News From the Hill

Posts Tagged ‘People’

As I write I can hear rain drops pitter patter-ing on the roof light, it’s a lovely sound at night when you are warm and cozy and do not need to go outside.

We did get some really nice weather week before last and made good use of it too!

A couple of friends from different parts of the country had asked if they could come visit and was there any work that needed doing around the place?

What a silly question! There is always work to be done around our place – everyone is welcome – bring your workclothes and boots, a good attitude and a smile and your dinner will be on the table!

We got lots of work done and even managed to have lots of fun whilst doing it! Double whammy!

We cleared the yard of accumulated “this will come in usefull” stuff and neatly piled it in a better part of the yard. We organised a fox-proof container for keeping the rubbish (trash) bags in ’til it is time to go put them at the crossroads for collection.

We moved around a few old vehicles that actually do have a use – you just couldn’t guess it to look at them! One truck has a very reliable engine that will become our key-start back-up genny for when we have a few of those dark, non-windy days that sometimes happen in the winter, leaving us a little short of electrical power. We moved the truck nearer to where we keep our electrical control equipment and will incorporate it into a lean-to on the side of our workshop.

We shovelled a couple of years worth of couch-grass off the gravel on the yard – hard work! Anyone who thinks that the Earth is in jeopardy has never lived with couch grass! Seriously, the couch grass will inherit the Earth long after we are gone! It’s our own happy, healthy existence that’s in jeopardy.

The foundations to the house got some work done on them too! Now that’s what I call exciting! With a bit more ground-work by the two of us and another visit from some helpful friends and the foundations will soon be finished – yahoo!

Imagine, with all that work in just a few days we still had time to go for wee strolls, laugh at the lambs and their mums who pop in to visit, conveniently keeping our grass down and we even managed to have some really good chats with each other.

So now it’s raining and we are back to a more solitary existence and enjoying those moments too!

Happy St Patrick’s Day! Whatever that means to you…. Maybe green rivers in Chicago, trade deals in New York, for some binge drinking in Ireland and for others putting face paint on the excited kids of the local children’s playschool class. It is a very odd mix of activities isn’t it?

I loved St Patricks Day when I was a child, for starters we had a day off school which was always a cause for celebration in my book! Secondly, even thought we were in the middle of Lent we were allowed a free day – we could eat the things we had given up for lent such as Tayto crisps, sweets and ice-cream. Thirdly, we lived near a city which always had an exciting parade and it was fun to go watch it with our family and to meet friends there too.

Drinking alcohol was not a big thing in my family so my childhood memories of the day do not involve seeing people drink to excess and as I grew older it was not something that I associated with the day.

I found it a little boring when my college friends got “rat-arsed” on paddys day, although I was a party goer most other days of the year, I never could see the whole “it’s paddys day, we have to get extremely drunk” thing.

I am looking forward to the parade in one of the towns that I live near. It will be a lovely simple affair with tractors, both new and vintage, hopefully the fire brigade truck, the playschool kids in colourful costumes, brownies and cub scouts looking so proud. How do I know what to expect? Because it has been the same for the years that I have lived here and I really do enjoy it!

As I said, when I grew up we had access to quite sophisticated parades and they were great fun and very colourful and noisy with all sorts of marching bands, big fancy floats and often American bands with cheerleaders.

There is something really lovely for me in the simplicity of the local small town parade, it seems more real, more rooted in the community, not trying to be something that it is not.

Many people are happy to go and watch their local parade and then have a pint or two with their friends and neighbours and I do enjoy that sort of socialising and may well do that very thing today.

However I will leave early so as not to be in town this evening when it becomes messy and also because I want to cook a lovely meal of bacon and cabbage! – Yeah, I know, it’s a little cliché but I do love bacon and cabbage and today is a really good day for it!

What does St Patick’s Day mean to you? Whatever it represents I do hope that you have a lovely day and enjoy some fun with your family, friends and neighbours this week.

Families can be so complicated, I am sure that it was always thus. Now we have more family than ever, even though the old fashioned extended family has gone by the wayside we now have a new fashioned extended family because we have our in-laws and we now have out-laws.

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…

This post was prompted by Suzan over at Scrub Oak, who posted about some books she is reading at the moment. I thought I would post about the book I am currently reading.

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 love this story which I found on TreeHugger, a site that I check out every now and again, I like the fact that you get good news stories there, there are enough of the other kind (like my last post for instance!).

This story is about a young fella in the USA who got so frustrated at what he saw happening around him that he had to take action. Apparently GWB, the almost EX-president of over-there (how I love saying almost ex) decided in his unlimited unwisdom to sell off the leases on thousands of acres of Utah wildland – “After receiving complaints from the National Park Service, The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had dropped half of the initially proposed 359,000 acres from the sale” – wow, did someone notice the sellout? This young fella went along to the auction to protest and, understandably, got carried away…

Read the story here for yourself, it’s worth the click…