House of Howard - Drums, Garden Failure, Yarn Purge

 Happenings from the House of Howard 

Ellen has resumed pursuing her interest in playing drums.  Since she has been working this summer she saved up enough money and bought herself an electronic (I think that's what they call them) drum set.  She is faithful to practice every day.  I'm glad she has this outlet because I think it helps with her anxiety and general stress to get in there and whack away at the drums.  She has always loved music, it helps her deal with stress. Since I posted about it on Facebook there have been several people who have mentioned that they had always fancied playing drums, but had never followed through with it. I'm glad Ellen has followed through. It will give her something to occupy her, and something to strive for. 

 Gary has been super busy working on well repairs the past couple of weeks; seems like almost every day last week he went out to one job or another. I'm thankful he has Doug to help him. They enjoy going to different places and visiting with people. This past week a customer was so thankful to have running water in his house again that he treated them to lunch at a local restaurant. Haha..

 My garden this year is an utter disaster.  Between the copious amount of rain we got all spring and into early summer and my health issues, I just haven't kept it up like usual.  You can barely tell the garden from the grass.  We are still getting plenty of peppers, a few tomatoes and some okra. The sweet potatoes are also coming on pretty well. I can see the dirt is cracked around the base of the vines and I can see the orangey tops of the sweet potatoes peeping out. At this point I may have to just abandone the garden altogether, due to ticks and chiggers in the tall grass and weeds. This time of year is seed tick time, and I am being very super cautious about getting nailed by any more ticks of any size. I had a seed tick on me today, and am praying very hard that he doesn't make my alpha gal issues worse.  They say that even the seed ticks can carry it; that they can hatch carrying the alpha gal molecule and inject it in you. There are also preliminary studies that chiggers might be a vector. If this is the case then the whole of the south and Midwest are doomed to catch this horror. I am praying they come up with a vaccine or shot or some such, otherwise the beef industry is going to be in dire straits.  

Anyway back to the garden. Due to my having to follow a low histamine diet, the tomatoes and peppers are off of my food list.  I guess tomatoes are the worst as far as being high in histamine; as are all the other night shade vegetables. I can have okra though, we had some for supper a couple nights ago.  Since I am avoiding white flour, I used ground flax meal to bread the okra.  It worked really well.  I put the salt and spices into the beaten eggs, dipped the okra pieces into the egg, then just coated them in the flax meal.  It actually worked much better than almond flour.  I used to use almond flour because of Ellen's type one; almond flour is lower in carbs. But now I am avoiding any kind of nuts due to the fact that they are histamine releasers. Nuts are low in histamine themselves, but they cause other foods, and your mast cells, to release histamines into your system. But the flax meal seemed to stick to the okra better than the almond flour ever did.  That sounds good again for tonight.  

In the past week or two, since my worst fume reactions on July 23rd, my whole system seems to have been healing, or at least settling down from this histamine intolerance/mast cell activation thing.  I went to Wed night church with no trouble last night.  We were in our ladies' Bible study in a Sunday School room, a couple of the ladies had perfume on, and it didn't bother me or cause a reaction. I think as I completely avoid things that trigger me, meat smells and an overload of chemical smells my body is able to handle the smaller non-alpha gal triggers. 

Last week I had Ellen clear out about 90% of my yarn stash. We packed it all in boxes and I took it to the senior citizen's resale shop.  I only kept the small cotton skeins.  Once again the reason here is the alpha gal.  Some of the yarn was wool blends and I didn't want to take a chance.  Since I have cleared out the yarn, done a deep clean on the bedroom, and have been running an air purifier at night, I have been sleeping so much better than I have in a long time.  At night I used to plug up so badly and have post nasal drip all night.  It was awful.  Now I wonder if the wool yarn wasn't playing a part in that; allergies and all that. I will have to make sure every bit of yarn I get from now on needs to be 100% acrylic, or cotton; if I even decide to go back into loom knitting. My heart just hasn't been in it lately.  I will never say "never" because just a day or so ago I saw a super cute pattern I might want to try.  Haha! 

I had better stop for now.  This has taken me a couple of days to finish.