Cat Diary, 40

I’ve learned Come and Sit, both of them easy, but does the old woman think I am a dog?

She keeps saying “Look.”

I look everywhere she might send a kibble.

Have I told you I’ve graduated onto grain-free kibbles? That’s mornings, anyhow. She persists feeding me the lesser kibbles from lunch time onward.

Everytime I think I’ve trained the old woman to send a kibble into the direction where I’m looking she screws the lid back onto the jar and that’s that.

Here’s me looking everywhere …

We’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks, I might’ve cracked it 20% of the time and she keeps wanting me to look at her while she throws the kibble.

That’s so labour intensive. I want to be looking into the field when the kibble sails overhead and I can see where it lands.

She started to teach me Look because she kept finding kibbles where I hadn’t found them. What does she expect? That I should sniff them out??

I want to skip Look and go to Lie Down, should be easy to pick up a bunch of food mid morning.

Life …

Not a double exposure as such …

A reflection … I love the mystery of this kind of shot. Then a bit of framing and cutting and voila … a meaningful and metaphoric intersection.

I’ve been having to prep all week for a medical ‘procedure’ on Tuesday coming and it’s played havoc with my nerves. Meaning it’s played havoc with my routines, with writing, any reading except the sort of thing I can get engrossed in and forget that the consensual world exists.

To that end have thrown myself into the Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin. Have read Parts one and Two so far, and they are every bit as good as I’ve been told. Will be re-reading them as Number Three had to be ordered in. More on them in the goodness of time.

I had six weeks to prepare my mind for this thing, so did nothing until a week and a couple of days ago, then started with writing out the whole deal in long hand in my health diary and making lists. working of the lists now.

This morning the hospital called. Was I going to do an online pre admission form? Something I had completely forgotten. Not anywhere on my lists. So did that, now going shopping. Again.

It’s ridiculous how much stuff we need for this sort of thing.

The weird thing about the prep … for me … was that I couldn’t get started until I had my clothes sorted for travelling there and back. I’m not any kind of dress-up person, most of my clothes are old and worn.

So when a hospital says ‘loose and comfortable clothes’ they’re talking about the rags I wear at home. So it was only after I had one of my clothes try-outs with all my clothes endingin a pile on the bed, and finally deciding to wear my one and only rarely worn skirt, a tshirt and a longsleeved shirt and hanging them ready …

only then could I start to think about any dietary difficulties I might have with the prescribed diet, the fact I had to drop off my antihistamine a week ago and have my nose leaking and my skin allergies popping and so on.

Does anybody even sell plain gelatine these days? Haven’t found any.

Food: GF Bread

‘Falling off the Wagon’, is a phrase that originated in the Temperance Movement, according to Wikipedia.

Meaning falling of the water wagon back into alcoholism. Getting back onto the wagon means getting sober again. I’m sure I’m not telling you anything new.

Every so often I fall off my gluten free, dairy free, lowFODMAP and sugar free penny-farthing-bicycle and then I am in pain and discomfort.

Getting back onto my penny-farthing bicycle is a matter of figuring out where the bad stuff has crept in. While one teaspoon of gluten-containing flour in a loaf of bread is not going to cause any problems, a cup of 100% wheat flour will. And I’ve been mixing spelt flour in my baked goods to encourage yeast action.

And having that bread daily. Having anything you’re sensitive to daily, is another no-no for people with a lot of allergies, intolerances and sensitivities.

Having a particular food once every three days usually prevents a build up of the bad chemicals in the body. But sometimes all I want is to be able to eat something without worrying what it will do to my chemistry.

That’s when my penny-farthing slams to the ground and I fall by the wayside.

Which is why I’ve started experimenting with baking my own bread. Commercial gluten free breads tend to have a ‘stampede of ingredients’, and the breads that are any good aren’t always available. The phrase ‘stampede of ingredients’ … so appropriate to food intolrances … comes from the MooGoo people, who make natural skin care products.

Cutting gluten-containing flour from my diet only half-fixed my problem. I came to the conclusion yesterday it has to be a capsule filler causing me grief. I’m now taking 0.9 mg LDN daily, either a (3 x 0.2 + 3 x 0.1) dose equaling 6 capsules, or (4 x 0.2 + 1 x 0.1) equaling 5 capsules.

Meaning, I’m taking a lot of Avicel cellulose filler. And I’ve been reading in a pertinent group that this stuff gives a lot of people grief. They either have their capsules compounded with a different filler and that’s a minefield I don’t want to go into right now, or they throw the contents of their capsules in water. The LDN dissolves and the Avicel is the residue at the bottom of the glass, and then drinking the water.

That’s what I’ll be doing. I still have about one hundred and fifty capsules to work through before I can ask for a different filler. It’s a real “Good Grief, Charley Brown!” situation.

Lunch … couldn’t wait any longer. Wilted greens, avocado, a few olives and the equivalent of approx 2 slices of newly-baked bread. A third of an apple. A jug of hot salted water.

After stopping the bread machine for a minute, I hauled out the bucket and scooped out the equivalent of two slices of bread. Bucket back in to finish the cycle, 28 minutes to go. Going on the texture of the bread, it looks like it will be my most successful loaf yet.

Food Chemistry: Purines

Round about Christmas time found these totally delish little bites. Bought them as my special treat since I can’t eat anything of the normal Christmas menu.

About halfway theough the twenty or so, eating no more than one or two per day … I’d call them biscuits you might call them cookies … I read the ingredients.

Huh?

First in the list, meaning there’s more of it than anything else, was apricot kernel flour. And I thought that was poisonous?

Diving down that rabbit hole, I discovered that raw apricot kernels are poisonous, containing cyanide; that cyanide is a biologically produced poison, in contrast to—for example—arsenic which is of mineral origin.

Cooking makes apricot kernel flour edible, and it is considered a health food as it has a high protein and needful mineral content.

At the end of January, I decided to get that packet out of the fridge, had been there long enough, how many to go? Four? I ate three. That night had an attack of gout in my left thumb and left big toe.

Gout is caused by the breakdown of purines into uric acid. Purines? Okay, they are important in that ‘cells use them to make the building blocks of DNA and RNA.’ (Courtesy of Google) I had already met excess uric acid once or twice in relation to eating too much red meat.

How could these scrumptious little bikkies be causing me such pain? Er, probably the baking agent? Ammonium hydrogen carbonate. One of my many many allergic reactions is to ammonia.

But, you know, I was still confused. What on earth has uric acid in common with ammonium that could be causing me such pain?

Nitrogen … they both have nitrogen in them.

And to make the whole deal worse (for me) all that happened on the same day that I chewed a single solitary coffee bean, thinking I’d ‘wire’ my brain to prevent the dizzies I’ve been having.

Caffeine is another example of a purine.

Unreal!

Back in the days of high school, I failed chemistry dismally. Give me a go now and I can probably pass.

All of it means, read the ingredients even closer.

Cat Diary 32

This is the fifth day training with a piece of paper. I don’t know the aim, but I aim to please. More kibbles that way.

I know there’s someting under there …

Ah! Got it. A kibble of course! Yum.

I can’t see it. She’s trying to trick me …

Well, of course I see it now. To see is to eat.

What? Where is it?

Oh! OK! Got it! Oh no, it slipped.

I’m learning ‘under’ …

Cat Diary 31

Training again, I believe. A new thing, and the old woman hopes to tempt me to touch it with a round of kibbles? Huh.

As if that’s going to work. I showed her what I thought by eating the goods and walking away, out of sight out of mind. If only humans were so normal.

But of course she can’t leave well alone. She lay out another round of kibbles and because I was peckish—it is nearly lunchtime—I soon snaffled them up.

And would you believe the old woman put the next round inside the object, whatever you call it? I had a go. She video’d me, 38 seconds worth. Will take you forever to load. Worth it for me. Got most of them out.

Tired then. Time for a nap.

Cat Diary 30

I’ve been in training. The first new habit I’m supposed to pick up is to scratch either one of the three objects she got into the house for that purpose—to be scratched!

I really don’t know why she bothers? I scratch the uprights of the couch and after she told me NO! a few too many times, I graduated onto the vinyl chairs.

Look at me, I’m thinking. This after the old woman said NO! about the couch. I want her to see my expression which says I am not pleased to hear NO! when I’m trying to get her attention.

She didn’t stop and I switched to the vinyl chairs. Too bad the vinyl is so strong I can only make holes. She said a blind woman could read these, and she’d be saying NO! just as many times.

She also said, this is the last straw. Whatever that means. She collected the three things to be scratched and lay them out …

The cardboardy thing is in the middle, it’s useless because I get my claws stuck. The thing with rope around it is just too weird for me. The thing on the left is the board the old woman found on the riverbank after a flood.

That’s the one we settled on for training. She lays it beside her on the couch. The first session she dragged a cord over it and every time I touched the cord, she’d go all gooey, slathering me with praise.

But more importantly she gave me a kibble everytime I touched the cord. After about twenty toes worth of kibbles, she said that’s enough today. We both relaxed then.