Never-Ending Summer

I feel so much better having written about that school stuff -- getting it out of my head was so cathartic!

I didn't get to post yesterday, because I've been pretty busy.

We have this basement space that was a big reason we purchased this house. It's no big deal, it's just that it was actually *finished* space. I've never lived in a house with a finished basement; in fact, when I was growing up, I slept in a partially-finished basement until my parents had a second story put on our house when I was ten. When the construction work was being done, we had a burglar. He probably thought the house was vacant, since it happened on the night before Christmas Eve, and there was no roof on the house!

Anyway, I woke to some noises at the end of my room, where the basement stairs ended, and my mom (still) keeps her sewing machine, and saw a flashlight. I was terrified, of course. Somehow I didn't pee the bed. I just lay there, pretending to sleep as best I could, until I heard the footsteps go back up the stairs, and then was able to breathe again. The only thing that was taken was some cash from my father's wallet.

So, anyway, I have a strange relationship with basements. I see them as opportunity spaces. In the unfinished room next to my bedroom we did (and my parents still do) their laundry. There is also a kiln in there, and a kick-wheel for doing pottery. We did a lot of pottery at our house when I was growing up!

As long as they're not touching me, spiders don't scare me.

I think, too, I've always been a tad envious of homes with a nice comfortable basement space -- with a pool table, or air hockey, or foosball, and a place to watch movies, and a place for guests. So, we got this house.

On the day after we moved in, the sewer backed up into said finished basement. (Hello, Mr. Insurance Man, if you are reading this blog, your comapny doesn't cover this lonely problem my house has, so you can go on your merry way). Crap. Literally.

It took me three years of living here to see the pattern. Every November or so, we would have The Backup. Well, that would happen as long as I called the regular sewer rooting company, which used an auger-like device, to clean the sewer line. It involved going in through the basement window and across the carpet (ewww), so after that, we had the special carpet-cleaning company come and sanitize everything. But then, after having the sewer line camera run, we realized we had bellies in our sewer line. Our house was built within the last 30 years, so that's an unexpected bummer.

The next company I called used a pressurized system to clean out the lines, and the second time they came, we realized they could use the sewer access for the RV parking we have, so they don't have to come in across the carpet anymore! Hooray!

And, we figured out the problem... fat. Yep, all those bacon drippings and coconut oil, even the tiniest amounts I was washing down the sink, were collecting in the bellies and occluding the poo exit for our house, such that one overzealous wiping session could leave the basement filled with...

Yeah! So, anyway... I have them come clean the lines every Fall, and I am careful to wipe out all my pans carefully with a paper towel before washing them, and, (fingers crossed, knocking on wood), no problems! Except that I forgot to call last Fall, and I haven't called yet this fall. And it got cold. They can't do it when it's below freezing.

So, anyway, the space is pretty nice, and I have tried several permutations for keeping our junk (there's so much of it -- mostly books and crafting stuff and board games) down there. But we never seem to make it down there. And people don't really stay with us anymore, now that Erick's parents live across town. Which means I've gotten really lazy about keeping things clean. Especially down there.

We were working on learning electronics on one side of our big project table, and doing claymation on the other side. It was nice because we could leave half-done projects down there and not worry about picking up. Except that my sister would really like to come visit, and it's totally not toddler-friendly down there. Nope. In fact, one time when my other nephew came to visit once, he and my daughter got into the craft cabinet and spread all the beads all over the carpet. Thank goodness for vacuums.

And, there have been dog issues down there. Grr. There's a door, and keeping it closed eliminates the dog problems, but folks don't always close the door.

So, anyway, I spent last weekend and the earlier part of this week doing some major stuff-shuffling, because I wanted to move all of our messy stuff into the guest bedroom and take the bed out of there, so I can lock that door when we have young guests. And we moved L's daybed down into the larger rec room area, so there's essentially a king-sized bed down there, which we can sit on to watch movies. Lucy got the queen-sized bed which we were using as a guest bed. And that left a lot of space open... for a sauna!

The sauna arrived yesterday, and I was mostly ready for it. We were instructed by E not to put it together without him. He loves assembling things, much like I did at that age.

I've been thinking about getting a sauna ever since I had organophosphate poisoning when we moved here seven years ago, and E had arsenic toxicity. It's probably a good thing I didn't get it then; I was in much too delicate a place for sauna therapy at that time.

But now, I've become aware of the health benefits of infrared light; especially the near infrared spectrum, at 660 and 880nm, which helps recycle the copper moeity in the mitochondrial enzyme cytochrome c oxidase. We've been using "chicken lamps" around our house for recovering from illness, and reducing stress and inflammation, and counteracting the negative effects of blue light (which turns off cytochrome c oxidase), for about a year now. For a while, I was traveling to a nearby tanning salon for red light therapy, but it was quite costly, and I figured out it would only take about a two years of doing that to pay off a red light therapy bed.

Our summer this year in Colorado made this seem all the more important. In June we had a huge fire nearby which left our air quality in such poor condition that our county and neighboring counties were advised to stay indoors. Then, it was over 90 degrees fahrenheit for a record number of days -- well into the end of August, if I recall correctly. So, our outdoor time was pretty much zilch.

I figured we would see the bad side of that pretty quickly, and we did. It's been a frequent illness fiasco here this fall. But the good news is that we are recovering from these illnesses very quickly with fat soluble vitamins and chicken lights, and our moods are good.

L even had all the symptoms of strep disappear in about a day, sitting under a chicken light.

This is the kind of crazy stuff I think people need to know, but that I worry about posting in a public place, but here I am, posting it.

I get a lot of questions about chicken lights, so I'll just go ahead and post here what I got at my local Home Depot.

1) 250W BR40 Halogen Flood Light
There are also 125W versions, which will use electricity, but that also means less of this luscious energy for your mitochondria. There are red ones, which would mean less of the blue spectra, but this is what I prefer to use at my work and reading spaces.

2) 300W Brooder Clamp Light
This is just one example, and this is the one from Home Depot. I got other ones at my local farm supply store.

Oh, and I am getting rid of all those terrible compact fluorescent bulbs in my house, one at a time. I still have some in areas where we don't use the lights very often, but in our living spaces, it's all halogen and halogen incandescent. The halogen incandescent bulbs are available even at the local grocery store, and use about 20-30% less electricity than a regular incandescent bulb.

From Wikipedia:

"According to the European Commission Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) in 2008, CFLs may pose an added health risk due to the  ultraviolet  and blue light emitted. This radiation could aggravate symptoms in people who already suffer skin conditions that make them exceptionally sensitive to light. The light produced by some single-envelope CFLs at distances of less than 20 cm could lead to ultraviolet exposures approaching the current workplace limit set to protect workers from skin and retinal damage. Industry sources claim the UV radiation received from CFLs is too small to contribute to skin cancer and the use of double-envelope CFLs "largely or entirely" mitigates any other risks.^[49]

"A 2012 study comparing cellular health effects of CFL light and incandescent light found statistically significant cell damage in cultures exposed to CFL light. Spectroscopic analysis confirmed the presence of significant UVA and UVC radiation, which the study's authors conjectured was attributable to damage in the bulbs' internal phosphor coatings. No cellular damage was observed following exposure to incandescent light of equivalent intensity. The study's authors suggest that the ultraviolet exposure could be limited by the use of "double-walled" bulbs manufactured with an additional glass covering surrounding the phosphor-coated layer.^[50]"

And let me just say, the sauna is awesome. The winter is not only *dark,* but *cold,* which is a metabolic stressor. I have some local friends who saw the benefits of getting a regular hot tub a few years ago. I think it is just a regular hot tub, but the larger of the two lost a significant amount of body fat using it every night throughout the winter. We do tend to lose metabolic momentum over the winter. We usually blame that on overeating through the holidays, but living in Northern climates, we have the additional metabolic stressors of darkness and coldness. So, the sauna is my plan to combat that stress.

Meditation and music are also regularly touted as ways to combat stress. The sauna I got has a sound system in it, and it's nearly impossible not to melt into the music and let my mind go blank while sitting in there.

We're also interested in the possible effects on some skin problems we've experienced, so I am eager to see what becomes of those.

Today, we pushed the 500 pounds of sauna into the corner of the basement where it will reside. I guess that makes it official. We own a sauna. To celebrate, this afternoon, I shampooed the carpet.

If you don't have space or money for saunas or chicken lights, you can simply go for walks near dusk or dawn year-round and get the benefit of more red than blue light. But if you're on the blue-light-emitting computer screen reading about all this weird stuff, and seem to miss the appropriate windows, then maybe some chicken lights are in order.

Magical freedom

Here it is already... November. Wow. How did that happen?! That last post I just went ahead and published, written in July, was the last time I had enough focus on any one thing to actually write about it.

I guess this means I'm doing well. I feel better than I have felt in a long time. I do feel a little scared to write that, lest the bottom fall out of my wellness... but anyway, I have felt well enough to get entrenched in several large undertakings. These undertakings are large enough that I actually don't have time for them all! But I do love them each enough that I flit back and forth between them, not certain to which I should give priority.

Obviously, however, the kids are the first priority. That goes without saying. They have been immersed in playing Minecraft with each other and with their father. I was nervous about allowing them to play this online game, since I lifted restrictions on screen time for them about a year ago. We used to make sure that we didn't plug in until after 3:30 pm each day -- my rationale being that kids who go to school don't get to have unlimited screen time. Also, most of my homeschooling friends have pretty stringent limits on their kids' screen time. But, when Everett became passionate about computer programming, and would tell me with great delight about the next program he was going to implement when I was tucking him into bed, I wasn't going to be the gatekeeper to happiness anymore.

And, it's really amazing how much he has flourished in that time. Both kids have. This morning I surprised him with two new O'Reilly books -- Head First HTML 5 Programming and Head First Web Design. He became interested in HTML 5 back when he had first implemented his website and wanted to know how to get some of the programs he had designed in Python on his website. Back then (earlier this year), there were no books on HTML 5, and it wasn't for certain that HTML 5 would even become standard yet. We found the limited information that was available on HTML 5 at the time, and made it available for him. So, he was so excited to see that HTML 5 book there this morning. Perhaps it is a bit selfish of me, but I love seeing his enormous shining eyes and genuine smile when I've figured out just what to get to feed his desire for learning. It's a high I can't really describe.

Naturally, all of this has been trickling down. The desire to learn independently, the enthusiasm, the recognition of endless possibility. Lucy has been pursuing her own passions, as well. She has been actively participating in MIT's Scratch Community making animations, developing her drawing skills, connecting with friends, and just today, she made her first WordPress blog post. The kids are constantly chatting with each other, dreaming of new collaborative designs for Scratch or Everett's web site. Sometimes the negotiation becomes quite heated, and that's when I realize they are not only really passionate about these things they are doing, but they are developing valuable teamwork skills for the future. Lucy has even been composing stories with a local friend using chat.

Even I have been inspired by their willingness to take risks and explore technology. In a fit of frustration with my homeschooling group's current communications platform, I designed not one, but two different forums for testing -- the first one used phpBB, which was pretty easy to set up (with a tiny bit of hand-holding in the beginning from Everett) and then after wanting to learn more about forum engines, I discovered yet another one (Simple Machines Forum) and implemented it within just a few hours. I can't tell you how empowering that was. I turned some anger and frustration into a potential solution. And even if my group is not interested in using those platforms; I am still happy to have had the experience of getting to learn how to make them!

Even the challenges we have faced in computerland have been useful. Everett created a site called MyDog: Blog About Your Dog as a subdomain on his website. He figured out how to do all of it himself. He programmed it all using PHP. Not long after its release, it was found by SPAM bots. :/ What a way for a kid to learn about prescription drugs! First he started deleting the SPAM posts manually, one by one. I asked him if maybe there was a faster way to get rid of them, since there were hundreds. And just with that suggestion, he knew he had to create a search algorithm in his MySQL database to get rid of all the errant posts. At that point, he didn't know how to keep the posts from being entered onto his website in the first place, so he disabled posts to MyDog. :( For a while. He knew that he had to figure out how to enter a captcha code to eliminate bot posts, so then he implemented that. His remaining issue is that the text is too small, so it can be very hard for humans to tell what the pass code is to enter a post. Maybe he'll get that changed someday, when it seems important to him.

Because of this passion about computers, we do have trouble getting outside enough. For various reasons, we didn't make it to the park as much as we have in years previous when the weather was cooperative. Our yard is small and our house is large and comfortable. I got a basketball hoop on Craigslist, hoping the allure would create hours of sweaty fun. A skateboard and all associated safety gear has also entered our house. But alas, the new territory of creation on the internet isn't matched by the beauty of the outdoors. Yet. I know from experience that many opportunities that present themselves, sometimes just do so at the wrong time. It never ceases to amaze me that just when I think, "Oh, I guess they're just not interested in that..." I'll see them experimenting with it. Patience certainly has its rewards.

We did have a nine-day long hiatus from the computer. We took a trip to Washington DC with my parents, and it was nothing short of magical. Nine days was not nearly long enough. It is worth a blog post of its own, for sure. I'll comment simply on the relationship between the lifestyle we experienced there and our health, for now. We walked miles every day (we did not have a car), and we ate lots of wheat and vegetable oil, I am sure. And it didn't seem to affect the kids at all. It was sunny for the majority of the time, we got to breathe iodine-rich ocean air, did not have the challenges of high elevation, and were constantly moving. It was a little difficult to eat enough, I think, for the number of calories we were expending. I say that because I would be hungry upon waking (which is not normal for me), and would feel extremely nauseated if I didn't eat breakfast right away. This didn't seem to be a problem for anyone else. I have my ideas about why (hmm, what is something that I do all the time that neither my kids or husband do?).

Anyway, the hiatus just proved to stimulate creativity in all of us. Walking along the streets of Washington DC, surrounded in history, my family brainstormed about a world they would then create in Minecraft upon returning home. They wanted to re-create the impressive Metro system we took daily. They wanted to generate copies of the monuments. They came home and made a dream city, together.

Does it get any better than this?