Menthol

The first and most common symptom of this virus we had was coughing. Not just ordinary coughing but the kind that occurs often and is difficult to stop. Cough drops worked well in quieting the fits and opening the airways.

I was also giving Richelle elderberry syrup every day, trying to help her immune system beat the virus. I didn't notice the "other ingredients" which listed eucalyptus, peppermint, thyme, and myrrh oils.

One night, after about two weeks of all this, Richelle woke me up with her non-stop coughing. It took me about fifteen minutes to gather my thoughts enough to remember the Vick's vapor rub on the feet trick to stop coughing. I stumbled around finding the Vick's and then slathered probably more than was necessary on each of Richelle's soles. It was dim and I didn't have my glasses on. You're supposed to put socks on afterward but I wasn't awake enough to search for a pair. Richelle stuck her feet back under the covers, flopped over in bed, fell back asleep...and never coughed once until morning.

Three days later, Richelle broke out in what I thought was poison oak. She insisted she hadn't been in the brush but I sent her to the shower with the bottle of dish washing liquid - my first line of defense for poison oak.


Of course it wasn't poison oak. It was an overdose of menthol. She ended up with a rash that covered most of her body. It started here on her cheeks and she looked rather squirrel-like for probably a week. It didn't help that I forgot about the Vick's on her feet and Mike had to remind me to change her sheets.

Catch-up

No, we've not fallen off the edge of a cliff. We've succumbed to the nasty infections that's been wreaking havoc in this part of the country. For about four years my family has avoided doctors except for the chiropractor and then whammo! Three of us are dragged into the urgent care clinic within two weeks.

Richelle had an ear infection (I think it started as tonsillitis), Nick had a really bad sinus infection, and I had a pretty bad case of bronchitis. Mike and Cameron fought/is fighting a sore throat. Mike's cleared up after a week of home doctoring and Cameron's just started yesterday.

I'm looking forward to sunny weather and good health for all!

Eddikashun

The saying is that you're supposed to learn something new every day. I tend to learn nothing new for a handful of days and then fill a basket with new knowledge in one afternoon. Or forenoon as the case may be. I comfort myself on the off days that although I'm not learning anything new, I'm practicing what I learned the last go-around.

Today is a basket-filling sort of day. So far, by 1pm, I've...

...learned how rock is quarried, cut, and shipped. (They pour chemicals down the drilled holes and add water, separating it from the mountain by expansion. Less stress on the rock than using dynamite.)

...learned that onyx is a pale, creamy yellow-ecru color and is about as soft as marble, making it relatively easy to carve. It can also be back-lit for added beauty. ( I always thought onyx was black)

...learned that there's no way I can afford those beautiful counter tops and figurines in the foreseeable future. ($395 for a 24inch vase?!)

...learned that there are so many stone colors and patterns that I can't figure out how a person can decide what to use where in their house if money is not a factor. (Money being a factor I can decide in two seconds...the cheapest!)

...learned that "serpentine" refers to a type of rock as well as a type of soil (I knew about the soil already; the rock part is new. Let's see...serpentine rock is basalt that took on different elements within its crystalline structure as it was forming underwater. Mine is a beautiful jade color shot through with white quartz.)

...learned what it means to click "no" on "convert line breaks" in the settings/formatting tab of my blog. The effect is as if I've taken one deep breath and ran my entire post together as one paragraph.

The things you learn in Scouts

Last weekend was another adventure in camping with almost a dozen girls ages 9-12. We have a good (excellent, really) parent involvement and there were five adults to ride herd on the girls.


We spent Friday and Saturday nights at a Girl Scout camp located on the coast. Saturday, we got up at 6am (after going to bed at nearly 1am) so we could be up, dressed, breakfasted and at the tide pools 35 minutes up the coast at the ideal time of 9am. One of the rules I've laid down for the girls is that they must be cheerful in the mornings even if it kills them. I tell them if they don't feel cheerful, they've got to fake it. They've not let me down yet.


So we spent about an hour at the tide pools (tons of mussels, barnacles, barnacles on mussels, anemones - some at least a foot long and six inches in diameter, small dead jellyfish, a couple of starfish, and lots of colorful seaweed and algae) and continued up the coast to the aquarium. This is the same aquarium that housed (pooled?) Keiko of "Free Willy". They turned Keiko's pool into an undersea garden passageway where you can walk inside a plexiglass tunnel and look around at the sea creatures swimming beside, above, and below you. Check it out at http://aquarium.org.


We stopped and hiked up to a lighthouse on the way back and looked out over the cliffs to the surf pounding the rocks below and the sea lions body-surfing a short way out.


The girls were pretty worn out by the time we got back to the camp but it didn't stop them from learning and playing old, fun games. I don't know what this first one's called but you measure the distance from your opponent by putting one foot in front of the other with your toe to the opponent's toe of their front foot. Bringing your front foot together with your back foot, put your hands up with elbows bent and try to knock your opponent off-balance by slapping against their hands without losing your own balance. The first person to take a step or fall into the other one loses. For some reason, the girls all wanted to take on the dad who is 6'4" and weighs 240 lbs. One of them actually caught him by surprise and knocked him off-balance. It was quite hilarious to see the girls less than 5 feet tall and weighing no more than 85 pounds match up with him. They usually ended up on their backsides.


The other game they played is called "Slap". Again, you stand facing your opponent with your hands held out in front of you. One of you puts your hands palms-up and the other's is palms-down lightly touching each other. The palms-up person then quickly tries to slap the backs of the hands above. The trick is to be fast enough to slap the other person's hands or quick enough to yank your hands away without getting slapped. The hands return to neutral (palms-up/palms-down) and the slapper tries again. If the slapper misses, they exchange positions and the slapper becomes the slappee.


We finished off the evening with a dance (each girl doing her own thing on a slippery floor and with sock feet) after a candlelight supper of spaghetti, salad, and bread since it was Valentine's Day. What could be more romantic than a candlelight supper with four good friends and eleven "daughters"?

Culinary creations

Cameron loves fresh salsa and has been wanting to make his own for awhile now. I don't particularly like it so hadn't pursued a recipe until he started asking me to find one.

The first thing I did was call my sister-in-law who is an awesome cook and can take random things out of the fridge and come up with some great-tasting stuff. That was not as profitable a call as I'd have liked because like all great cooks, she doesn't measure or jot down. She just takes what's on hand and tosses them together in proportions that "look good". She did, however, give me some good advice. The best advice was to look on the list of ingredients of his favorite salsa and start experimenting.

Yesterday, Cameron, Richelle and I made a trip to the grocery store and looked over the assortment of vegetables. Cameron loves habañeros so we got three of them. He doesn't particularly like jalapeños so we ignored those. There were some little dark green peppers called serranos that looked good so we picked out half a dozen. There were some poblanos that I remembered my sister-in-law mentioning so we got one. I pointed to a tomatillo and asked Cameron if he wanted one.
"What do they taste like?" he asked.
"I have no idea but they look cute!" was my girly answer. He snorted, shook his head and told me to put one in the cart. Well, they are cute - a little green tomato wrapped up in a papery leaf-like thingy.
We added half a dozen roma tomatoes, a yellow bell pepper, an Anaheim pepper, a yellow onion, cilantro, a few limes, fresh basil and took a swing through the chips aisle on our way to the check-out.

He was three hours slicing, dicing, and deciding how to concoct four different combinations of ingredients. Along the way, he decided he wanted to taste the different things that were unfamiliar to him. That's when we learned just how HOT serrano peppers are! He tasted the teeniest mince of one and described the experience as a blast of heat that tapered off to very warm. He also managed to get some oil on his lips in the process and was forced to stop production long enough to wash them with soap. Juice, chips, and bread simply couldn't cut it.

He was impressed with the tomatillo. Crunchy and moist, a hint of citrus with the idea of heat but when the piece was swallowed, so was the illusion.



He was mildly disappointed with the results. None of the four combinations he made were hot enough for him!! They were plenty hot enough for me. But then, I don't like very much heat (I also don't like my sodas very fizzy or very cold [the guys say I like it flat and warm] but that's another story.) We forgot to add garlic, salt, pepper, and sugar until most of it was gone but it did bring out the flavors a little more. He liked the serrano peppers but not the poblano. He wants to swap out the yellow bell pepper and try green onions instead. His favorite mix was the one with everything in it.

I told him that I would supply him with whatever vegetables he wanted however often he wanted it. He looked a bit startled and I explained that I would happily keep him in ingredients if this was the way to get veggies into him.

Lego Robotics

Here's Richelle with the trophy her team won at State Competition January 17th. They also got a participation medal which she's wearing.



As I posted earlier, it's made entirely of Lego pieces except for the written part on the base and the decals on the side.



Here's a close-up of the commendation on the base.

Now she's involved with a Science, Electronics, and Technology 4-H group and having a lot of fun. Part of the meeting, they're working on electricity and the second half they're learning more about the Lego robot; its sensors, attachments, and more advanced programing. Yours truly is in charge of that bit. It's quite a challenge because there's no curriculum I can go by. I'm having to piece a curriculum together out of online resources and tutorials I came home with from training last fall.

What can be done to cats

Nick came over the other day and was telling us that his girlfriend was getting a kitten for her three-year-old daughter. He said it was going to be gay. At our confused looks, he explained.

The kitten (male) is white but Jade (the 3yo) wanted a pink cat. So her grandmother dyed it pink. Jade has named it Cocoa. This cat will be indoors so they're getting it fixed. Jade is handicapped (arthrogryposis) so this cat will also need to be de-clawed.

To sum it up, it's a male white cat, dyed pink, called Cocoa, with no claws and no balls. Yup, it's gay.