blog moved

blog has been moved:

http://deedra.the-brannons.com/blog

hospital free so far plus other things

well guess it's time for a long overdo update. I've been out of the
hospital since about june 19 and so far things are looking good. the
rest of may was farely rough and the beginning of june as well. Things
are fine now though so that's good.

Chris and i switched back to gentoo for our olinux installs a bit agao.
We did this for a few reasons and so far i'm happy with things. Chris
is doing development stuff for gentoo again, and I'm in the process of
setting up as an arch tester so that I can help out as well.

Medically things are going farely well. I'm kind of waiting till next
month to see what my new naturopath wants to do next in terms of medical
things. Also waiting to see GI here so that i can see what they want to
do next. Don't see GI till september though.

medical update

We had a phone conversation with my naturopath, and things are looking
good. we did add calcium to my suppliments, but that doesn't surprise me
much. my bp meds have been dropped drasticly since my last hospital
visit and that's a good thing. the doctor lowered my bp meds because of
my body starting to cooperate.

my angziety seems to be more under control though the vagus nerve
problems still need dealing with. So all and all things look good, it's
just waiting for my body to get back in line.

updates, updates

Well a lot has happened since i posted. For several reasons i wont go
into, chris left google. We ended up moving to oregon and are now in salem.

The weather is wonderful here. Our apartment is a bit smaller then our
last one but we also got rid of extra furnature when we moved so the
lack of space while annoying for some reasons isn't really a huge problem.

Bella has been doing farely well, she's got a blog of her own now,
though it's not been updated recently. I'm looking to move my blogs off
blogger and into an easier to use blog setup but we'll see if that
actually happens. The new blogger setup is kind of horrible and isn't
useable by folks with text browsers so i kind of just think it's not
worth using blogger any more if i can avoid it.

good bye savannah

It seems another chapter of my life has in it's way come to a close. My
last guide dog, my wonderful girl savannah died on the 11th of this
month. Apparrently she had cancer and there was fluid building up
around her lungs and heart.

The email i got from peggy said that she was happy and hyper till the
last, she loved to play ball and have fun.

I've always missed her since she left, but in some ways i miss her more.
A large part of me wishes i'd kept her after retirement because i never
was able to get another dog, but at the same time, i know they took care
of her in a way i never could. They have a dog for her to play with, and
she'll be missed greatly by their dog willow and bob and peggy.

I'll always miss her and i hope one day maybe I'll have another shephard
again, guide dog or pet. No dog can replace her, but shephards are
wonderful dogs.:)

bella says feed me.

Bella has really opened up since she's been here. she's starting to stay
out when the doorbell rings and i think this is incredible progress on
her part. I almost dread the day we move out of here.:P

We had a bit of fun with her earlier this week.

http://deedra.the-brannons.com/podcasts/bella-says-feed-me.mp3

new naturopath, there might be hope after all.

Well, I saw a naturopath last week. she took an extensive medical
history, i think i was able to tell her more of what was going on then
i was able to tell the homeopath. She really took the time to listen to
me, she had a great deal to say, and she said i was right on track with
the suppliments i was taking. She had some questions about my probiotics
and suggested i increase the s boulardii more. I explained the
probiotics to her. Essentially to high of a dose of probiotic tends to
make me queezey though the s boulardii and the scd probiotics dont do that.

Tuesday we had our follow up apointment and she layed out her treatment
plan. Essentially it involves a great deal of detoxing, combine with
trying to reawaken my vagus nerve and try to get control over the
stomach acid problems, and also try to balance my hormones. It's been an
expensive trip so to speak, but i've got a great deal of hope that it
will actually work.

Jennifer is nice open and honest. She thinks she can help and we truely
hope she can.

Well, it's been almost a week since my origional backslide on scd last
week and my body is just now starting to completely bounce back. I felt
pretty crappy for a couple of days but i'm starting to feel decent
again, so we'll see how things go. I've found replacement foods to deal
with those insane cravings, so guess we need to overstock on dates.:P

measuring cups and spoons with braille

So a friend told me about these, the spoons are the pourfect 12 piece
set and the cups are the pourfect 9 piece set. Both of these have
specific braille labels on them. The spoons go from 2 tbsp to 1/64 tsp.
There is apparrently print to go on certain of these spoons. 1/4tsp is
considered a drop in recipes. if i remember correctly, 1/32 is a
smidgen, 1/16 is a dash, and 1/8 is a pinch.

These seem to be measurements to help folks who aren't sure what those
measurements should look like. Some recipes dont get that specific i
think but i suppose when you are dealing with spices you will run into
these measurements.

Either way I give these 5 stars so to speak and thanks to christina
for telling me about these!

This same company also makes a set of mixing bowls 1 cup, 2 cup, 4 cup,
6 cup, 8 cup, and 12 cup bowls.

I dont have the smaller bowls but i have the ones from 6 8 12 and find
them extremely useful. They're easy to measure things in because they
have raised lines at the cup marks. They also have egg crackers on the
side to help in cracking eggs. I find those particularly handy.

I'm going to test all of these rather extensively in the next several
days. I need to make bread along with bbq chicken, I'll glaze the
carrots in some duck sauce i have, and maybe i'll make jello and yoghurt
soon. Almond milk is a definit on the list for tomorrow along with the
chicken and carrots.

I may do the bread tomorrow or i may wait till wednesday.

I need to go over to safeway in the next couple days to. I want to get
fish that i know i'll like along with some uncured bacon, and maybe
another package of chicken. I also need to get juice for chris and i.

I have my next naturopath apointment wednesday. The lavela seems to be
working well, more so then the klonapin i'm happy about that. No real
angziety since i switched to the lavela.

the search for a doctor continues

Well the other day i went to see my new doctor. Basically i came away
with no better help then before. she essentially told me that do to my
many medical issues she wasn't experienced enough to help me and i
needed an internal medicine doctor.

How frustrating. She was my third doctor since i've been here. It seems
as though it's almost impossible to find a good doctor.

adventures in the kitchen: carrots, beans, and salmon!

Today's adventures in the kitchen was a busy day but semi-short podcast.
I made scd carrots, scd salmon, and black beans and rice for chris. Link
is here:
http://deedra.the-brannons.com/podcasts/carrots-and-beans-and-salmon.mp3

good bye starbucks

I've been almost completely scd for about a month now. The only thing i
wasn't really willing to give up was the weekly or so trip to starbucks.
It's a fun walk the people are friendly and so on. The problem though is
that i'm tollerating their stuff less and less and today is kind of the
final straw.

I went today thinking to get a nice solid breakfast which i've always
done but today when i went things went downfind but it resulted in
horrible diaria. Meh oh well, No more starbucks. That's not all bad it
will save us money anyway. Least i handle diluted coffee with almond
milk in it better.

s boulardii, the miracle probiotic/yeast

s boulardii is commonly used with those with digestive disorders. I
would suggest reading about it as it's very helpful in managing certain
things. At any rate, I started taking a boulardii 2 days ago. It's
supposed to help with diaria and things like killing bad bacteria etc
etc. Immediately the diaria i've had for almost a month seemed to stop.
I'm still playing with the doseage on the s boulardii but over all i've
found it to be very helpful and i'm glad i learned about it from the scd
folks.

the potential for hope

Well, a couple things have happened in the last couple of weeks that
give me a little hope in terms of my stomach. Well i ended up in the
hospital last week as usual, but things were a little different. The
thole nausia/vommitting thing came completely out of nowhere. I was
cooking food one minute and puking my brains out the next.

I was in for about 5 days or so and that was bad, but the changes in my
diet with scd seem to be helping in certain ways. I was quite ill as
usual but i was also a bit better able to function. As long as i didn't
get any illegals in my food i seemed to actually do alright.

So Now that i'm better able to function tomorrow i'm going to do quite a
chunk of cooking. I'm going to cook up some carrots as well as a ham i
got when we ordered food a while ago. I love ham and this one seems to
be quite interesting. so i'm going to prep it and hopefully it wont take
50 years to cook tomorrow.

sometimes things dont go the way we want.

This morning started out nicely. Woke up got going early finally got
caught up on the endless pile of dishes that cooking makes and started
our date night dinner which btw is ham, asparagus, and coconut flour bread.

Well, i got 4.5 hours into the ham, and the smoke alarm went off.
"carbon monoxide warning" Couldn't get it to stfu it went on for about
10 minutes.

Ham is still cooking asparagus is just started, but need to wait for
maintenence to come by and have a look.

So while i was planning adventures in the kitchen for today with the
coconut bread, we probably wont have it today at all since i'm currently
waiting for maintenence to come by.

bye bye facebook

Well we finally got into my facebook account after we've moved and
decided it wasn't worth keeping i've done perfectly well without it for
7 months no point in keeping it if captchas have to be solved every time
i want to change computers or something.

adventures in the kitchen: peanutbutter cups

I decided to do a podcast today after all, I needed a bit of something
to do today. I decided to do the peanut butter cups, and here it is!

http://deedra.the-brannons.com/podcasts/20130314-peanutbutter-cup-making.mp3

the recipe for this is found on the digestive wellness blog
http://digestivewellness.blogspot.com

adventures in the kitchen

Well i was going to start the podcast today, but i woke up with a
horrible headache so it's on hold till tomorrow. I probably wont set up
an rss feed for i.. I'd rather just post the download links
here.....Blogger turns them into html links anyway, so the lazy folks
dont need to even copy and paste:)

a productive day

Well i didn't get as much as i wanted to get done today but some of that
is lazyness. I did get almond milk made and i made it using dates
instead of honey. This seems to taste much much better and it doesn't
give it the after taste that honey sometimes gives things.

Bella has been good lately, she's wrapping chris around her paws more
and more.

Tomorrow i have plans to make biscuits for chris banana cakes for me,
and i'd like to do the chicken egg bread but need to bake the chicken
and make the carrots first.

So randy gave me a bit of an idea. He's been trying to get me to use
audioboo though that isn't happening especially since they limit the
little podcasts to 3 minutes. Either way I think I'm going to start my
own...."adventures in the kitchen" maybe throw in some bella podcasts to
if she'll cooperate.

When i set it up in a few minutes the link will be:
http://deedra.the-brannons.com/podcasts

things to do

Well, I have food for today for scd so no need to cook today unless i
want eggs later.

I seem to be doing well so far. Haven't tasted the yoghurt today and
wont start eating that till tomorrow If i recall the scd site says to
wait for 3 days in before starting to add yoghurt.

I was having a bit of trouble getting the information i needed for s
boulardii but someone from the scd list was kind enough to post the file
to the list and that was very helpful. Thanks to those who have been
helping me on that list it's been very helpful.

I have to rant. Yahoo seems to require a captcha for their website in
order to actually get into your yahoo account. Well this is pointless
for me as their audio captchas only sometimes work and even then you
can't always understand them to solve them. I'm going to see if kathleen
can come up some time and help me with it so that i can actually get
into my yahoo account I'd like to download all those scd files then
repost them on my website for those who actually need them but are
having trouble with yahoo..

maybe i'll make this my next project for folks after it's unlocked.

We're still trying to get into my facebook account, maybe we can get in
do a final post and hopefully get folks to read this blog instead of
insisting on using facebook to communicate with me.

next week is my birthday. The collective offers 20% off to those on
their birthdays so I may go pick up some new strains to post to my other
blog in the coming weeks.

I got all the baking pans and supplies i need to start baking various
breads and muffins. I really like this part of scd because i can get
creative as long as i stick to scd legal items And scd items can get
quite flavorful and fun to do.

Bella is doing well, we switched to felidae grain free food both canned
and dry and she's complaining a bit about the canned stuff i guess even
cats complain about things that are healthy for them:P

I've finally found a way of eating that seems to work well for my
stomach i still can't eat much in the mornings but i certainly try now.
It seems that eating a cup every 2 hours works well. I just need to
remember to eat because my body doesn't always tell me when i need to
eat though sometimes it does.

good days and bad

Well i'm into my first 24 hours on scd and i'm still having reactions to
the milk i had tuesday. Hopefully this passes quickly would kind of
suck to end up having die off along with reaction to milk.

My almond milk yoghurt looks like it came out good, nice and jelled and
solid. Hopefully it didn't seperate too much when i go to eat it guess
i'll find out.

I enjoyed the jello i had for breakfast, i'd forgotten the stuff was
good lol.