redcairo

I grew this stuff about 12 years ago in my standing backyard garden. I had bought about 9 different kinds of basil to try (all from seed by the way. Started indoors like peppers/tomatoes. Grew just fine -- much like all the other basils -- in zone 6 ozarks). Each year, the smell of a few basils and other herbs in the garden was nice. But that year, the smell was just out of this world. It honestly felt like you were being 'fed' on some level and getting healthier by the sniff just by walking through the garden. I've always assumed it was simply a greater variety of basil types that year that had that effect. Maybe it was the Tulsi. :-) Some of the larger seed organizations (like Seed Savers) should have it. Maybe not in the public-commercial catalog (not sure) but their membership offerings are really huge. I remember the first time I got their small-print thick-book catalog in the 90s, realizing there were probably 150 or so different kinds of peas (peas!) alone, not to mention everything else, including tons of fruiting plants I never heard of in my life -- really mind boggling! This spring I am starting a whole back room of aeroponic cloning and hydroponic gardening, mostly for summer veggies I can have indoors year round, but I figure I'll also grow a few culinary herbs and pretty flowers. Maybe I will grow some Tulsi. I cannot recall the specific taste of the stuff. Could you make pesto out of it like you do other basils? RC

I should have known the bums would have a thread with kefir already. :-) I've had serious gluten intolerance for about 20 years (that's when it kicked in). This is likely due to 'leaky-gut' which allegedly can be caused by antibiotics and other things. Who knows. All the sudden severe asthma, severe allergies, and acid reflux, sort of "fell on me from the sky" all at once, and the doctors acted like this was normal. I didn't know what it was for the first ten years. When I went lowcarb it temporarily and then 'mostly' was in abeyance, but that was because I was eating "meat and vegetables" -- not grains. But I ate things that had some gluten still (canned chili now and then for example, and some spice blends) so I still had occasional symptoms. When I figured out what the source was, I did a lot of experimenting. No doubt at all that brought it on, and it vanished if I stopped eating gluten. But it was yummy! So I'd eat it, feel crappy, things got worse till I couldn't breathe (and many other side effects like acne, brain-fog, depression, etc.) and I'd finally go off it for awhile. The symptoms kept getting worse all the time though and finally I went 100% off gluten consistently. My immune system recovered enough that then, if I got accidentally gluten'd even without knowing it, even the tiniest bit, I'd wake up feeling like I was dying but not-soon-enough, whimper and wail for an hour, and then wheeze and cough for a week. Suffice to say... gluten has been a huge impact on my health and diet for a long time. After speed-reading over 3000 reviews on various kefir grains over a week, I got some quality live grains for kefir (at fusionteas.com) and tried it out. First 3 batches were tiny and I tossed, designed for recovery, grass-fed non-homogenized pasteurized milk. Next half dozen batches were eh, a little yeasty, a little sour, that reduced with every batch though. Now, a month later, my kefir (whom I have named Barney the Infinite) has his groove on, and the resulting texture is like eggnog kinda. I add swerve (a sweetener) and some extracts (orange bakery emulsion is my fave currently) after the 1st or 2nd ferment (depending on my hurry) and put it in the fridge. And I took up drinking 3oz 5x a day, and then 7oz 6x a day. I was keto, so I figured I was trashing my diet utterly but after the reviews, I was convinced that maybe, after a few months, perhaps the accidental restaurant G wouldn't have such horrible effects on me. For unrelated reasons a couple weeks after that, I ended up intentionally eating something with gluten (so I didn't pass out, as I was driving and had no other food options and was suddenly thrown out of keto so had no energy and had gone too long without food). I figured I'd be miserable the next day of course so I ate what I wanted (if I'm going to suffer penance, might as well enjoy the crime!). And NOTHING! Kefir wipes out my inflammation body-wide. SO well that I spent the next few weeks eating every gluten food I haven't been able to eat without abject misery, for years. More carbs than I've had in eons lol. When I was eating tons of stuff at once and ongoing, I did start getting a few MILD symptoms, bit of wheezing, but for regular intake... nothing. I have never had something affect me so strongly that I KNEW it was having a dramatic effect on my body or health (well except maybe vitamin D3 when I was super low, and Co-Q10 (-ol) when I was near heart failure for a defective valve). This stuff is the bomb! I've had serious symptoms for two and a half years, since my open heart surgery, of limbs falling asleep extremely and suddenly for no apparent reason, all the time. It's gone. I have no idea why it's gone. It's interfered with my life all this time and for two weeks now it hasn't happened even once. I don't know that it's permanently gone but it sure seems like it. And for eons, after learning to walk again I've been trying to get to even one bodyweight squat, since I couldn't get off the ground and figured this would be the muscles I needed to do it, so I could brave venturing out alone again. I hadn't tried in a couple weeks but so far I'd only gotten to one, barely, with a lot of screaming at the effort. Now I can do about four. This is so mindblowing to me -- I have a squat cage and weight bench and rack in my living room if that's any sign of how serious I am about restoring my health -- I've been going over and doing 2 squats, several times a day, every day for three days (since I discovered this), like I just can't believe it's true. It's like my health just radically improved. Radically. And it seems pretty hard to believe that the last month [edit: I guess technically about 6 weeks, sorry) of homemade kefir is what's done it, but there isn't really any other major shift in my intake or habits, so I don't know what else to attribute it to. Note that I use ordinary whole milk now. Not organic. And it's doing just fine for me. I have a rule that every so often I will do one with organic just for the sake of the grains. RC

Keto but for the raisins and apples, lovely sugar bombs :-) A SWEETish taco -- sounds interesting! RC

Walmart was in the city where I live (~15K pop) before I moved here in 2000. They upgraded to 'super walmart' (now just walmart again, but ridiculously large) I think in 2001. We lost five grocery stores, couple clothing stores, auto shops, sporting goods, a pharmacy, and probably several other things I'm not aware of. WM simply put them out of business. Nobody could compete with their prices -- or with the convenience of having everything in one place. One tiny grocer just a few doors down from me survived, because they were on a frontage road from Main St and it was kind of rectangle. So if you wanted milk, you could just run in and get it and run out. It wasn't like you had to hike to Guam at the opposite side the way you do with the big WM. It survived and gradually even expanded and moved across the street. Their prices are significantly higher though. In some respects they focused on the stuff WM didn't, like gluten-free and so on, which made people go there for that. Now even walmart has coconut and almond meal and GF everything, cauli and zuke frozen stuff for grainfree noodles or 'rice' and so on, so I'm not sure if that's helping them anymore. I shop there, because options are limited here now, and because the price of real food is high enough without making it worse. I make myself shop at the other store sometimes, just to support its existence. For the complaints about employee stuff though, I have to say, I know a couple people who have worked there for years. They pay 2-3$ more an hour than any of the other retail in town, there's a % off card, and the conditions aren't any more psycho than any other retail job (often better just because larger environs and formal HR policies reduce the personal-tyranny small places can experience). It bothers me that walmart and amazon (which pretty much have the majority of my non-bill paychecks for the last 15 years) are taking over everything though. There is this (IMO total propaganda) movie called 'The Circle.' It has this ending which apparently many watchers thought was a happy ending, and I thought was the summation of a nightmare. Having some global corp utterly controlling and monitoring your existence is slightly nauseating. RC

I have a signature quote on another forum for 15 years now that says, "If you love anything enough, it will talk with you." - George Washington Carver The Secret Life of Plants really affected me a lot when I was younger. Cleve Backster's experiments with polygraph and plants I find fascinating also. Some little books like Behaving as if the God in All Life Matters and The Perelandra Garden Workbook I rather enjoyed about 20 years ago when I first moved to this house. Had an interesting experience with the 'nature spirits' when rearranging a room that I still find difficult to believe. I've had a couple experiences where I was forced to experience and realize that 'space' is as subjective as 'time' which is... mind boggling. I once fell in love with a tree. I'd had a kundalini experience not long before and from heart to crown was rather overstimulated at the time which is probably why. I used to look around furtively and hug her and tell her how beautiful she was. I mourned having to move away from her! On that awesome Ayu... um, drug post that Taomeow posted (sorry it's on another page so I can't look up the spelling for either of those words) -- that was a really awesome description. It's kind of funny, because I had a dream that was so odd once but that kind of tied into the total life in the earth (not just plants) and your detail really reminded me of it. Also, I wrote a beginner novel (never published, many many years ago, but I might stick it on amazon kindle for the heck of it this year) -- paranormal, it's silly in parts -- but that has a... being/creature and an experience that is very like that, which I thought at the time I might have gotten from the dream. But hearing you describe that I suspect that is just the way it is. Lovely, thanks for sharing that. RC

Yeah, having had a big fish tank at one point, my complete disinterest in the smell they tend to have if you don't clean them religiously has made me disinterested in anything fishy. I figure the hydroponics will be work enough. So prior to beginning the 'garden room' I have two things that have to be done which all this time later I am only just now getting to: 1/ the electric in the room needs rewiring, it kills electronics and I have something like 87000 Lux in LEDs (not to mention humidifier, fans, window A/C unit, and the basic electronics of the aeroponic and hydroponic systems) I don't want to wreck. It's taken me forever to find an electrician who will work in my small city. All the people listed do business not residential stuff. Finally I found a handyman who can do part of it and thinks he can talk an E. friend into doing the main box upgrade we need that the city has to verify. So maybe if I'm incredibly lucky that will get done in the next couple of months. 2/ because the room is going to be hot and humid all the time it needs to be repainted, so I got a solid primer and a mold-resistant (bathroom sort) of paint, both of them colored a light pistachio green (because white was boring) and I still need to actually do the work of painting the whole room. And the back wall of the closet since my house helper and daughter at some point in the last few years, removed AND LOST (threw away??) the DOOR to her closet. WTH, who does such a thing?! Anyway. So I have not begun yet. But I did, some months ago, buy I think everything I need for the project. I'm going aeroponic misting for the cloning, and several big tub ebb & flow systems for the various plants. I want to grow not just peppers (my favorite thing) but specifically alliums, which nobody I know has ever grown indoors hydroponically (they require a lot of light), and I couldn't even find much on the web about it sadly. On the bright side everybody moved out so I have the back room to make the garden. And I had the bright idea to have a handyman build me a big box in the garage, on legs of a sort, that connects to the joining wall of the living room, with a cat door. And the litter boxes are gradually moving into that so they are technically in the garage in a way -- and I will get my other back room returned to me so I can put my gym in there -- my squat cage, bench and rack has been dominating my living room for a long time now :-) -- and then maybe have more room to do crafts and stuff in the living room (I need to decoupage my kitchen cabinet doors and drawer faces, do some sewing, and so on). I totally have garden fever now because of the season. Usually hits me right before the new year for some reason. I have some novel seeds this year I haven't tried before. Since I'm growing indoors with lights, the season shouldn't much matter for whatever I'm doing. So starting things in -- hopefully -- March, which with Feb is serious winter here on the flat edge of the Ozarks -- hopefully won't matter much. :-) RC

For reasons I won't bore you with I have not gardened in years and my property and garden are sorely in need of maintenance. So this will be a major "improvement" project, this season. But I am getting back to it now, and I got an aeroponic cloner from my best friend for Christmas and am really excited about taking up gardening yet-again! I got into gardening pre-Y2K after reading about it solely for survival reasons. Prior to that my only exposure to it was when as a teen, my dad decided to grow some tomatoes in the backyard in California. A few months later my stepsister and I were going door to door in a ten block radius with grocery bags full of tomatoes begging people to take them. I was not real fond of gardening after that. And I didn't even have to do any of the work. :-) When I moved to the Ozarks, I read this book "Behaving as if the God in all life Matters" -- I loved the title, is why I read it -- and the whole "talking to nature spirits" bit fits right in with my interior-universe and archetype work, so I loved it. I first went crazy with flower pots on my front porch. The next year I decided to plant a garden. A REAL garden. In my backyard, I have two cinderblock beds in "L shapes. 6'x4'x32"h is one set, and 16'x4'24"h is the other set. A foot or two off, I think it's about 185sqft total for those beds. I have five, 4'w x 4'd x 6'h arch trellises of cattle panel along the side wooden fence in the backyard, those had 26 gallon tub "homemade earthboxes" at their base until an ice storm shattered all plastic and terracotta on the property. I might replace some of them this year. There's a round trellis in the middle of it all I sometimes vine things up. And I often put a few tubs out front where there's a little sun. Anyway, so it's not a ton of space, but it's enough to have quite a few plants, which is good because I have a whole experimental series lined up. :-) Some old pics for context: Empty season Arches Wilting late summer old season :-) (prior to someone making off with my copper-tubing framing haha) Not long before my (birth-defect-heart-valve) health wrecked my life for several years, I did a couple seasons of seed-starting using hydroponics -- I had about five Aerogardens at the time -- and that worked much faster and easier than regular seed starting. I had the idea, since I'm so excited to use my cloner (mostly on anything I am not supposed to legally propagate) (er, I am referring to patented pretty flowers people, not altered-state supplements! :-)) to hijack the seed-starting process and see if intervening with aeroponic cloning can actually succeed. Plan: Experiment #1: Grow seedlings to about 3" then snip off that stalk and stick it in the cloner. See if that tiny baby stalk with grow roots -- robustly and fairly rapidly (~10-14 days). Experiment #2: See if the remaining root and stub, left in the seed-starting environ, will regrow. Experiment #3: See if the very-rooted clone can go back into a soilless seed-starting environ (some ferts then) with grow light to develop some leaves. All this before planting out. I have a variety of minor issues that tend to impact gardening that aren't huge individually but which I think could be improved by having this ability to get 2+ plants from one viable seed, or even just at least one truly robust seedling, much more than the average, for the garden. The cloner will hopefully allow me to get ONE seedling from the nursery (if they will sell that few, or split buys with friends) and from that plant, end up with 2-4 seedlings for planting (I'd prefer to grow from seed though, for food plants). I will post my experimental steps and results here for anybody also crazy about gardening. :-) I'm hoping the cloner will allow me to fill my front porch with (dollar store pots probably :-)) lots and lots of pretty flowers (I'm a double-impatiens freak), and herbs, and maybe some great stuff for my semi-shade beds, and CHOCOLATE MINT which is currently my favorite plant on earth. I can't BELIEVE it smells and tastes exactly like a peppermint patty. I don't understand why it's not the most popular plant in the world. :-) RC PS Does anybody else here garden? Or do hydroponics??

Actually the Pleiadians are of reptilian origin. I am kind of embarrassed that I know this. I looked at her stuff circa... 1994. She was a Seth fan (as am I) but her 'channeling' accent makes her sound like Elmer Fudd, which is simply hilarious. I have waded through more weird-shit on the internet since 1993 than most people, but I have to say, by far the worst conglomerates are those which mix metaphysics and/or aliens with the jesus mythos. True story: So I was sent a plane ticket by some nice people in '94 to come visit them. They were 'walk ins.' Never mind. Anyway, so he was a programmer and she was a nurse. He was also a pilot, built his own small plane. They had adult kids, they were in their late 40s or so. Sound fairly intelligent, right? I suppose. It was the most gawd-awful compilation of the Ashtar Command, modern UFOlogy 'abduction' lore, channeling, and completely misquoted new testament doctrine I had ever heard. (Not to mention they had half my clothes off before I realized they were more than just really nice. Ha! I'm socially oblivious sometimes. They were pretty disappointed I was celibate in that era lol. They probably should have asked before inviting me!) That was the first time I'd truly heard someone mix so many things into one new spiritual goulash, as I call it. :-) RC

Day before yesterday my new neighbor came over. She has a 1.5 year old toddler girl named Luna. It was an interesting meeting. I always want to meet my neighbors and have a good relationship with them. It was odd though. She is 25. She and her husband were both meth users heavily for quite some time, and then they found Jesus and each other at the same time and she got pregnant nearly instantly so they married. That was in Wichita, but a distant relative gave them the ref to move in next door via family relation to the owner. She has... not a single personal interest that I could find. I'm not religious but I'd've been happy to spend an hour talkin about jesus (or buddha or anything else) if it made my neighbor happy, but not even that. She did say she likes 'hospital dramas' on TV, that's something, but I don't watch TV really and never that stuff so I had zero base of experience. I spent over an hour covering the entire range of everything I could think of that she might have any interest in -- including books, media, toddlers, even cooking or food -- nope. Nada. I found myself thinking, "For the love of god, NO WONDER this girl was a drug addict. She doesn't read, she doesn't think, she just exists like an NPC and watches TV. What was there to give meaning to her life?" Then I felt like a miserable cretin the rest of the day for being such a judgmental bitch in my head. Obviously, outside my head, I hope I was nothing but kind. I actually gave her my wifi password as they can't afford net and I hoped it would reach into their house at least the part near mine (it does) and I think I have the bandwidth to share. At least now she has netflix and youtube and not just antenna-TV. But it really just boggled my mind that she had no interests, doesn't read... I feel on some level like maybe the drug just sucked some connection to soul out of her. But perhaps that's unfair. Maybe she was that way before it. Here's hoping they don't relapse. * I picked up a hitchhiker a few years ago driving to the other side of town about 10pm. So I was on the way to walmart, which is the only thing open at night in my nowhere small city (in part because it killed off so many other businesses it's nearly the only thing left outside of fast food and medical). I see a young man walking, clearly toward WM because what the heck else is there open, and it's dark, and as he hears me nearing he puts out his thumb and keeps walking, so I ask myself, "Self, will this person do me harm? Life and death here babe, look into it." And self doesn't feel any sense of physical bad in my future so I pick him up. He's flying. "Where are you going?" I ask him. He looks at me, gets a funny look on his face, and then says -- clearly trying to be as scary as he can be -- "To the edge of town. The darkest edge of town." I burst into hilarious laughter. (Don't make me shoot you, kiddo.) He was clearly disappointed this did not have the desired effect. I dropped him off at walmart, after convincing him they had light, bathrooms, and benches to sit on, which would be better than being in the middle of nowhere in the dark alone. ;-) RC

Heck. Do you guys realize that tomorrow is TACO TUESDAY?! Due to my ongoing but as yet incomplete attempt to heal leaky gut, I cannot eat gluten, glutin, or any nut/seed meals. (I'm keto so I don't eat the grains anyway.) So I am for the time being stuck with coconut flour and protein powder and maybe oat fiber as my sole baking options for making tortillas. Which... ergh. Kinda suck. I did however work out making taco shells out of cheese itself which are surprisingly pretty good (see). Although ridiculously filling! Taco Bowls are easiest but they aren't "real" mexican food. Just spiced chuck burger with shred cheese, diced scallions and tomatoes and jalapenos, sometimes some sour cream or guacamole. I miss carne asada, maybe I should be making tacos with that. Gak. Now I've made myself even more hungry but it's 1am so I'm not going to eat. Tomorrow (er, today, but later) I will eat. TACOS! RC

So, "synchronicity" was the term Jung invented for an acausal correlation between things. When you are working on personal individuation, one of the very specific side-effects is the increase of synchronicity in your life. But this is really just kind of trivia -- you might say it's a small indicator you're closer to in-the-zone -- and it already has a word. The thing you showed sounds like someone reinventing and then greatly "adding assumptions" to that. One can find and the brain loves to match patterns, all over the place. I think a number of psyche disorders also tend to make people a lot more tuned to "investing meaning" into things which would not be considered anything coincidental if not for their subjective assignment of meaning. Which really is the only true nature of "meaning" in the human sense anyway. (As opposed to abstract/logical definition.) I mean really... Reality is manifest example of confirmation bias. :-) RC

My best friend bought some ethereum with the barely any money he had. And as a result got to spend an entire year traveling the world, attending a specialized print mentoring in Spain, and doing a ton of stuff he would never have dreamed he could. That was from Ethereum. I own just a tiny bit. At this point I don't pay attention to it since it's not worth anything more than I paid for it but who knows, someday. :-) RC

I think of myself as "a bit of a hippy." Growing up in coastal mid-southern California is most of that. Time spent places like the Rennaissance Faires after hours playing guitar with a bunch of genuine aging hippies... and profoundly terrible taste in colorful paisley fashion. ;-) Metaphysical at heart. I think in general, closer to communal living would be a good thing for my culture, and on the whole I think many of the hippies had the best intentions. Mind you there were later waves that were more like entitled kids who wanted to be part of it and their descent on places like SF made it a very different world than it had been, from what I've read. I don't think we have a hippy contingent at this point, sadly! RC

> No More Mr. Nice Guy I have recommended that book to several men. I've found that those who read it really seemed to need it, as evaluated by their reaction to it. Which was very good... somewhat destabilizing... but I see that for the best, since it's a journey, and in my experience all personal growth is led by destabilizing the foundation you're standing on -- you can't steal second with one foot on first, as the saying goes -- funny but I never read it myself, just read a ton of reviews about it and started sending or referring it to men I knew based on what they'd said. Nice to hear a bum say they liked it too. :-) RC

Well, I'm hoping "better late than never" on this one -- and maybe this is not the best or only approach -- but it's a start. This should have happened two years ago. Tort lawyers: a whole new world is about to open up RC

Illegal immigrants: using ICE's own numbers, reading the government docs a couple years ago it might have been, I had to conclude that there were probably more like 40 million illegals in country. That does NOT count that there would also have been at least ten million of their children(sss) and grandchildren(sssss), but they would be legal. Ann Coulter who is obsessed with the topic believes there's about 50 million. She's an attorney with a good brain and a lot of study on it so I'm tempted to think she's right-er than me. (Literally and figuratively lol.) So PragerU's video talking about dealing with the 11 million illegals might seem a bit different when the number is basically 1/6 to 1/8 your entire population. However, his point that you can't just get rid of 11 million people, is 5x as true for 50 million. He's right about what has to be done except I would add "and voter ID" to his list. RC

Are you sure Patton was not referring to active COMBAT fortifications as opposed to national borders? Edited: I hadn't yet seen all the posts that followed, so, never mind. :-) RC

I am not really a 'watching' sports sort, especially football. But this team was 99.9% doomed and then... in the final <8 seconds or so... this was so unexpected and awesome it made me cheer. Look at the crowd leaping to their feet. Very cool. :-)

I really love this. Jazz piano.

I love the Home Free Vocal Band. They do all kinds of music. From modern country [upbeat My Church] and [slow We All Want] to upbeat pop [Mayday] to old western [Man of Constant Sorrow] to Christmas music if you're in the mood like [Angels We Have Heard] and [Holy Night] (and a really great modern mix of Do You Hear What I Hear ). There's other more pop or upbeat stuff but the ones I put here are some of my favorite and they are often slower. Their covers are often IMO as good or better than the original artists and it's rare I think that. Their vocal percussionist is really good as well and they now have two excellent deep bass men. They are all musicians as well but everything in HF is vocals-only. PS Edited to add: I forgot to add the song that got my attention first: A cover of Cash's Ring of Fire. That one has a guest singer added (the bass Avi from Pentatonix) but it's a great version.

I just got an Instant Pot (electric pressure cooker et al.) to start experimenting with. I eat real food but no gluten/glutin. I am usually ketogenic except since heart surgery (for a heart-valve birth defect, not a veins health issue), because I lost the majority of my oxygen/nutrients for who knows how long leading up to that, I'm on a 'recovery diet' to re-fortify my body. Trying to eat as much and as "versatile" as I can. So aside from those sorts of grains, as long as it qualifies as real food I have no serious limits to it at the moment. (I limit sugar and caffeine only because I don't want to add fat or stay awake all night, but am happy to have them sometimes.) Because I have a major issue with needing more protein than most people who aren't in bodybuilding competitions (it makes a very noticeable difference in my psychology, strength and energy, so this isn't guessing at a number, it's from a lot of experience), I usually have some kind of protein powder or protein drink every day (or more than one) along with as much food as I can eat... given limits on time and appetite. Those aren't really 'real-food' but I'm willing to suffer a little imperfection for the sake of density-of-nutrition. I despise protein powder. I am a dairy protein 'super-taster.' It's hard even to find milk that is cold enough and has STAYED cold enough. I can taste the denaturing of the proteins when its temperature has risen even a little. I can (I once tried it!) put a single TEASPOON of protein powder into an entire blender of milkshake and still feel the whole thing is ruined by it. It's hilarious and stupid and really sucks for someone who needs to ingest a lot of protein and can't eat tons of food! Over the last 15 years I've tried so many protein powders it's ridiculous. I have actually found a couple that are truly good stuff in terms of quality (unflavored natural factors 'whey factors' and naked corps' 'naked whey' and 'naked casein') but they taste kinda eh, at best. I have found one that is the best tasting I've ever run into, and I really like that the protein is processed in a variety of different ways then combined for a 'spectrum' of digestive speeds -- but it's got a bunch of really crappy ingredients (Syntha-6 esp their chocolate). The good news is, protein powder cooked -- like baked -- is VASTLY better. Why? Because the heat denatures the proteins. I modified a recipe to create a junk food protein ball (with bits of pepperoni, parmesan, italian herbs) but deep frying it properly is a real PITA. I recently had the bright idea that if I FROZE the batter in tiny silicon molds, then I could drop the little pieces into the deep frying coconut oil, and that might work too and be far easier and more consistent. But since now I have an instant pot, I want to find lots of things to experiment with in it! Instant Pot is nearly a cult online. Anything that gets THAT much enthusiasm should be either sleeping with you or paying your rent. Maybe both! According to search engines (or my lousy searching maybe), nobody has any recipes for protein powder-based or -included foods made in a pressure cooker. Apparently I'll be the first! If anybody here is an Instant Pot fan -- or a protein powder fan -- let alone both -- I would love to hear any ideas you have for experiments or recipe options! I have close to zero pressure cooking experience so I can only go off the recipes I find online (apparently the same 45 recipes stolen by 400 different people, so far, haha). Any ideas welcome! If my experimenting comes up with anything decently edible I will post it here for posterity! RC

I don't know if this is on youtube. This is from twitter and they hide the location on a lot of stuff. But it's a really cool vid of a volcano. :-)

The Hollies are great. 'The Air That I Breathe' is one of my faves.

This was kinda novel, don't see much of this kind of music today. Lotta fun.

Gah, What IS it with the must have the last word thing. Pleeeeaase stop. I don't know what the right answer is for gender dysphoria, I mean, I'm willing to bet that people and doctors have tried every thing that we currently know about technologically to deal with it. Surgery/hormones is ONE approach; it's still got a ridiculous suicide rate, so obviously it ain't the ideal solution but it's just one of the options, another of which is "be just as miserable and kill yourself at a 40% rate anyway." So I mean it's a truly tragic, horrible thing for people afflicted with this. I honestly think the glomming onto LGBT, and the support by the feminists, may turn out to be the worst thing ever for that group. Because only the shrill extremists tend to be activists. Most of these people just want to quietly live as-if and pray to God nobody on the outside ever finds out otherwise. Instead it's been not only made into a huge drama, which only pushes on how far it is from the norm (creating resistance), but is being pushed in many ways (from the bathrooms to the sports) that causes a serious backlash in everyone else. A lot of things that most people would go, "Dude, you're a weirdo, but whatever" and not care about in ordinary life, outside of gossiping about you maybe, they consider an actual threat on one level or another when activists and the media are pushing on it. I don't see how this is doing much of anybody any favors. RC