Luck

It's funny how you hear about something and then it starts coming up everywhere. My friend told me about the benefits of raw apple cider vinegar and then I see it as a facial toner and a treatment for diabetes.

In my first issue of Mary Jane's Farm there is a recipe for Queen of Hungary water using herbs and raw apple cider vinegar. The Queen of Hungary supposedly used it as a facial toner and that is why she always looked young and beautiful. Turns out the recipe more likely originated as alcohol (wine) and rosemary in the 13th century, was the first version of perfume, and cannot be attributed to any Queen of Hungary. Oh well. I tried using the vinegar by itself with warm water as a facial and after doing this twice, it removed what I thought was an age bump on my face. Turns out you can use vinegar to treat warts. Was that a wart?! Oh dear, it is gone now.

Since I was feeling a bit jittery when I haven't eaten, I researched hypoglycemia online and found raw apple cider vinegar as a treatment for diabetes. Turns out it can help regulate your blood sugar levels. Tuns out it can also help lower your blood pressure. Unfortunately, I have a healthy low blood pressure and raw apple cider vinegar can make my blood pressure too low. I wondered if it had anything to do with my jitters that went along with some mild dizziness and decided to lay off the vinegar for a while. Oh well.

On March 4th I started as a regular employee with the State of Idaho, just in time to be eligible for a two percent pay increase that they announced this week, and for the first time in more than ten years, I'm feeling lucky. It has been almost a month of one good thing after another. Two percent of not very much is not very much, but it is something and I would not have been eligible as a temp. I do not think of myself as a lucky person. The last time I felt luck was in 1994, when I moved to Vegas and got a great job right away. For years it seems like I was the person who could not catch a break and the only breaks I got were in letting go of material things, like my house. I was lucky to sell it when I did, but I didn't want to let it go in the first place.

One problem with winter here is that by March I am sick, sick, sick of my winter clothes. Winter seems to last from time change to time change. I proclaimed spring started March 9th and I was right. We had a few days of nicer weather and I got in two good walks before it started to rain, which it has done since Tuesday. Someone at work tried to give me a hard time about the rain and my proclamation, and I reminded her that is what it is supposed to do in spring, rain.

My crocuses are blooming, Sarah's tulips are coming up, and all the trees are budding. Both of my blueberries are bursting with large buds and Sarah's raspberry that I let grow on my side of the fence last fall is about to be full of leaves. I am really happy with the blueberries, they looked good with burgundy color last fall through December and there they are getting ready to be full of blueberries already in March. Sarah cuts her raspberry down to short sticks in the fall, so that is what I did with what was coming up in my yard. I have two good thick sticks and I am hoping that means my own raspberry crop this summer.

It is time to plant vegetable seeds, but already started seedlings have to wait until after danger of frost, here that means the first week of May. I think I will plant the same things as last year, although I might try lettuce. Lettuce seems like a good thing to grow from seed, since I do not want to plant a bunch of seedlings at the same time and end up eating lettuce all day for a week, but I think I will wait to plant seedlings for everything else.

Since it is raining anyway, this weekend is a good one for spring cleaning.

I hope that the last few really great weeks are an indicator that my 50's will be much better than my 40's. Most of my 40's sucked and I am really looking forward to 50 (next week) like some kind of great turning point.