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real life

A 3620-post collection

Addendum

To market, to market, almost too late.

The thing about markets is, they have what you might call weird hours. You have to get there early to get the good stuff. We arrived maybe half an hour before they were due to close, so we had just enough time to noodle around everywhere and see what was what.

I can get pure cotton clothes that come in sizes for Real People(tm). Huzzah. As long as I don't mind them in neo-hippie mottlings and tie-dyes. Good thing I have a hippie soul, then.

Not that we were shopping for clothes. We were after some organic produce of the vegetable variety. And some of the strange and unusual that you can't ordinarily get at Dickson's. Like Celeriac.

Yes. I know it sounds like a disease. You're thinking of Celiac, which is a general allergy to wheat and wheat byproducts, and lots of things with gluten in them. They're one of the very many people who get helped a great deal by LCHF diets, by the way.

Celeriac is actually celery root. Well. Sort of. You don't get celeriac off of the celery plant we know today. Selective breeding has futzed with the original plant and made two species. One's our celery, and the other is celeriac. And it's the Low Carb version of the potato.

For those who miss deep fried chips, celeriac is your pal. Most of the potato and rice recipes from "normal" life get replaced with cauliflower, but if you really miss potatoes, go hunting for celeriac.

We got two of them. The last in the markets. They still need to get put away, but they can bide for now. And with the Queensland mackerel we also scored today, we could plausibly have ourselves some lo-carb fish and chips.

Time will tell.

I've learned that wandering markets and shopping malls really drains me. Physically. I've yet to get most of my stamina up, or the fact that 90% of what's there, I either can't afford or can't have. Either way, it wears me out.

And one of the first things I do when we're done wandering and seeking, is to have a good lie down. Which leads to a napnap. Which leads to late dinner.

I need to get used to a lot of things.

Educational Moment

I like learning new things. And since I'm turning forty-five this year, that means that I'm well beyond Douglas Adams' statement that anything invented after I'm thirty-five is strange and scary. I'm one of those annoying people who act like a new thing should have always been like that.

Just ask Beloved. I'm always unimpressed by their programming of a new thing. No "yes, this is just what I wanted." It's all "why didn't they do this earlier?" Much frustrate. Very wearing.

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Progress?

MeMum asked me about the ins and outs of Keto or LCHF, this morning. For her doctor to read. And I am glad to provide any information about it at all.

Not only am I a writer who does research for fun, but I am also a nerd who loves sciencey things.

I admit. I am neither a doctor nor a dietician, but I have listened to enough of them to get the basic gist of how ketogenics works, and retell that

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How do I deal?

I managed to scare my mother with the threat of science. And when MeMum gets scared, she gets hostile. And since I don't want her to shut me down entirely, I must relent.

I have to maintain the avenues of communication.

I have to be the one making the tough decisions when those decisions are out of MeMum's reach. And that's a possibility that I didn't want to be looming, just yet.

And once Mum's put her foot down about a thing,

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Unexpected Improvements

What I learned to expect from doing a LCHF diet was a general improvement to my health. What I didn't expect was a reversal of ageing indicators. I already mentioned in an earlier blog how my knees have come to function more properly than they have in two decades.

So along with the arthritis reversal, we've also noted: a slowing down and an ebbing of unwanted facial hair, a general improvement in skin conditions, stubble where there once was balding, an increase

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Hidden Toxins

Okay. Now I'm pissed off. Beloved and I, and the mother-in-law, have discovered by complete accident that there's one place they put sugar, and you'd never suspect it at all.

Table salt.

It seems impossible. How can they add sugar to salt, right? You'd notice, wouldn't you. Well. Not so much.

Rewind to yesterday, we were having what we thought of as a nice, keto friendly broth and veg, and everything seemed to be fine. Until Beloved took their blood sugar reading

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New Starts All Over

I bullied my beloved into going for a walk in last evening. Turns out that I'm still tasty to mosquitoes despite my daily dose of vegemite soup with extra salt.

Yes. On LCHF, vegemite soup is not salty enough.

And this morning, we went on our walk before the heat kicked in for the day. Allegedly. The sun was sharp, the walk was hot. We went for the 'figure eight' around both blocks and I managed to keep pace with my love

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It's 2017, time for change

I confess, I fell over sick and Yuletide happened, and the house... went to crap. Waiting for everyone else to get their tail in gear and help remove the mess they made has been an abominable failure.

So the first thing I did this AM was going around the house and emptying all the little litter bins. Now Chaos has one less avenue to be lazy about cleaning the heck up.

New surprise policy for my little darlings: First kid awake gets

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At the closing of the year

It's New Years Eve and I don't have many plans to stay up until midnight. I have little choice as to when my batteries need charging, but when I go down, I go down.

Resolutions
  • Work to improve my writing
  • Work to improve mine and my Beloved's health
  • Do what I can for MeMum

People who make too many resolutions end up keeping none of them, so I keep it to three.

And there's a story in the third one. Those dear

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Moanna and personal white noise

Saw Moanna. It's firkin brilliant. I'm loving that they paid attention to Pacific Island culture in general and lots of the art style too.

Things we can take away from Moanna:

  1. It's possible to do a movie about POC without getting into semi-racist stereotyping [Looking at you "Please Bring Honour to Us All" in Mulan]
  2. It's possible to have an animated female heroine who looks more like a real human and less like an alien [Looking at Tangled and all her weird,
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International cuisine

Like all wisdom, some of the best food comes from outside of what we know. Beloved is determined to get this family away from western-themed bland monotony and ignorance of spices.

I miss Sweet Mustard Pickles, so Beloved has suggested a Korean version of Sauerkraut as a substitute. This version doesn't use sugar as a part of the pickling process, so I'm down with that.

We have lots of other options from all over the world. Some of which have ingredients that

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Post-Yule

The good news is that I didn't bounce back out of Ketosis, nor did I gain more than I've lost. I'm still in the 84-kilo zone. Just... a little higher up in there.

Our cheese-cup-cakes were an immense success. The strawberry ones were way more delicious than the original flavour. I think we're going to go Genuine Fruit Flavour each time we make these things in future.

So, of course, I have to share the recipe.

Cheesecake the Easy Way

Implements
  • Electric
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Season's Greetings

It's Christmas Day in my household, and so far, everyone else is asleep. The fridge is overloaded with Feast Fare, including homemade chocolates, cheese-cup-cakes, a lo-carb pizza, and one of Beloved's own creations that I'm calling Salmon Bread in lieu of something better.

It's a sort of low-carb bread kind of deal, but as you can guess, it has loads of salmon in it. And it's tasty as hell. I'm encouraging Beloved to formalize the recipe so I can share it with

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Christmas eve!

We've done all our shopping (I hope!) and got all our things for the glorious morrow.

And as an extra bonus, this Yule happens on a weekend, so I don't need to worry about my novel's word count. And I really don't need to worry about an Instant, either, since it's my day off.

And I especially don't need to worry about the gap between the Instant count and the days of the year... because of all the double prompts I've been

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