Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 Actually, let's do the vaguely funny first.   Last week Gary and his sister Gail went on a driving tour to Kentucky and West Virginia and a loop around back home.  I didn't want to go this time, I don't do well on driving tours, Ellen had to work, and it just didn't work this year for all of us to go.  So Ellen and I stayed home and had the care of the chickens and Gail's cat. Princess, the cat, stayed in our little cat "habitat" that Gary had made several years ago for this purpose. We parked it in the shade and I made sure to take her frozen 2 liter bottles of ice and place on her shelf to cool her off if she needed it.  She did great.  I kept her food and treats in the house, of course.  One morning I got up and found the bag of cat treats on the laundry room floor; torn open with only 2 remaining.   I had wondered why Smudge hadn't been in to wake me up for her breakfast! Crazy pudgy cat. ************************** This past week, t...

 Life is not all gloom and doom in the House of Howard.  About a year and a half ago in the fall my sister-in-law planted 4 little thornless blackberry starts she'd ordered from a plant/seed company.  She wasn't sure if they were going to survive, but she plunked them into the ground and prayed for the best.  She had to make sure they were covered with netting to protect them from the deer and the ground hogs that wander through.   Last year she got quite a bit off of them, enough to take up some room in her freezer and provide her with a few berry pies over the course of the year.   Those 4 little canes went crazy, put off all sorts of shoots and they are bearing like they are on fire. Her freezer is as full as it can get and I have over a gallon of them in my fridge that I am going to work up into jelly or jam or preserves of some kind this week. Ha! Two weeks ago I'd put up a couple pints of freezer jam with them. They are starting to slow down...

Reading and writing are in my blood, you know.  My mom always told the story of the first night she and my dad brought me home from the hospital after I was born; my dad propped me in his lap and read the daily newspaper to me.  And this continued to be the theme of my early life; being read to. As far back as I can remember we always had kids books in the house, and my mom would read them to me. After I reached a certain age I am sure I wasn't interested in listening to my dad read the newspaper, but my mom read any number of books to me. I can't remember them all, but I do remember every year in school during the book fair I would order a pile of books. One series I remember from elementary school was Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books.  I remember a couple different series by Beverly Cleary; Ramona Quimby and all of her adventures, and Henry Huggins. The Encyclopedia Brown series about a boy detective, those were fun books.  Oh, oh, and I remember my b...

 It is funny/aggravating that my android gave me no trouble in downloading pictures to this blog.  My iphone is giving me fits.  It won't download them, I wait and wait and wait for a picture to download, then it tells me it can't and just quits.  Argh! So here's another quit post without a picture.  A post about pretty much nothing at all.  We have been busy running around back and forth and doing this and that; as most families are. Ellen has been enjoying her job at the resort on the river.  The drunk people test her patience, but they tend to tip pretty well.  Ha!  Gary has been delivering gravel, working on wells, and working around the place here.  There is always something for him to do.  He has made a flatbed out of the blue farm truck.  Yesterday we went to Lebanon and stopped by a garage sale where he found a long truck toolbox to put along one side of the flatbed.  It looks really good.  At that same garage...

 This is is a picture of my father; Lawrence Corley Davis.  I am not sure how old he was here, but he was a very handsome man, with bright blue eyes and very decided dietary ideas.   I won't go too much into the back story, because in light of my recent alpha-gal syndrome diagnosis my focus here is going to be on food, but to set the scene; when I came into being we lived on a 5 acre farm in N. Calif.  There were two houses on the property, my dad, mom, brother and I lived in one, and my dad's mother lived in the other. They were very much farmers; had a milk cow, raised a large garden every year, preserved by canning or freezing...etc.  My Grandmother Davis passed when I was about a year old, but my dad continued with the farming; with cow and garden and even a pony.  When the cow had a bull calf it would be butchered at a certain age and put in the freezer.   When I got about 5 years old my dad was in his 50s (he was 46 when I was born) and...

 The first thing I've learned that I think is really the most important is that calling AGS a "red meat allergy" is almost a misnomer; it barely touches the tip of the ice berg.   It's actually an allergy to the carbohydrate "galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose" found in the cells tissues and fluids of non-primate mammals..even cats and dogs.  However upon researching it, I have found that I am probably already conditioned to be used to the alpha-gal present in my cats/dogs, so they do not cause an allergic reaction when I am around them.  This doesn't make sense to me, but I have read online that some people DO become allergic to their pets.  I guess it depends on the severity of a person's sensitivity.  I supposedly have a moderate sensitivity. This alpha-gal carb is also present in pretty much every mammal byproduct and also in all dairy products. I have to scan labels for the following ingredients; gelatin, glycerin, lactose, casein, whey, stearic acid...

Last week I had what I thought was a great idea; I would have a friend cook up a bunch of ground beef (in the form of hamburgers and just some crumbles for maybe soup or spaghetti) for Gary and Ellen as a break from chicken or turkey.  On Sunday I gave my friend Erin several lbs of ground beef.  She cooked it up and brought it back to me on Monday.  So I wrapped 3 burgers tightly in foil and put them in the oven to warm up. Such a bad, bad idea.   It took maybe 10-15 minutes and I could feel myself starting to react. First I got faint; not really dizzy completely, but just really light headed and shaky.  Then a few minutes after that my pulse began racing. It is a very unpleasant feeling. I at first got a face mask, turned off the oven and kept on with supper prep in the hopes it would subside, but it didn't, it just got worse.   I took some liquid allergy medication and just went outside and sat in the fresh air to recover. Gary and Ellen ate the...