Aug 1 - Aug 23, 2017

 My weight pics for Aug 1 - Aug 23. Again, I don't have them from every day, but here's what I've got:

I made some ferments & sprouts.

black mustard seeds on the right, juniper berries on the left (to add to the finished mustard)

beans soaking for sprouts

2 jars of jicama, fermented strawberries, and a jar of figs + an apple

fresh home-grown figs with one apple

leafy green sprouts, carrots + daikon, another attempt at garlic-dill cucumber pickles (turned out yummy!), and water kefir

water kefir and strawberries

water kefir, strawberries, and beans soaking

 I made dinner:

turkey medallions, carrots, dilly green beans, peas, zucchini, in chicken broth

crock pot pork roast (shredded), with carrots, sprouted beans (soy, peas, black-eye peas), konbudashi-pickled mushrooms, plus some bouquet garni herbs

beef with carrots, sprouted beans, and sesame seeds

Our house is not very big, so storage is at a premium. I was getting frustrated with all my jars just sitting out on the counter, so Brianne got me a set of shelves to store them on.

I bought some of that new-fangled charcoal tooth powder and it does seem to make a difference!

I replaced our Canada flag - the old one was faded and torn up by the wind.

We took in our recycling. One of the items we brought in was a 10-foot long section of copper tubing for one of our swamp coolers. It had split over the winter (guess we didn't get it drained in time). Copper is valuable and it brought in almost $5.00, which helps offset the cost of the new one we had to buy. :-/ 

I watched the eclipse from inside the camera obscura that Brianne made for me.

I picked some juniper berries from the backyard bush.

One of the things I love about the desert is the wildlife.

This is the lizard that lives on our front porch. 

4-foot long gopher snake in our backyard. The first one we've seen in the yard since we moved up here 2.5 years ago!

A close-up of the snake.

a hawk in our front yard tree, scaring the bunnies away

BUT, we've had entirely TOO MUCH wildlife in our house recently!!

found this huntsman in a box of pencils in the office

pencil-box huntsman 

found *this* huntsman in the bathtub!!

bathtub huntsman again

This Yellow Sac Spider fell into my aquarium and drowned. Was NOT expecting to see this! LOL

Roof rat (Rattus rattus) that was in our house for a few days. Used an electronic trap to electrocute it. Put it outside over the fence onto the undeveloped portion of our property. It was gone a few hours later. (I suspect the ravens ate it.)

a comparison of a roof rat (Rattus rattus) and a Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus).

Hopefully I'll start remembering to take morning weight pics and posting regularly again!

.

July 2017

Morning weight pics for July - not a full set because I guess I forgot??

I made some salt-brine ferments: a lemon-dill sauerkraut, salsa (with tomatoes, jalapeños, and nopales (prickly pear cactus pads)), dill-garlic cucumber pickles, and jicama with dill & garlic. 

All of them turned out well except for the jicama & the cucumber pickles, both of which ended up moldy (and so I dumped them into my compost bin):

I used up all of my whey protein powder a couple of days before I could get another container of it, so I bought some vegetable-based powder to tide me over. Once my whey protein came in I switched back to it, but I'll use up the rest of the veggie powder when my "super veggie" powder runs out.

And here's my weight chart for the end of July:

.

June 17 - June 30, 2017

First of all, here are the morning weight pics I have for the end of June:

On June 17, I flew up to Oakland for Sonos rehearsal. I got some trail mix for the flight:

On July 28, I started adding hemp protein to my morning smoothie. Prior to that, immediately after drinking my smoothie, I sometimes had slight intestinal cramps (from the influx of protein), but the hemp protein seems to have cured that. Yay! Here's a couple of pics of the bag I got from Marshall's:

And here's my weight chart for the end of June!

.

Catching up? (June 17 - Aug 23)

I know haven't posted for a while. After I got back from New York, I got sick and then got more sick. Two trips to the Urgent Care, and 3 different antibiotics later, I finally started feeling better near the end of the Handbell Musicians of America's National Seminar in Garden Grove, CA.

Anyway, I have been taking morning weight pics (though not every day because I got out of the habit) and pics of dinner and of my food prep activities and I want to post them here to have a record of it all.

So, rather than do day-by-day posts, I'll do a single post for the rest of June, another for July, and then another up to today, Aug 23.

.