I search my phone photographs for moon and come up with this photograph: an eerie sun and cloud photograph with a halo. Sometimes the clouds and fog combine with the sun to form frightening light, even though it is beautiful too.
The computer also picked this picture in the moon search. I’m not sure what that is about. Elwha had hopped into the bathtub not realizing that I had just gotten out. He was soaked and howled, because he couldn’t get out. He was a very grumpy kitten, grooming for an hour.
The source of digoxin and digitalis. I am interested when people tell me they don’t take prescription medicines and that they only take “natural” medicines. Meaning pills. Pills do not grow on trees or bushes and are made by human beings. How exactly is the person defining “natural”?
My father said that anything a human could think up was “natural”. “Though that does not mean safe.” Think wingsuits and basejumping.
Digoxin and digitalis are used less than in the past, because there are many other medicines to choose from to control heart rate. However, they are still used because digoxin is one of the very few rate controlling medicines that does NOT lower blood pressure. Most of the others do lower blood pressure. When nothing else works or is tolerated, the cardiologist may sigh and say, ok, start digoxin. It is a tricky medicine because levels that get too high are toxic and the dose is different for each person and the dose must be lowered as kidney function changes with age. We still use it, though.
About one third of prescription medicines originate from a plant source like this, where the plant actually makes the active substance. Plants and animals and humans evolved together. We have deer all over town and they do not eat the foxglove. They love roses but stay away from foxglove.
I am seeing advertisements for a book to make your own medicines at home. I have not bought it. I would stay away from any recipe with foxglove: I want a lab to test to get the dose exactly right.
For Cee’s Flower of the Day. Heh, it turned into an essay of the day too. Wordy, wordy, wordy.
It isn’t that river otters are unusual here, but this one is present rolling in the grass in the middle of the day. Between the bank and the ferry dock, in Rotary Park. Hoorah for otters and the Rotary, both. Otterly delightful to watch.
Sol Duc loves the neighbor’s back steps. I have permission to walk her in their yard. Walking cats is quite different from walking a dog. It’s more following the cat around. Elwha is quite scared of being outside in the day, partly because we live on a busy street and there are all those NOISES. Sol Duc is braver, but tends to stay away from the roads in the daytime. Cats like edges and shadow, except when sunning.
When I walk them in the early dark, they are both much braver. Sol Duc has gone around the whole block. She is annoyed when I won’t let her go under a house or way into a yard where I do not have permission. And she has seen birds and deer and another cat and dogs and other humans! Whew!
Yesterday the downtown bank recorded a temperature of 87! And this is after six months of seeing the sun about once every two weeks, and temperatures mostly in the 40s and 50s.
The beaches have been EMPTY. The delightful Salish Sea gets to a high of 55 degrees, so anyone who swims is brave. But yesterday the beaches were FULL again! Tourists and locals, summer is here! The water temperature yesterday was 9 degrees C, which is 48 F. Cold for swimming.
I took this photograph yesterday on East Beach in glorious sun.
I left the house to hike at 5:30 am. I didn’t hear about Roe v Wade being overturned until later in the day. I am grieving and will fight for women’s right to determine their own health. Each sperm is alive and each egg too. Don’t tell me they should all be saved, because then we would all starve. Life doesn’t start at conception. I think that some men wanting to control women starts with conception. They certainly don’t want their sperm controlled.
In the photograph are great blue heron tracks. I saw at least three great blue herons. At least four eagles, sitting in the tops of trees along the cliffs enjoying the sun.
The beach changes daily. We go to North Beach and one day it is long stretches of sand and the next it is covered with rocks of all sizes. We have been hiking so regularly that it is really clear that the beach changes as much as human moods! Every tide is different.
Here are chalcedony nodules found yesterday. We still call them agates, but since we are getting fussier and want the clear ones, they are more correctly called chalcedony nodules.
The beach changes like US politics. The water rushes in like a new administration, removes small and large boulders and rushes out again. A new Supreme Court Judge, a new person in this appointed position or that, change, change, change, a new pattern. I am grieving about Roe v Wade, but contributing to the fight for women’s rights and for women’s health. I wish that as a country we were less dramatic and nicer and did not need to have an enemy to shout at all the time.
Maybe that change is coming, but slowly. We might learn from social media and from all sorts of lessons. I have some hope.
Meanwhile I’d rather be with the great blue herons and the eagles.
Tenderfoot reminds me of my sister and our family’s summer visits to Lake Matinenda. We lived in tents. My grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins were all in cabins.
We were always the last to head home. We usually mislaid our flipflops, towels, t-shirts and flashlights, so we head down the path in the dark. When I was little I have cuts every summer in the arch of my foot. I learn to walk in the dark on the path with the foot curled and lightly, so that if there is something sharp I can change weight to the other foot. If there are two sharps in a row, usually rocks, I get cut anyhow, but less often. I still love to take my shoes off on the paths there.
I would go this summer except for the oxygen. We did not bring in electricity. I do not quite feel up to acquiring a solar panel/battery combination that is adequate this year. It’s also the heavy lifting. We drink the lake water and bring it up in buckets. We do filter it, but carrying the buckets. It just does not seem like a brilliant idea alone with my lungs still challenged.
Anyhow, here is another soft footed and soft armed creature. This is taken at the Baltimore Aquarium a few years ago.
Discover and re-discover Mexico’s cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
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