I have great difficulty accepting the contrast of Michele Obama growing organic veggies in the White House gardens while hubby Barack places pro-Monsanto and pro-GM people in the FDA and USDA.

It’s like having the bank robbers oversee the governing body for banking – actually that has happened too if you take a close look at Irish banking, oh dear, that was a bad example, however I hope you know what I mean….

I don’t know about you however I sure would not like my food to be sprayed with toxins. If you live and vote in the USA here is a list of the people who are pushing the widespread use of Roundup. Perhaps you live in the constituency of some of these politicians and could let them know how unhappy you are about their stand on toxic pesticides and herbicides…

Seventy-five House members ask USDA to approve Roundup Ready alfalfa planting despite the fact that an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) has yet to be finished.

A letter to U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack from 75 Members of Congress asks that farmers be allowed to plant Roundup Ready alfalfa (RRA) in the fall 2010 planting season.

The June 21, 2010, decision by the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a nationwide ban on the cultivation of biotech alfalfa, but remanded the case back to the District Court. Depending on the District Court’s decision, USDA can then decide what interim measures can be implemented while the agency completes its Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

The letter points out that the USDA’s draft EIS concluded that there is “no significant impact on the human environment due to granting non-regulated status to Roundup Ready alfalfa.” A partial deregulation would allow farmers to plant their inventoried RRA seed this fall while the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) completes its final environmental impact study.

Under the leadership of Reps. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.), Wally Herger (R-Calif.) and Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), the letter was signed by 75 Members of Congress including House Ag Committee Chair Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Ranking Member Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) along with 25 additional Agriculture Committee Members.
Representatives
Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-KS) and seventy-five members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asking the USDA to partially deregulate Roundup Ready alfalfa (RRA) and allow fall 2010 planting.

The letter was signed by

Representatives:

Bobby Bright Bright, Bobby, Alabama, 2nd

, Marion Berry Berry, Marion, Arkansas, 1st
,, Mike Ross Ross, Mike, Arkansas, 4th
, John Boozman Boozman, John, Arkansas, 3rd

Dennis Cardoza Cardoza, Dennis, California, 18th
Kevin McCarthy McCarthy, Kevin, California, 22nd
, Jim Costa Costa, Jim, California, 20th
, Tom McClintock McClintock, Tom, California, 4th
Devin Nunes Nunes, Devin, California, 21st
, Wally Herger Herger, Wally, California, 2nd

Mike Coffman Coffman, Mike, Colorado, 6th
, John Salazar Salazar, John T., Colorado, 3rd
, Doug Lamborn Lamborn, Doug, Colorado, 5th

Joe Courtney Courtney, Joe, Connecticut, 2nd

Allen Boyd Boyd, Allen, Florida, 2nd
, Tom Rooney Rooney, Tom, Florida, 16th

Jack Kingston Kingston, Jack, Georgia, 1st
, David Scott Scott, David, Georgia, 13th

, Walt Minnick Minnick, Walt, Idaho, 1st
, Mike Simpson Simpson, Mike, Idaho, 2nd

Phil Hare Hare, Phil, Illinois, 17th
, Aaron Schock Schock, Aaron, Illinois, 18th
, John Shimkus Shimkus, John, Illinois, 19th

, Brad Ellsworth Ellsworth, Brad, Indiana, 8th

Bruce Braley Braley, Bruce L., Iowa, 1st
Tom Latham Latham, Tom, Iowa, 4th
, Leonard Boswell Boswell, Leonard, Iowa, 3rd
, Steve King King, Steve, Iowa, 5th
, David Loebsack Loebsack, David, Iowa, 2nd

Representatives Lynn Jenkins R-Kansas
, Jerry Moran Moran, Jerry, Kansas, 1st
, Todd Tiahrt Tiahrt, Todd, Kansas, 4th

Charlie Melancon Melancon, Charlie, Louisiana, 3rd

Dave Camp Camp, Dave, Michigan, 4th

Collin Peterson Peterson, Collin C., Minnesota, 7th
, Erik Paulsen Paulsen, Erik, Minnesota, 3rd
John Kline Kline, John, Minnesota, 2nd
, Michelle Bachmann Bachmann, Michele, Minnesota, 6th

, Bennie Thompson Thompson, Bennie G., Mississippi, 2nd

, Sam Graves Graves, Sam, Missouri, 6th
, Roy Blunt Blunt, Roy, Missouri 7th
, Jo Ann Emerson Emerson, Jo Ann, Missouri, 8th
, Todd Akin Akin, Todd, Missouri, 2nd,
Blaine Leutkemeyer Luetkemeyer, Blaine, Missouri, 9th
, Russ Carnahan Carnahan, Russ, Missouri, 3rd
, William Lacy Clay Clay Jr., William “Lacy”, Missouri, 1st

Adrian Smith Smith, Adrian, Nebraska, 3rd

, Harry Teague Teague, Harry, New Mexico, 2nd

Chris Lee Lee, Christopher J., New York, 26th
, Scott Murphy Murphy, Scott, New York, 20th

Howard Coble. Coble, Howard, North Carolina, 6th
, Larry Kissell Kissell, Larry, North Carolina, 8th
Mike McIntyre McIntyre, Mike, North Carolina, 7th

Earl Pomeroy Pomeroy, Earl, North Dakota

Patrick Tiberi Tiberi, Pat, Ohio, 12th *
Jean Schmidt Schmidt, Jean, Ohio, 2nd *
John Boehner Boehner, John A., Ohio, 8th *
Bob Latta Latta, Robert E., Ohio, 5th *
Steve Austria Austria, Steve, Ohio, 7th *

Frank Lucas Lucas, Frank, Oklahoma, 3rd

Greg Walden Walden, Greg, Oregon, 2nd

, Glen Thompson Thompson, Glenn W., Pennsylvania, 5th
Tim Holden Holden, Tim, Pennsylvania, 17th
Chris Carney Carney, Christopher P., Pennsylvania, 10th
Joe Pitts Pitts, Joseph R., Pennsylvania, 16th

, Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin Herseth Sandlin, Stephanie, South Dakota,

, Phil Roe Roe, Phil, Tennessee, 1st
,Blackburn Martha Blackburn, Marsha, Tennessee 7th**********

Mac Thornberry Thornberry, Mac, Texas, 13th
, Joe Barton Barton, Joe, Texas, 6th
, Randy Neugebauer Neugebauer, Randy, Texas, 19th
, Mike Conaway Conaway, K. Michael, Texas, 11th

Bob Goodlatte Goodlatte, Bob, Virginia, 6th

Cathy McMorris-Rodgers McMorris Rodgers, Cathy, Washington, 5th

Tom Petri Petri, Thomas, Wisconsin, 6th

This particular entry is called “Love of Home” and it was the last paragraph that gave me pause for thought – It buoys me with proof that one person with one shovel can change everything, given a guiding vision of a more abundant life, a life more intimate with the gifts of its place.

I would encourage you to go read the post in it’s entirety so as to have the excerpt in context. It has me think more about last nights post and whether to become more actively involved in politics, not actually running for election or anything heady like that, simply whether or not to join a particular political party in order to help change it’s focus.

I like that one person with one shovel can bring about great change, it’s more in line with my current thinking, to just do what you do and let that be enough.

Knowing that it is enough is key.

Knowing that it is enough to just do your best doing what you do and let that be.

Letting it go and not try to influence or change anyone else, just do your own thing and trust that it will work out…

Easier said than done…

Our entire apple harvest made one yummy crumble

Our first water lilly flower getting ready to bloom

Fully blooming, how lovely

The weather has not been the best, however, this is Ireland and we have grown up with these weather patterns and have learnt from our mothers knee to just go out there and make the most of it – even if that means putting on waterproof pants and jackets, maybe even gloves – no I go too far, gloves are rarely needed

I have been camping in a few different places and having some lovely fun. No phones and no modems – hence not much action on the auld blog of late.

On the advice of a friend I headed to a beach on the west coast to see this friendly dolphin I had heard rumours of.  On and off over the last few years I had heard of a dolphin along the west coast who liked to swim with people and I often dropped by various places to see if she was visible. Until lately I never saw her.

She has moved to a very accessible although quiet beach and she is really enjoying the company of the swimmers. I have swam with her a few times now and can’t believe how friendly she is.

She seems to really want to play and spends a good deal of time with people who enjoy playing with her and ignores those who, for whatever reason, don’t want to play, which means that anyone who feels nervous about being in the water at the same time as her, need not worry about her swimming around them.

I can’t believe my luck to have had such wonderful experiences in the water with her. I snorkel quite often and it’s quite something to be swimming along, just looking at crabs and little fish and then to see, just about a foot away, a seemingly smiling face of a dolphin looking back at you.

Although I know some good swimmers who are reluctant to swim with her and are happy to keep their distance and admire her from afar, I have never felt any fear in her presence.

Mostly I feel a sense of mischievousness when she is about, a playfulness, a childlike joyful sense of fun.

I count my blessings to have had the benefit of her friendship this summer.

The first floor joists were put in this afternoon and it is really satisfying to see them sitting on the beams that span the “stilt” style foundations. We have a very sloping site and so the southern face of the house will be close to six foot off the ground on sturdy stilts which are on concrete pads. The concrete pads are set about three foot into the very solid clay subsoil.

We really would have liked to avoid using concrete however we really could not afford the alternative of cut stone and there is no stone naturally occurring on our site. There are some compromises which we find we are making, mainly due to budget constraints – our budget actually being almost non-existent!

Our floor design will be a little unconventional - quelle surprise! We are fixing galvanised chicken wire between the tops of the sturdy beams and on top of this we will spread a breathable fabric which will in turn be fastened to the tops of the beams. The floor joists will then sit on top of this fabric, nailed to the top of the beams and the spaces created will in time be filled with insulation and the floor boards screwed down to the joists.

We will not be adding the insulation just yet for two very good reasons – firstly we need to get the roof on in order to keep the insulation dry and secondly at the moment we do not know what sort of insulation we will use.

The second consideration will depend on budget – if we win the national lottery – highly unlikely but not impossible – if only we remembered to buy tickets!! I digress – if our budget changes we would love to use sheep’s wool or something similar.

What is more likely is that we will source some local timber and use our free electricity and an electric planer to create wood chips which we could mix with lime and maybe some hemp hurds and a little water to create a sort of woodchip insulation.

Any suggestions about alternative, easily sourced, environmental insulation will be most welcome

No, I don’t mean Billy the Kid or the Great Train Robbers, what I mean by out-laws is that we now have the assorted ex-in-laws.

We have our own ex-in-laws, if there are children involved and we are lucky we may have a reasonable relationship with them. Then we have not only our new partner’s family – the in-laws, we have the ex-in-laws and that relationship in whatever state it is. To top that we now also have our siblings’ ex-in-laws and possibly new in-laws as well. Phew, who has a big enough table for that family gathering?

With the best will in the world it is hard to maintain good relationships with all these new “relations”. Family responsibilities may become very confused and boundaries are ever more difficult to maintain – ah! There is the “wild west” motif sneaking in again – fence wars, boundary problems!

For many of us healthy boundaries within our immediate family may be quite enough to concentrate on, let’s face it – not many of us learned about healthy boundaries whilst growing up. By immediate family here I mean our partner and whatever children we may have between us, for some even this distinction is not clear.

I recently had a conversation with a sibling who assumed that by immediate family I meant my siblings, I was quite shocked and so was my sibling. You can imagine the conversation – sibling: but we are your family; me: yes, of course you are still my family, I now have a bigger family and more immediate family priorities with my partner and my partners children; sibling: where do we come in?; me: I actually left that unanswered and I’m still trying to figure it out, hopefully my sibling is also giving the matter some thought…

Family responsibilities are not clear and easy to deal with for many people and now with all the added family it has become even more difficult.

It may be the case that because of a particular skill you possess you may have taken on the role of doing certain jobs or having certain responsibilities within your first in-law family. When divorce or separation enters the picture that role may not be as clear as it was.

It may be that you wish to continue providing that skill to the now ex-family and there is resentment coming from others in that family, on the other hand perhaps you would prefer to keep very clear boundaries and withdraw from that level of family involvement and other family members resent you for doing that!

It’s even worse if there is simmering resentments or bitterness in the out-law family, not necessarily from your ex, sometimes these resentments come from your ex’s siblings and that can be very difficult to deal with. These feeling can sift downward in the generations, perhaps becoming exaggerated as they do and then affect the children no matter what age they are.

Even trying to write that is confusing, never mind actually trying to live it. Think I will put the kettle on and have a nice cup of tea.

I hope your day is not filled with confusion…

The book is called Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs, by Patrick Holford and Jerome Burne.
I think it would be a very informational read for anyone in healthcare or a caring situation. It may help you understand the drugs being prescribed for yourself or for someone you care about

I am still working through the book and will probably do a book review of sorts when finished. It is fascinating stuff although I have to admit that the beginning of the book, which concentrates in the pharmaceutical industry had me fairly angry, huge parallels to the energy industry and the oil/nuke boys wanting to control the entire market and have us all entirely reliant on them – oops - think that’s another post?

The book goes into quite a bit of detail about “blockbuster” drugs such as statins, high blood pressure pills, pain-killers and anti-inflammatories, anti-depressants etc. I found it fairly shocking really that so many of these drugs do so much harm, for example in Britain more people die from prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) than from some cancers.

I have become aware that I don’t know what sort of drug regularity structures we have in this country, do we rely on US FDA recommendations? I must try to educate myself more. The FDA and the British body MHRA are scarily inept and often the people in charge have links to the Pharmaceutical industry, until recently it was not illegal in Britain for MHRA decision makers to be on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies – hard to believe!

The majority of these “daily” drugs are designed to deal with symptoms, not causes. If we never deal with the cause of the “unwellness” then we will always need these drugs to maintain the status quo.

Not only are some of these drugs designed to be a part of our daily lives, some of them actually produce a need for more drugs! Some NSAIDs (including aspirin) are so hard on the stomach lining that they require the use of another drug to protect the stomach and at worst sometimes cause gastro-intestinal bleeding.

I bought the book to educate myself about arthritis aches and what nutritional advice I could follow to protect myself from these aches without resorting to prescription drugs. Anyway, so far I have discovered that the usual healthy food advice applies in reducing the aches and pains.

Supplements such as chondroitin, glucosomine, msm, omega 3, epa and dha (healthy fats) are all advised for daily consumption to ease inflammation and should be just as useful as taking a daily NSAID.  Naturally daily exercise is also important.
That’s what I gleaned so far, I had skipped ahead and had a quick look at the relevant chapter after I bought the book so that I could do some supplement shopping too before heading home and now I am reading from the beginning.
I am hoping that about six weeks from now I will know if the new regime of supplements and taking nuts, seeds and hemp oil will help ease the aches I have started to feel over the last two months.
I am guessing that doing all those healthy things would help delay the onset of the aches for some people. Obviously these are just my opinions and should not be taken as advice to anyone.

I had a lovely break over the Christmas, didn’t even check my email for nine days straight!!!

I hope that you all, my two lovely readers   had a beautiful Christmas, as I did, spent some time with loved ones in my family, had lots of great food, some great walks, some great sitting and watching classic b+w films and some great chats.

As for New Year’s Eve – I have to admit that I have never been really interested in all the fuss that accompanies it, even in my younger and wilder partying days I was never into the N.Y.Eve parties, the resolutions that everyone assumed would not last past February, singing and hugging complete strangers etc. Somehow it all seemed a little exaggerated, superficial and unreal.

When I was younger I was not quite sure why I felt like this, it’s not as though I didn’t enjoy partying as much as the next young wild one and I wouldn’t have known a grounded, living-in-the-moment person if I bumped into one, which wasn’t likely actually in the places I hung out! It makes more sense now that my life has changed quite a bit and I have stopped floating through life in a smoky and busy haze, taken the time to challenge some of what I was running away from, dealt with some of the baggage that I was dragging around.

The concept of living in the moment was a difficult one for me to grasp, obviously I knew what it meant intellectually but it was a while before my heart caught up. No surprise there, my head was nearly always in the way. I still struggle with that  but now when I speak of getting out of my head it’s a very different out of my head experience than that of the eighties! Now it’s about taking the time to listen to my heart, taking time out of the rush and hustle of life to slow down and really listen to what it is that I need, what it is that I feel.

For me this is not as easy as it sounds, I really have to remind myself to do it and sometimes I have hearing problems – it can take quite some time before I can clearly hear myself. I suppose that this is sustainable living for me – in order to live a real and healthy life and to have healthy relationships I need to do this, I need to take time out to listen to what is really going on for me.

For me the Winter Solstice was a special time, a time for reflection, to acknowledge the year gone past and a new beginning, the days becoming longer, the sun coming back to us, growth starting slowly under the protection of the soil, promise and optimism.

I hope that this new year brings with it many wondrous and joyful experiences for us all…

Everyone spoke in turn, without interruption. People took their time, there was no rush, there was time to think about what you were saying. We all spoke about how we were affected by the situation thus avoiding the “you said” and “you did” elements which can be so unhelpful.

We realised how what we say and the tone used can be so easily misinterpreted. This can cause hurt, which if not aired can fester and lead to resentment.

It is not as simple as it sounds to sit and listen to each other without interruption and without the chance of an immediate come-back – which often just escalates a situation into an argument. The value of speaking in turn is that by the time it is your turn to speak you may no longer wish to say what you were expecting to say, you will have had to time to listen to others speak and this may well have changed how you see things and given you the opportunity to identify what you are really feeling.

There may be many rounds necessary to resolve a situation, you sit with it until it is finished. People sometimes ask – how long will this take? It takes as long as it takes!

It is also not often that people are courageous enough to really speak from the heart, to say how hurt they are feeling or vulnerable or frightened or angry. We are so often afraid to let others see how we really feel, we wear masks to protect ourselves, to hide behind. There are many reasons that we do this, it is a learnt behaviour. Perhaps in the past someone used our vulnerability against us or took advantage of our fear to frighten us further, whatever the reason we can unlearn this behaviour and learn a new way to be. Learning any new skill takes practise and to do this it helps to have people around us that we trust and feel safe with.

I would love for everyone have the opportunity to experience this sort of communication, to experience what it is like to sit through a situation which could very easily lead to confrontation but doesn’t, which allows everyone to speak their truth and to really hear each other.

Simple things can be really difficult – but it is worth it!