight hamstrings. The consultant originally diagnosed him with spina bifida but that is another story. They said it was common in tall children. He is 16 and 6ft 5" which is 77" or 195cm - not sure what height measurements other countries use.

[Crabbcakes]

Hey Ladies!

Ugh - I know the public memorials of bad stuff... we just had the 9-11 memorials here (World Trade Center attacks). On that day I was just across the river from the WTC, out and about with the kids, heading for the orthodontist (back when we lived in NJ). Hubby called me from work and ordered me to go home, but I initially refused - I told him that I wasn't going anywhere unless he planned to leave work as well, so he did. I'll not forget those days. It is said here that every generation you have an awful event such that nobody ever forgets where they were at the time they found out... I have four: the WTC, the death of Elvis Presley, the night that Operation Desert Storm began, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Answers: Ocean, NJ; Killeen TX; Frankfurt, Germany, and Frankfurt, Germany.

Friday night is the zoo overnighter (tomorrow night). Should be a blast!

Anne - in the US, feet and inches for height. Only doctors, foreigners, and (math) geeks use metric here for measuring human height. I am 5 feet 5 inches. Hubby is 5 feet 10 inches. First is 5 feet 6 inches. Second is 5 feet 1 inch. Third is under 5 feet. Don't know about Fourth - she is steadily growing out of clothing, so I know everything is okay. It looks like this in common American shorthand: 5'5" (where the apostrophe is always feet, and the quotation marks are always inches). 6-foot-5 is pretty darn tall, anne! I'll bet his legs gave him fits as he grew!

Yoga class is on Monday evenings. I just found out about it this week, so I haven't had a chance to go see. I have been told that the level is Intermediate, and participants must bring their own yoga mat - which I don't own. I'll go email my cousin, the yoga teacher in Fulda and ask what I should look for in a yoga mat so I don't buy the thing twice in the end by getting a dumb first one.

The exercises with Third are prescribed by all of her various therapists: PT, orthopedic surgeon, OT, ST, and VT, so they don't look like the usual "exercises", with the exception of the 50 jumping jacks she has to do for coordination practice, a hamstring stretch, and a chest muscle stretch. She hates the hamstring stretch - it hurts. We have this little photo album that I put index cards into instead of photos; one index card equals one exercise (complete with written description and stick-man drawing so Third can understand what we are doing next). It got so long that I split it up between 45 min in the morning and then another 30 at night before bed.

So - I'm off to bed so I can function tomorrow at the zoo...

[annedawso]

Dear all,
Have been mad busy so had no time to talk. Hope all are well.
Hope the zoo night went well and that your plans for travelling to Germany are going well Crabbcakes.
Bess - hope you are progressing with all your translations.
Autumnal weather is defintely here, though my husband has set up table tennis in the Conservatory so keeping all kids amused.
Going the gym is an effort this week, but have just been and done some weights and sprinting. Got my nightdress on already and it is only 7 pm.
Went out both Friday and Saturday evening and to a Garden Party on Sunday so drank far too much alcohol over the weekend. Going to have a few weeks of not going out.
Speak soon.

[Crabbcakes]

Yodel-ay-eee-hoo Journal!

Just to get this out of the way... if you would be detecting a somewhat "odiferous" scent in the air, that would be me, the rotten pile of Crabbcakes, because I have done some bad stuff. For starters, I still have not begun the YAYOGing. I really don't have too much of an excuse other than I have been on the road a lot, but those circumstances aren't new to me, so I really need to get a grip on this. I did manage to find a yoga class at the YMCA that I will be starting next Monday, though, so I consider myself a smaller (rather than huge) pile of poop at the moment.

Although I shouldn't get too proud of myself - the yoga class is Stretch and Relaxation yoga, not Bikram or anything like that. I ran into the yoga teacher last night at the Y, who filled me in on some details about the class (like the focus / style thing). She is really nice, a bit older than me, very welcoming, and definitely not a yoga snooty-broad. I ran into one of those in the summer of '11 - there is a yoga studio just across the street from where the Girls Crabbcakes used to take gymnastics, so one day I went to check it out. Even though the website comes across as really friendly and down-to-earth, when I went in the front door I actually got tossed back out because a yoga class was about to begin and there would be "privacy issues" if I stayed. Beats me what those "privacy issues" would have been (because she didn't elaborate on them - I guess it was too "private" to even state what the "privacy issues" were) - I wasn't toting a news camera or looking like a homeless heroin addict or anything - I had just come to ask for information sheets. So I never went back there. If the teacher has a complex already, I don't think there is anything worthwhile to learn from her.

For more stinkiness, I ate one McDonalds cheeseburger, one s'mores, and drank two sodas at the zoo overnighter. The zoo rules state that no food can be brought into the tents (they have enough problems with native scavengers of the food left in the enclosures for the exotic animals, let alone courting even more of them at the camp site with SAD snacks...), so First, Fourth and I ate as much as we could out of our cooler before entering the zoo (cooler was left in the locked car way out in the parking lot). That would have been about 5:45 in the afternoon (program began at 7:00 p.m.). After dark the zoo staff started a weeny fire to roast marshmallows in (you can tell that I have been living in the country too long - anything short of a righteous blaze seems like something created to light a few cigarettes), and I eventually succumbed to the sweet-smelling lure of milk chocolate, graham crackers, and toasty marshmallows. But I really did only have one.

The night in the tent was cold and really, really damp. Friday night in Cleveland was not a good night to be out tent camping - lots of rain. I didn't sleep well at all - mostly because I was worrying that First and Fourth might be cold (even though the temp wasn't dangerously low and we had sleeping bags and flannel sheets and warm jammies and they slept peacefully all night) and then because I couldn't stop thinking of stuff like big, steaming bowls of beef stew... New England clam chowder... cheese and broccoli soup...

Breakfast the next morning was an incredible assortment of granola bars, grainy breakfast bars, single-size cereal cups, cheap oj, and 2% milk. I had half a glass of the milk and IF'd it the rest of the way.

So, by the time the program released all of us (10:00 a.m. Saturday morning), all I could think of was getting some really heavy food into me, and all that I could find that was open was the Mickey D's and the Pizza Hut places in the main courtyard of the zoo. (The girls wanted to take full advantage of the free Saturday admission to all zoo areas that came with the overnighter, so we stayed at the zoo.) I bought a 2 cheeseburger meal - First and Fourth shared one burger and all of the fries, I got the second cheeseburger, and we all shared the soda. I did actually feel better after that - not so desperate. A bit bad for not IFing it longer, but I really didn't feel all that well, and the food did help, SAD that it was.

Around lunchtime, we did find a new-to-us eatery in the Rainforest building. That was much better - they offer soups, salads, panini. First and Fourth got a roast beef panini and I ate the side dish of cole slaw (soup starts October 1st ). First brought ice water to the table, and then we refilled with another soda before we left for some more exploring.

If I had to do the overnighter again, and we definitely will, now I know to absolutely STUFF our huge cooler with food and Thermoses filled with steaming chowders so I can just wait for the 10:00 a.m. release time and leisurely walk to my car for a full meal of Primalness, instead of getting desperate. (We ate all the food in our cooler the afternoon before... no leftovers... . )

On the good side, we had an incredible time seeing the zoo at night, special hands-on animal exhibition just for us, and even got to go behind the scenes at the zoo. The staff lived a tent alongside us, answered every question, and the guy (of the guy-and-gal zoo overnighter team) even woke us up boot camp style with a lot of really loud yelling to an accompaniment of the 80's metal band Poison. FUNNY!!

All in all, Journal, I think I kept the non-Primal damage to a minimum. I guess the biggest lesson in all of this is to BE PREPARED when it comes to Primal food. Fourth has her own 48oz wide-mouth food Thermos (she is an incredibly picky eater, and won't eat if her food is cold during the winter months, so we bought her her own...) and I think I need my own. Hell - I think everybody in this house needs one!

Otherwise, I am in the throes of an incredible days-long sugar craving. I keep trying to kill it with dark, dark chocolate and butter and lard and Primal whole foods, but like those trick birthday candles that keep relighting themselves, this just keeps on returning! Aaaargh! Early this morning I bought chicken livers - I hope that turns out to be the H-bomb of Primal ordnance!

For final notes to life in the Crabbshack, Third got her first Kinesiotape application at PT yesterday (on her back - posture issues). First is continuing to suffer with a cold (she had it before the zoo overnighter, got just well enough to go, and then crashed again Saturday night) while Second kicked her cold to the curb. Fourth has informed me that she wants to take martial arts classes so she can do rougher activities than she already has, Second wants to return to dance, and First wants to ice skate and ski, as well as play acoustic guitar. This weekend is our TeensyTown tractor pulls again - excellent! I continue to forage and hunt for food at our local farm stands instead of the regular supermarket, to successful and delicious effect. Third is getting used to not having margarine on her food. Last week I joined our Amish friends in their kitchen for a Concord grape juice-making-and-bottling session (with a steam juice extractor pot), and scored their homemade ketchup recipe. And Third's OT told me that she can absolutely see that I am still losing inches - ego boost!!

So, Journal, that brings you up-to-date. As always, I will return...

[annedawso]

Hi all,
Felt quite lethargic this week. Not sure if it all the nights out and alcohol or the change in the weather. Going dark a lot earlier here now.
Been to Zumba tonight and glad I went, the dancing we do is very feel good. Looking forward to a relaxing weekend. Going to have a sort out and sell some stuff on eBay- two reasons, to have a declutter as there are loads of toys no-one plays with and it will hel out with the cost of Christmas.
My 3 sons mainly want money for Christmas. I buy them underwear, books, chocolates and one of their favourite things is I fill up for each of them craft boxes with dividers with their favourite sweets.
Must be the dark nights turning my mind to Christmas.

[Crabbcakes]

Hi all,
Felt quite lethargic this week. Not sure if it all the nights out and alcohol or the change in the weather. Going dark a lot earlier here now.

Yeah, me too, but as the school year has started, I won't get a break until I fly to my cousin's wedding. I think it is the changing of the seasons. I need to get out every day now for a walk in the cooler air and sunshine - that helps regulate me and acclimate me to the cooler days to come. Today I got some weeding and pruning done and am feeling very mellow and happy with myself. Or it could be the huge dollop of mascarpone I put on Second's tomato broth with veggies she made for all of us just now...

[Bess58]

Hi all,

I'm still here, but very busy with my translations. Nice to read about your adventures. I feel you about Christmas coming. Here in Germany Christmas sweets start to appear in the shops by the end of August. Is it the same in the US and the UK? Normally I have no problems with resisting sweets, but around Christmas (and Easter, which is also sweets season here) I really get into trouble. And this after being low carb for six years and more and more primal for the last two. Must be a psychological thing: I feel like a child that isn't going to get a gift this year. So, as you confessed your sins (alcohol for Anne and fastfood at the zoo for Crabbcakes), I confess that I ate a big bar of nougat the day before yesterday which gave me terrible sweets cravings yesterday. Fortunately I could fight them off by eating a lot of fatty stuff, always works like a charm.

I was thinking of you in the last days. Crabbcakes, the action of my current novel took the heroine to Cleveland, but alas not to the zoo. And Anne, we have a festival here which is called "Eight days a week - Liverpool in Köln". There will be a series of events with young, avantgardistic artists starting today until the end of October. Each event has a title that refers to a song by the Beatles. Looks like an illustration of the theory about "six degrees of separation" or "small world" ...

Have a nice weekend!

[Crabbcakes]

I hate the commercial aspect to all of our holidays, secular or religious. Yeah, Christmas stuff is coming out here and there, and Thanksgiving is starting to dominate our shelves already, even though Halloween isn't here yet. I asked a store stock-person about the Christmas stuff and he said that people buy them out already - which is why the stores order/stock even more of the stuff. Gack.

I have wanted to have almost totally handmade holidays for a long time now, and I think I feel energetic enough with the Primal to really do it. Until now, we have mostly bought things from consignment stores and Goodwill and such so we aren't contributing to new production/shipping of plastic China crap (when I didn't actually get a craft done for whatever reason). I was recently watching old episodes of Extreme Engineering (a Discovery Channel show) and the shows were all about how ports in the US, the Panama Canal, et al., have to dig deeper channels / bridges need to be built with higher clearances underneath to accomodate the new supersized container ships now floating on our oceans. Do you know how much shit will be added to that swirling Pacific Ocean garbage patch if one of those things sinks?!?!

I am a tree-hugger at heart, and have always done everything I know to tread lightly on the earth, and humble non-plasticky holidays suit me just fine. If it didn't require a dictatorship to accomplish, I would so totally make a law that everything that doesn't 100% biodegrade on its own / be able to be completely recycled is outlawed from the land, both domestic production and imports. I was talking to the moms at Third's riding center and mentioned that I have always wanted to build an energy-self-sufficent (off-the-grid), non-toxic, natural-materials house with perhaps even composting toilets and one of the moms looked at me like she had just had a stroke.

One of the best, super, totally great things about living in Germany was that it was considered "American" (unnecessary) to take a shower each morning whether you need one or not, and that you really won't die if you just wash up anything needing attention until you get to the point where a full bath/hot shower would be good. I have sensitive skin, and that little bit of culture has saved my skin. My kids were taught this, and we don't go into contortions if we are out for an overnighter somewhere and have no shower available until we get home. At my recent zoo overnighter, you wouldn't believe how many times the OFFICIAL NOTICE went out that the zoo doesn't have shower facilities for the overnighter attendees.

And the babies! Oh, my Lord, how many times do I see babies with dry skin and exzema and all that because their moms think they MUST have that daily evening bath! With chemically crap "baby wash", to boot!

And since I now have worked myself up into a lather, I shall just continue to rant... political campaign money should go to literacy education and national/state parks/nature preserves (just because I love books and parks so much); teacher's unions should be outlawed and all that lobbying money should be seized and used to open small neighborhood schools of whatever stripe the community wants; organic-biodynamic-grassfed-permaculture farmers should get most of the farm bill money; highway/city billboards should be torn down; all make-up should be organic and non-toxic and cruelty-free; the people who want to open My County's first porn shop should have their genitals shrivel up and fall off; all TV news shows should be in the Charlie Rose format and not crap info-tainment; and hopefully God Himself will have mercy upon us all TODAY and smite tv, print, internet, and radio ads from the face of the Earth.

Chocolate. I think I need chocolate. Going now to get chocolate. And then chase that with mascarpone... and when will the damn avocados I bought finally be ripe!?