The View From Here/Up For This Week

The View From Here/Two Poisons/Strawberry Shortcake Party
We had company this weekend and before that I was cleaning and caulking up a storm, so I haven't been near the internet for three days and am so behind! Sorry, everyone! And this week I'm getting ready to go on my trip to Fairbanks, which is so exciting and so daunting from so many perspectives. I'll write more about it this week, for sure.

Two kinds of poison for me this afternoon - the sun finally came out yesterday and today has been gorgeous, so I went out to the beehives and did some more swarm-prevention. Two very strong hives, one of which was beginning to remonstrate with my intimate attentions. I was working with a veil but no gloves (you're much more sensitive that way) and got just one sting - from a dead bee, I think - I was replacing a frame in the hive and a stinger apparently not attached to a bee caught my finger. Then, driving back toward town, I got caught behind the road-painters, of all things, going at 10mph! What should have been a 5 minute drive was a 20 minute drive - I was so relieved when they turned off.

You can see the 'wet paint' sign on the back of the truck, and the shiny yellow line in the road. And boy, did that paint ever stink! It made me dizzy. Interesting that both bee venom and whatever's in that paint would be considered poisonous and yet I'd rather have the beesting anytime and certainly regard it as a lesser toxin.

One of our favorite friends in town is Phil's ex-wife from long ago, his daughter's mom. Over the weekend, she threw (at the home of other good friends) a 'strawberry shortcake party' - we were all given strawberries from her overflowing freezer and instructed to make some goodies for a potluck dinner! Well, I made some strawberry-themed goodies and also a big green salad, almost entirely stocked with greens from our garden, without strawberries (since I can't have them).  It was challenging for me not to feel left out in the midst of all the abundance from which I'm barred, but making beautiful things and getting to indulge my creativity made up for the eating part.

Here are the greens from the garden:

Peppermint leaves front right for the strawberry soup and the first accidentally-harvested maca on the left...
And here's the salad itself:

I also made strawberry-peppermint soup. I used regular cream and yogurt because of the audience for whom I was making it, but ordinarily I'd use coconut kefir and almond cream, I think:

It was very well-liked. How strange that my 'irregular' way of making it is everyone else's 'normal...'

I also stuffed miniature peppers with home-made (homegrown) arugula pesto and drizzled with strawberry vinaigrette, and roasted:

'Drizzle' got sloshed around a bit in the truck on the backroads getting there - oh well...
I also made strawberry muffins (not pictured) with no gluten/dairy/eggs 'but despite all that scary-sounding information they taste really good' was the sponsorship they received from their intended recipient when I announced them like that! That's the prevailing attitude here - even as creative as I can be at making things, people are just not that open to the no sugar/dairy/grains/etc thing - and if they don't have to be, why should they, I guess? I just know that if anyone ever does start to notice food allergy issues, they'll know that they can come to me for help!

Up For This Week


I hope I didn't lose everyone immediately with my post about 'art and truth' on Friday! My mum told me over the phone that it was 'tangled' indeed. I'm hoping to get some more of my thoughts out about it here this week, hopefully with greater clarity also.

So much to think about re bees, and rather than try to summarize it in today's post, I'll try to get something out in more depth and clarity.

And of course, I keep hinting about my big trip coming up but have barely said a word about it on here! It merits a post of its own asap, if only to help me plan how I'm going to stay sane and keep my energy level for two weeks away from home in a place I've never been before, and how I'm going to feed myself under those conditions also!

And that will probably be plenty.
much love.

Before-and-Afters, Music, Our Voices/Representation/Truth

Happy Friday! The week seems to have galloped by faster than everything that needed doing could possibly follow. I've spent most of the day so far trying to get the cabin tidied/cleaned for our guest, whom Phil is driving to Anchorage to pick up. Also caulking more windows, taking this insulation project as an opportunity to take everything apart and put it back together better.

Before-and-Afters

So, some before-and-afters! I showed our laundry in the rain on Wednesday, with a red ladder clearly in view on our countertop, sprawled over my claimed work corner. The ladder is now gone, but it'll be back, as we haven't finished covering the ceiling! Here is how my workspace prefers to look:

- books, piles of paper, etc, happily back in place - and here's the context. (And whoops - you can just see the caulk gun and some screws that I left on a chair - not done with this cleanup yet!) 

This is a ridiculously tidy version of the counter: being the one major horizontal surface in our tiny cabin, it gets swamped  with books, tools, harvest of any kind, obviously it's my only food-prep surface too (although I often get down on the floor eastern-style to knead Phil's bread).  But the inspiring thing about a major cleanup is that it motivates its own maintenance!

Last night around 11pm, when we were so ready to go to bed after hours of cleaning and organizing, we went outside to look at the sunset. Can you believe this picture was taken at 11pm?

Here's a similar view January.

Our Voices/Representation/Truth

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of 'voice' as a writer or performer of any kind, including a cook/chef/food preparer, and want to share some ideas. However, as so often at the moment, I'm feeling pushed for time to express myself clearly, and also have so very much that I'm thinking and want to say… So I'm going to take it in chunks, and do some of it now and some tomorrow (or Sunday, if I don't get online tomorrow).

As a performer, voice is, presumably, the externalization of identity. What you offer says something about who you are, and thus to some degree defines how people react to you - whether they identify with you and feel agreement and sympathy, or feel threatened, or feel politically unaligned, etc, etc. Nancy Lord was saying on Tuesday that she thinks that one shouldn't have to be limited to a single 'voice' - and I agree. As skilled performers (writers, cooks, musicians), we should be able to make offerings that harmonize with many different aspects of human experience; as sensitive human beings, we should be capable of sympathy with a wide range of perspectives and of belief in a plethora of possibly conflicting views. 

But this is the point at which I get stuck: the ethics and also the physics of the relationship between truth and representation. I want to touch the truth, and I have the hardest time with the fact that sometimes, in order to represent, one has to exaggerate or to highlight. I know that it's just like wearing make-up on stage to clarify features for a large audience at a distance. And of course I'm egotistical enough to desire a large audience for my poetry - and for the food I prepare and write about too, for that matter! But does that mean that I need to use a microphone and wear make-up - or, to borrow a metaphor from Bill Roorbach, to baste my turkey with motor oil - in order for a realistic representation to be received? (Bill invokes this metaphor, by the way, in a beautiful story he tells in the introduction to his anthology of creative nonfiction titled The Art of Truth. The light oxymoron of this title conveys precisely the dilemma that I'm trying to talk about.)

'Impersonation' - speaking in the voice of another - is traditionally all about putting on a mask (persona = 'mask:' the Latin word actually came from Etruscan but the Greek 'mask,' prosopon, yields its etymology clearly: it's what you put in front of your face. 

On the one hand, putting on a mask is liberating. Someone who read at our writers' group yesterday is writing a memoir. Since she started writing it in the third person and changed all the characters' names, including her own, she has discovered a delightful new lease on it and her exuberance, joy and enthusiasm for the way that a very interesting and unique story is now simply flowing out is a wonderful thing to see. Another lady in the group, who is involved in theater, commented that a similar liberation takes place when you are acting the part of a character. You can do any goofy thing and 'blame it on them!' I suspect that this obviative capacity, this ability to shift the responsibility onto the part you are playing, then seeps back into the sphere of speaking for yourself: perhaps saying something intensely personal and confessional becomes easier when you are used to making the confessions of the part you are playing. And perhaps, if you're doing it really well, you become more universal.

On the other hand, putting on a mask is obviative - it's stepping out of the way of responsibility, and claiming to speak for someone else (as if you could know). It's forsaking reality for a picture or fiction of the reality, or of some different reality that doesn't exist. Now, perhaps everything is picture/fiction anyway and I'm worrying about nothing. Hindu cosmology would certainly say so, as would postmodern theory and certain skeins of cognitive neuroscience. So, why am I so reticent to attempt to portray a variety of perspectives? 

First, I will say that I'm not alone in this. I think a lot of Li-Young Lee's poetry is predicated on this question. The only time I saw people get really heated at the Writers' Conference last month was over the question of taking on characters from other cultures and 'impersonating' them - this raises the specter of political correctness and also the question of the disadvantaged person 'what gives you the right to tell my story?' One participant was really offended that it was suggested she didn't have the right to write from the perspective of her black neighbors with whom she'd coexisted for years. Another confessed that she writes science-fiction, based in an imaginary universe, precisely to avoid such issues. But, from my angst-y perspective, she thus potentially places herself in the same bind of avoidance of reality - unless she can say forceful things about the real world through depictions of an alternate world. And this is where some hope comes in - masterful writers like Ursula LeGuin do say forceful things about the real world in their fiction. That was what I liked so much about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas also, as I blogged about recently.

I do find myself paralyzed by the unfulfillable need for omniscience, though. If I'm going to write from another person's world-view, I feel that I need to know everything about it. And sometimes the fact that I pick up so much psychically is an impediment rather than a help: intuitive, empathic knowledge is often ineffable and I'd be able to present (not: represent) the character far better by being able to show their drinking habits or what age they were when they first learned disappointment.

While I was cleaning, I was listening to the Best of Sting. It's the only Sting cd Phil owns and I love it! Sting was big when I was growing up, and yet, through the various quirks of my upbringing and later life I was almost completely unaware of him until Phil first played me this cd. I love how many different characters he evinces in the course of that one disc, as well as how many current/political affairs he glances at. I admired his being a voice for what many people think - and what many people disagree with also! But I was also stricken with anxiety about my suitability to represent a person who grew up in England in the 80's, as I did myself, whilst having been almost oblivious to popular culture of the time!

I need to get back to cleaning pretty soon, and posting this blog, downloading what-all else and some grocery shopping are a rainy-wet bikeride away. I hope that these musings are any kind of coherent. I prescribe myself an assignment - to write some persona poems!

Interim bottom line for me: when I write, I want people to see themselves, not for them to see me and identify with me. Or when I'm representing objects or events, I want to take them right there, not have them be distracted by my docent voice. But then, I love to get lost in the beauty of words juxtaposed, also - and sometimes that pure, abstract beauty is the closest thing I find to truth.

Rain, Greathearted Writers, Blood Sugar

Happy Wednesday, everyone! I'm working at the bookshop pictured right at the end of this post today - it's a good day to be indoors: rain all day. I biked down here and was pretty soaked on arrival. So far, it certainly has not been a great summer to start bees - or to be outside in relaxed manner.

We've been very busy with the cabin insulation project, and everything is out of place, to the point that when we did our laundry yesterday, rain or not, we had to hang it to dry outside:

Yes, that is a ladder on our kitchen counter/workspace! We still have to hang muslin on the ceiling - I was up early this morning sewing it together.  It's cluttering up rapidly despite having cleared everything off - you can see our thriftstore-bought football-shaped crockpot with Phil's lunch in it there too. That left-hand corner is normally my workdesk-space, normally piled with books and papers (I try to keep it in some sort of order!) Said books, papers, journals, etc are currently sitting on our couch, together with our dishes and dishdrainer. It's not the comfiest... Don't our clothes look pretty wet out there!

Phil and I spent a very cordial and pleasant couple of hours with Nancy Lord yesterday morning. Besides holding the imposing title of Alaska Writer-Laureate, she has published collections of fiction and nonfiction to inspire awe and emulation, and has most recently turned her attention to the effects of climate change on parts of Alaska. But there we were together, finding so much in common: she is so unassuming, sincere and friendly. We resonated on our tendencies to overcommit on a volunteer basis, she gave me some very generous advice about continuing to connect with a broader literary community, we reminisced about the Writers' Conference, at which she had been a presenter and had also attended some of the same workshops that I had been to. Magnanimity in established members of a profession or art is such a wonderful thing - also a boon of living in a small community. And all communities are small, really, once you start to find your tribe.

Blood Sugar Issues

I mentioned in my Sunday post having had a problem with extreme low blood sugar because of getting up a little later than normal and eating a later breakfast. I'm continuing to have problems with this lack of leeway, and am quite puzzled. Anywhere you look, people talk about avoiding sugar and avoiding high-glycemic foods in order to balance blood sugar. Sugar, and high-glycemic foods, release glucose into the blood rapidly, so that overall blood sugar levels rise too fast. Too much insulin is often released in response, which can lead to increased fat storage, as well as a correspondingly rapid crash in blood sugar. Having regularly high insulin levels, for whatever reason they that way, is correlated with pretty much every malady that threatens longevity.

So far, so good: it all makes sense. So, people who tend to suffer from low blood sugar are generally advised to eat regularly and to eat low-glycemic. But I do all this - the highest-glycemic thing I eat is carrots! And yet, not infrequently, I get into this state of crazed-anxiety-white-knuckle feeling. Sometimes, by the time I actually eat something, it doesn't even help - it's as if my body's in panic mode and can't be dissuaded.

You hear so many stories of how people find relief after quitting sugar - how anxiety and general ups-and-downs even out. So why haven't I gotten that? The Naturopath pointed out to me that because I eat so low-glycemically, there's very little sugar available to be circulating in my blood (but I thought my body could then make it from protein - gluceoneogenesis). His point being that if I'm eating small amounts, it could be easy to end up with low blood sugar.

It's certainly true that I've been feeling tons better since adding a mid-morning snack rather than trying to eke through till lunchtime on my meager smoothie (and making said smoothie a little less meager too, adding some protein powder). But I'm feeling a bit of catch-22 here. I know that eating sugar is the worst thing I can do. But eating no-sugar, I'm still 'crashing.' How much of this could be a bodily 'habit?' I used to go without food for long, long stretches of time and just push through. Now, my body seems to rebel/panic at the slightest hint of such behavior.

I'd very much appreciate anyone else's insights or experiences.I've been trawling around on Pub Med and haven't yet found anything helpful.

The View From Here/Up For This Week

The View From Here


Overcast, and occasional glimpses of blue, that sometimes seep out and colonize the white-gray. Mirrored, indoors, by our ceiling project! Phil has covered the homey, warm cedar tongue-and-groove ceiling with sky-blue insulating board, and we're now in the process of covering up that sky with further insulative muslin!

We took a hike on the beach just now - shorter than yesterday's because I'm fatigued, but not short on beautiful views - here is the bay where Phil (and I too) love to play:

And here's Phil, who just can't keep a straight face!

(At that point, I lost access to the internet at the laundromat, where I was hanging out. So now I am at Safeway, praying that I haven't lost my morning's translation work (it has to be uploaded and is prone to crashing and losing your work if interrupted in any way!)

There are so many beautiful rocks to be found on the beach - I have to restrain myself. Here are three special ones from today, though: the big one is special just because it's such an unusual shape - obviously hasn't been rolling around in the waves for very long, it has far too many angles. And then there's a cute little agate, and the striped one was irresistible too:

They are resting on my wool scarf, which I'm still wearing here in July (although when we're walking with the wind behind us, or have been walking for some time, it gets to be too warm).

Up For This Week

This week, I want to calm down! I want to find the way back to feeling good about what I'm doing, and not feeling like I'm in a desperate rush all the time. Probably, getting the ceiling covered will help with this, because then we can put the cabin back into some kind of order - everything is upside down, out of place and dirty from dust being knocked onto it at the moment! I'm generally very tolerant of clutter and mess, but this has been tough. And of course, it's tough for Phil too and we resonate.

So, if my blogging can help with that in any way, that's what I want to do here this week!

As always, I'd love to hear from anyone who wishes to chip in with advice and suggestions.

Fourth of July, Anxiety, Mercury, Hiking in the Hills

Happy Fourth of July! It was brilliantly blue-skied here early morning, but turned into a muggy, overcast kind of day that Phil considers great hiking weather - so it's perfect that we'd planned a hike for this afternoon. I'm at Safeway, where we came post-hike to fill our water-containers - Safeway, ubiquitously open and busy with people even on a Sunday-holiday-day.

Sometimes people have a greater degree of muscle fatigue two days after a major workout than they do directly after: I'm wondering whether my emotional and energetic perturbation of today, two days after my huge-drive-day, is a species of that. I've been feeling a sense of almost flat-out panic all day, as if I'd drunk a whole jug of strong coffee (and I've had nothing close to caffeine, not even cacao, in a couple weeks). There's just no time to do anything, is what it feels like.

What to do when feeling like that? We lay in until 8am, and by the time I was up and fixing breakfast, I was so low-blood-sugared that I was just losing it, and never quite recovered. It's an awkward bind, having so little leeway in bodyclock schedule. And there's so much shame around it for me too, after all those years that I'd just push myself on, often not eat breakfast until noon, etc. Phil was so sweet, held me and hugged me and encouraged me to plan details of my Fairbanks trip two weeks hence to mitigate some of that anxiety.

I found myself singing 'Love Invincible' from Michael Franti's 'Everyone Deserves Music.' which was right on for that. Sometimes singing helps just per se. Any other advice on how to come down from crazymind?

Like I said, it could just be slightly delayed reaction to the kind of trip that's probably pushing 'too much' for me at the moment. I think that the mercury chelation I'm currently undergoing is also affecting my mood. Twelve weeks of it to go - good to try it out at home to see whether I could do it when in Fairbanks or if it would spoil my time there!

For our hike in the hills, we followed one of Phil's favorite winter ski trails. It's just a few hundred feet higher than where we live, but in this zone of intense microclimates there are many plants that are less 'far along' than where we are - dandelions still flowering, roses just budding. Also, some plants that we don't even have. We took it at a fairly leisurely pace and we both enjoyed stopping and taking pictures with our new camera.

Since we probably need to go home and continue insulating the ceiling of our cabin, I'm not going to try and post them all but here are a few.

These don't even grow where we live: they are a gorgeous little trailing native berry called nagoonberry (cool name too!) - just flowering here:

In late August, they make delicious, sweet-tart berries, a little like raspberries but better, but so tiny and sparse!

At the opposite end of the scale from edibles, this false hellebore is a potent neurotixin but looks like a beautiful sculpture:

We passed a few abandoned homesteads back of beyond there, and an inhabited homestead with a tepee in front and what looked like a big garden. This old homestead wasn't old enough to lack a power hookup, but looks pretty dilapidated - check out the bent chimney!

Love and happiness to everyone -  I have to go.

Anchorage Trip, Alaska Writing, Alienation, Natto

Yesterday, I drove to Anchorage and back. Left at 5am, having gotten up an hour earlier to drop Phil off for a day playing about the bay in his boat. Got home around 10pm, to go and pick up Phil and boat and a whole mess of fish (mostly cod and a sizable halibut). I had an appointment, did some errands and took some downtime/internet time at Title Wave, the independent bookstore. Even then, I was a bit busy! A new writing obligation that I've taken on is putting together the 'Weekly Roundup' that goes out every Friday on the '49 Writers' blog, which is devoted to all things literary in this state. It feels good to me to help out with these kind of things. Of course, first time around, it wasn't smooth sailing. I hadn't quite grasped the extent to which these wysiwyg programs like Word and even Blogger have deep memories of old formatting that they will throw up like reefs in your smoothly prepared work. And then, I scheduled the post, published it - and it disappeared! The two ladies who run the blog ended up having to rescue it/me, when the whole point was to give them space to expand. But all the links got lost, so I sat at the bookstore with temporary admin privileges and sorted it out. Hopefully not too many readers will be able to infer that whole story from the post's appearance!

Here are lupins blooming! Elderberry (but not the edible kind) behind.

Since the continued work on improving my relationship with food and life and using writing to mediate that was the whole purpose of my appointment, I'd thought it might be a good time to write a blog about that too. But yesterday there simply wasn't time (see previous paragraph!) and today is the usual catchup-after-trip kind of day with a friend's birthday party in the evening too, and I'm not feeling ready to write about it now. 

Just the obvious: since my ND appointment right before the Writers' Conference and the Conference itself, I've been making efforts to eat more protein earlier in the day and overall, and have been writing more and feeling very convinced that doing so is what I need to be doing. And my energy has been lots better, as well as my mood, and I'm feeling a welcome sense of purpose. That might even be all I need to say, but of course there's lots more to it.

I took 'company' with me for the long drive - books on cassette from the library! For someone who loves reading aloud so much and values the oral/aural element of language so highly, it's astonishing that this was my first experience of books on tape since a couple I had as a little tiny kid! I took John McPhee's 'Coming Into the Country,' stories about Alaska and specifically the Alaskan Interior, and Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter.' Very different companions, each thought-provoking and fascinating. 

'Coming into the Country' is a 400-some page book and this was excerpts, read by the author. It underscored the irony for me of my attempts to insert myself into the Alaskan literary community - and community tout court - McPhee has a very specific, forthright, opinion about who should come to Alaska and be a part of it, and it is not me! It was as if I was constantly hearing a subtext, throughout his readings - 'You don't belong here. You don't deserve to be here. You're a sissy when it comes to the cold. You are a slave to the urban, in the trap of modern society,' and many other things besides. Whereas he could have been eulogizing Phil directly. I wonder whether there's any other place that could have brought out the differences between the two of us more strikingly. I could console myself by thinking that whilst I didn't recognize myself in any of the characters he portrayed with approval, I wasn't like the urban sharks either. And while I felt like I fit in so well in Hawaii and California, there was always some alienation there too. And growing up in England, people always asked me where I was from. It's not just because I look Israeli, I don't think. 'For I am a stranger with thee and a sojourner' is going to be the title of one of my books of poems. But I loved the experience of having the books, and I definitely absorbed a lot aurally. I stopped for a restroom break here in transition between the two…

…and took a few minutes to recall what I'd heard. It was rainy yesterday, still somewhat so today, and the sun over the Kenai mountains was a fuzzy orb:

Since I was in the big town, with Asian stores available, I bought and tried some natto along with the chlorella 'slaw I'd packed. Natto is a fermented soybean product that many people, including raw enthusiasts, promote as an excellent source of good bacteria and enzymes. People often say that soy can be quite nutritious when it's been fermented, because that removes many of its existing problems with trypsin inhibitors, phytates, etc. Natto is sold frozen, in these little styrofoam containers (not my fave) and was still semi-frozen when I mixed it in. (I'll take a pic and upload asap.) Even semi-frozen, it was obvious that it's an intensely mucilaginous, sticky, viscous substance, like okra, more so than flax goo. I know that some are grossed out by this but it doesn't bother me at all. I know that foods with that kind of texture are often soothing on the stomach, because it's often to do with soluble fiber content. It has an enormous amount of protein too! 

But given how my tummy is, I probably shouldn't have had a whole package (which is maybe 3-4 tablespoons) all at once. I definitely had a tummyache afterwards for a while. And it's obvious that I should start much more slowly - back to my 'slow and steady' watchword at the moment - have just a little bit at a time. Flavor-wise, it's one of those weird fermented Asian things that I'm pretty tolerant of but that I know lots of people hate, especially when allied with a mucus-y texture. So I don't feel very well-qualified to critique the flavor. It's not particularly strong to taste, but smells strong and earthy. Mixed in with a gingery slaw and chlorella seemed like a pretty good way to do it.

Anyone else tried natto? Thoughts?

The internet connection I'm on right now is quite good, but I'm in the lounge of the local motel (probably my shortest walk to an internet connection - about 30 minutes each way - and I'm aiming to get more walking in) and everyone's smoking in here! I can't stand it, spoiled California girl that I am... So I probably won't be staying long!

These beach peas are so beautiful and the flowers, leaves and peas are all edible and quite tasty. Flowering just beside the road in the drizzle as I walked down here.

Bees and a Near-Miss with Photos; Eighty Percent Raw Interview!

Happy July everyone! Now that it's July, I can reveal that for this month's issue of Eighty Percent Raw, I conducted a lengthy interview with none other than the Father of Raw Foods, Viktoras Kulvinskas! You can see the interview here. He was very generous and gracious with his time - it was a great experience and I'm excited to get to share it now. It's a funny thing in the publishing world, when you have to contain your excitement and avoid stealing your own thunder!

I just got back from working bees with some friends. My own two hives really haven't built up very much at all - they had such a rough journey up here and then it was cold and then the dandelions bloomed late and short... I'm going to merge them together and move them to our place, where they'll have a lookout on the roof of our bunker, safe from bears. But we were working a friend's two overwintered hives - bees everywhere, beautiful queens, doing great. No smoke, no gloves. Loads of drones and some queen cells hanging off the edges indicating that they're considering swarming. No point in doing that here, and we don't want them to do that, so there was a scene of drone destruction wreaked. I got stung once - by a nettle! But then right at the end, a little bee crawled onto the center of my hand and, quite deliberately, stung me. I said 'oh, sweetie, you don't want to sting me!' but everyone else agreed that that was most likely exactly what she wanted to do.

And - I'm embarrassed to admit - I took the camera along but didn't take any pictures. It was just starting to rain, and that added to the 'get it done and put it back together so that we quit disturbing them soon' vibe. Soon, though!

I saw the naturopath this morning and have started the DMSA chelation for mercury and lead - three months of that and then, he says, we can finally really start addressing the yeast. I'll write more about what we talked about, or about food and writing and how they're mutually reinforcing for me, maybe tomorrow. I know I've been very reticent about the whole subject recently, partly due to uncertainty about level of interest or how helpful it might be to others. But it's a big deal in my life and so I probably should.

Love to all!