Cooper’s Hawk & Docs

The studio is looking delicious. Yes the palette is totally boring but that’s what I want. I want to see the colours of my work against a neutral background.

I love the window I installed. It faces east so early morning sunlight will come into the studio and I’ll see it because I love working really early in the morning. All the other windows are on the north wall as they should be.

Darrell is going to seal the studio floor on Monday so nothing can go on the floor. But boy it’s looking good (see above). He’s building the shelves and counter today in his workshop and he’ll install them on Monday before he seals the floor. Then everything will be done and I can move in on Tuesday.

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I saw a Cooper’s Hawk trying to catch birds eating at my feeders yesterday. That was a first for me and I find it really exciting. It’s the second raptor I’ve seen here. The other was a Peregrine Falcon.

My Narcissus are emerging in the garden I made at the entrance to my yard. I’m so long removed from gardening I forgot how thrilling it is to have a hand in creating life. There are shoots coming up all over.

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I’ve arranged to go to Vancouver on Feb. 9^th to have dinner with my good friends John and Bunny. I’m going to stay at their place that night and the next morning Dwight will come with a truck, we’ll load up my ladies from J&B’s basement and bring them home.

And a big plus: Dwight might stay the night on Saturday. That really thrills me; I love my brother and every minute I spend with him.

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I thought Ethel might have worms. She was so thin and yet she was hungry all the time. Every time I go into the kitchen, she comes wanting to eat whatever I’m preparing. Well now I can see she’s heavier. In fact she’s considerably heavier and I am thrilled. She just doesn’t like the dry food I give to her and Fred.

And I haven’t heard Fred’s cough for several days. He came into my life with it; it’s cough really hard every time he drank but I think he’s growing out of it.

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I watched a documentary about the opioid crisis. Two nice “normal” people I know are hooked on opioid medication and this doc focused on that aspect of the epidemic — its insurgence into every strata of society.

I never understood how Scott and Loren came to be so powerfully addicted to Oxycontin but now I do. There’s one line in the film that really hit hard; an articulate mother of a boy who committed suicide due to his addiction says: “Every opioid addiction story starts with an injury.” The injured go to doctors who prescribe an opioid drug.

The documentary lays blame on we who demand pain relief and the pharmacy corporations who make and market the pills. They reveal how sweet these drugs are to a pharmaceutical company because each prescription creates a life-long consumer.

The advocate mother makes another powerful statement. She says, when asked why society is not stopping the epidemic: “Everyone who’s not yet been touched by this epidemic thinks it won’t happen to them but they are only one injury away from addiction.”

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I also watched a super interesting doc about allergies and asthma. (I have asthma.)

A meta study of research into immune system intolerance (ISI) involving several communities around the world and done over several decades has revealed that children raised on farms are 60% less likely to develop ISI and Amish children, raised in an environment where centuries old farming traditions are maintained, are another 60% less likely than American farm children to develop ISI.

Scientists believe our overly sterile lifestyle is responsible for the exponential rise in ISI diseases including MS. They believe it’s the exposure to bacteria that keep farm children from developing ISI diseases such as allergies, asthma, eczema and MS.

AIDS resistant Africans have been studies extensively and they, too, become resistant due to the presence of bacteria to which the rest of the world is not exposed.

One startling thing in the film is a group of research scientists who have purposefully ingested between ten and twenty-five hookworms. Several patients with ISI diseases whose symptoms were much milder than most everyone else with the same disease were found to be hosts of hookworms. Voluntary ingestion of a limited number of hookworms has led to a significant decrease of symptoms and dramatically improved lifestyle for many ISI sufferers.