journal

It\’s been kind of a busy week.  There was a work party at Chris\’ workplace, which we attended.  We didn\’t stay long, because it was supposed to be a family-friendly thing, and we don\’t have kids and also don\’t know many people at the company.  But it was free food, at least.

We also had two sets of friends visit the house, which was fun but also draining when you\’re already low on energy.  The first was a dinner and game night combo, the second a dessert and movie night.  Good times were had.  Another friend will come by tomorrow.  This is all good for my social life, but bad for my energy levels and attempts to get work done on this blog.

Lastly, still another friend got into a car accident, which totaled her poor car and gave her and her wife some ouchy bruises (though thankfully no other injuries, apparently).  She\’s having kind of a bad time right now, so I\’m helping out by serving as transportation to work, and occasionally errands.  Considering I have the luxury of my own car, this is a service that\’s easier for me to offer than it could be.  It does take time, which I\’m making the best of with podcasts.

I\’d been neglecting my podcasts for the last month or so.  I can\’t listen to them while I\’m trying to work, because I need my words-processing capability for formulating ideas and turning them into words.  It\’s a shame, because I missed listening to my various folklore, history, news, and comedy podcasts.  Possibly, I should simply set aside some time each week to simply do that, rather than expecting opportunities to pop up.  In the meantime, though, I get to listen to a podcast, then spend time with my friend for a bit, then listen to more podcast on the way home.  

  

I\’m still coughing on occasion, and my nose isn\’t entirely back to normal.  I\’m not sure what the deal is now.  The doom algae out back was growing nicely, so perhaps that\’s it.  I\’d had more psychological problems last year when that was the case, though, so I dunno if that explains it.  The heavens opened up and it just sheeted rain for about a half hour yesterday, which seems to have torn the algae to shreds.  If I do better today, that might be a good sign that the algae was the problem.  

I\’m not sure today will be super different, though.  I woke up quite early today instead of sleeping until my usual time.  That might simply be a temperature issue, but it\’s really not that hot out yet and I was using a lighter blanket as well.  

In the meantime, I\’m trying to do the bare minimum for most of my activities, which isn\’t always working out due to the enthusiasm of others.  That\’s life, but I can\’t exactly get my lost energy back, so I really hope life stops complicating itself for a bit so I can recover mentally and emotionally.  It\’s kind of been one long expenditure of energy, starting at Games Done Quick, continuing with the cold, and then taking care of Toro.  If I\’m fortunate, I can have a bit of a breather before October, Month of All Birthdays, arrives.  

My outdoor adventures with black raspberries are mostly over, unfortunately.  The season is fairly short, counted in weeks, but only like 2-3.  I still have some berries left from the last outing, at least.  I\’ll probably freeze half of them, or however much I need to make a pie.  I don\’t think I\’ve ever actually made a fruit pie before, so hopefully I can find a good recipe.

I didn\’t come away from my adventures entirely unscathed this time.  I appear to have a great number of tiny bumps.  They itched at first, but I washed them with soap and now they don\’t.  Not sure what the deal is.  They\’re not red since I washed them, but the Internet isn\’t being super forthcoming on what they are, possibly because there are a lot of possibilities.  They\’re not making me miserable, at least.  I ruled out poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac.  My best guess is oak mites, which apparently die if kept indoors, so I guess if I don\’t sprout any more, that\’s probably it?  

I guess I can check with my doctor about them when I see her tomorrow, too.  She\’s a big proponent of outdoor activities, and also a mom of four, so she\’s probably seen whatever this is before. 

Assuming the bumps are nothing horrible, the raspberry plants seem to be coming into season, so I might go out for a small harvest of those.  I\’ve seen a lot fewer of the regular raspberry plants, but there were several at a local park, and another near my parents\’ place.  Definitely not enough to make a pie out of, or even a substantial side dish, but cool to see and fun to snack on.  Wild raspberries taste just like the ones you find in the store, except perfectly ripe and always flavorful.  I guess, if I found enough, I could put them into a mixed berry pie with the black raspberries?  

 

Probably a lot moreso than their domestic cousins, actually.  Modern crops tend to be grown in nutrient-poor soil.  They plant the same crops there year after year, and only plant one type of plant, which all uses the same nutrition out of the same soil.  After a few years, the soil\’s nutrition is gone, but in modern farming, you don\’t let that stop you from planting again the next year… or the year after, or the year after.  So you get crops with poor nutritional content.

Wild stuff, on the other hand, grows alongside tons of other types of plants, which have varying nutrient requirements but also put back some kinds of nutrition into the soil.  So you get good, healthy, nutrient-filled soil, which grows these black raspberries into little nutritional powerhouses.  

They\’re 1/3 cattail pollen, 2/3 whole grain flour pancakes.  I\’m told not to go higher than 1/2 cattail pollen when baking, probably because baking is finicky.  Still, I was pleased with the results.  They did have a distinctive taste to my taste buds, but I couldn\’t really identify what it was.  I guess if we go collecting again next year, I\’ll need to get more and do a half and half recipe.  Either way, the yellow color these turned due to the pollen was quite pretty.  

Summer Games Done Quick is over.  It was quite an experience, and I\’ll talk about it this Friday.  Suffice it to say, it was exhausting, many gamers went home very happy, and Doctors Without Borders is going to receive a lot of money to provide medical services all over the world.  So basically everybody wins, at least after I rest up.  

I\’m still doing the experiments with the grounding pad, but the results aren\’t as dramatic as I was hoping.  Real science often isn\’t.  I didn\’t really have results from having the grounding pad\’s connectivity changed from day to day, so I\’m in the process of trying it with one week on, one week off.  Double-blind, so at the moment I have no idea whether it\’s plugged in.  I\’m merely documenting my results until both weeks are over.

…It occurs to me that not everyone has a background in psychology, so: Double-blind experiments are ones where the full conditions of the experiment are hidden from both researchers and subjects.  This is to prevent either group from making assumptions, and from those assumptions affecting the data.  

In this case, I kind of expect to sleep better when the grounding mat is plugged in.  That\’s my assumption, which biases me towards putting more favorable results for my sleep if I know the mat is plugged in.  Therefore, I should not be told whether the mat is plugged in.  That\’s \”single blind\” in this experiment.

My spouse is helping me.  Kind of being my research assistant, he\’s the one plugging in and unplugging the grounding mat.  He knows, therefore, the status of the mat, but not what results I\’ve been getting from my sleep.  This ignorance to the results of the experiment is the \”double blind\” in the experiment.  The whole experiment, having both of these, is therefore \”double blind.\”  

Last thing, I picked up a cold somewhere.  I was originally assuming it was an allergic reaction to the new nut butter I\’ve been trying, or to the cattail pollen… but the progression is pretty unmistakable by now.  Fuzzy head and slightly scratchy throat, leading to sniffy nose, leading to massively stuffed up nose, leading to hacking cough (my current location), which eventually fades away (hopefully soon!).  I\’ve frozen the last of my cattail pancakes, just in case, but I don\’t expect a reaction when I eat them in a couple weeks.  

The weirdness with my diaphragm seems to have worn off entirely, which I\’m really glad of.  I don\’t really understand how this weeklong experience happened without any pain, and still had such important side effects, but the human body is a weird mystery, so whatever. 

Speaking of weird, I went with friends to go cattail pollen collecting!  You can use cattail pollen as flour, and we wanted to try it, so off we went.  It was quite an endeavor, what with it being hot out and having to push my way through the head-high cattails.  It\’s no jungle, but it\’s probably the closest I\’ll get to traversing something like that.  I didn\’t have sufficiently waterproof footwear, and quickly got soaked socks and such. 

I used a technique recommended by a seasoned harvester: grabbing a gallon jug, cutting a hole in it, inserting the pollen-laden cattail head, and shaking it.  This allowed me to collect mostly pollen in my efforts.  The stuff is bright yellow, as you\’ll see, and I was quickly covered in pollen.  Fortunately I\’m not allergic. 

The results of my labors had to be sifted for bugs and plant fibers, which I did using a sieve to get the big stuff, and then cheesecloth for the smaller debris.

Fiber and bugs certainly won\’t kill you, but they\’ll mess up the texture of your baked goods.

The final result!

I want to say I was out there collecting for maybe 15-25 minutes, and we started collecting relatively early in the pollen window, so we had to search fairly hard for cattails with pollen.  Which is probably why the end results only came out to half a cup.  Still, that\’s more than enough for a recipe of pancakes, and that\’s fine with me.  If I like the pancakes and flavor, I\’ll get a larger batch next year.  

Other than that, I\’ve been mostly keeping busy with house maintenance and improvement.  Nothing super impressively major, just a slightly different setup for the downstairs TV, moving a couple small furniture things around, and rearranging some of my space in the bedroom.  Also this:

With luck, the board will help me and my spouse keep on top of weekly, monthly, and yearly responsibilities.  Sadly some of these chore-cards will never actually get turned over, because they\’re on an \”as needed\” basis.  Things like adjusting the thermostat, resetting the clocks whenever the power goes out or daylight savings time hits, etc.  Still, it\’s good to have them where they\’re visible and easily-referenceable.