Bergental Yule pics, Roz update

It occurred to me that I hadn't posted an update on Roselynde lately. As of this past Thursday she now weighs 8 lbs.! And then on Sunday she gave us another pleasant surprise, when she went over to Peredur's bowl and ate some of his _dry_ food. She has since eaten kibble yesterday and today as well, so it would appear her gums and teeth are finally feeling good enough to take on that challenge. Also yesterday, she went into kitty frenzies, which we haven't seen in quite some time. Also called kitty calesthenics, because she runs up the stairs, dashes into one room or another, then dashes down again -- repeating a few times. So, we think now it might be safe to try giving her antibiotics again, now that she's pretty much back to normal.

Here are some pics from Bergental Yule, thanks to Halfdan and etainmbw:
( see pics )

Sundry items of possible interest

P is amused that I ordered flax to make my own fiber. I think it would be nice to have some flax that is actually long to work with -- most of the flax commercially available is tow (short bits, rather than 2-3 feet long). I should like to have rather a lot of it. I ordered the 100 gram package. I wonder how much flax we'll get? You can get just a small packet of seeds - 100 seeds. But for fiber flax you need 80-140 seeds per square foot. One square foot isn't very much, altho' I suppose it would like very cute :P

I was reading more about beets last night and now I'm not sure if I should get red or white. White beetroot was apparently eaten in the Middle Ages (no, I don't remember where I read it, but I believe at least one discussion was from the Florilegium). Red beetroots were generally used for medicinal purposes, with the greens being eaten as a regular food substance. Although someone (Pliny I think?) also recommended using the leaves as bindings on cuts and such. Turns out Beet leaves have allantoin in them, among other things. Allantoin promotes growth, so it makes sense that it could help a cut mend more quickly. Best used externally, is my understanding. Immature Comfrey leaves also have very high levels of allantoin, which taken internally on a regular basis is purported to promote growth of cancerous tissues. Kind of confusing, since the article on beets talked about eating the leaves and beet juice as cancer preventatives - of course, beets have lots of other things in them, in particular the red beet, so the nutritive and chemical balance is completely different from Comfrey. There's a bunch of anti-oxidants in red beets. I don't know if white ones have them too.

Oh, and I mentioned about that supposedly the red beetroot was only used for medicinal purposes in Roman - Renaissance times.... but info has been uncovered about it being used as an aphrodisiac. There are beets portrayed in some of Pompeii's murals in the rooms that depict various more adult activities. There've been plenty of other plants used as aphrodisiacs, and at least with beetroot juice you'd get a bunch of vitamins and sugar, so it probably made people feel energetic and frisky for longer. According to the report on the site, they're looking at some of the depictions of people drinking 'red wine' to see if maybe they need to be reinterpreted as red beetroot juice.

You can read all about it ( here )

And another casual reference to the aphrodisiac info ( here )

My present from fitzw arrived today! Pewter acorn and wavy-armed star buttons!! And since asking for them I've learned more about 14th c. clothing, so now I know that the acorns will be on the fitted gothic underdress and the stars will be on the overdress. They're very pretty and shiny. P will have to get some acorn buttons too. And maybe fitzw would like some for his outfit :)

fitzw is still not feeling well. He went down to CT to pick up Z from his girlfriend S and her parents' house. 4+ hours round trip, because of bad traffic. They ended up coming back here via Great Barrington to get around the traffic. It took quite a bit out of him, poor thing, so we ended up cancelling practice when it became obvious to everyone that he wasn't going to recover quickly from the drive. We gave him various pills, tea, hot water with lemon, etc., then put him to bed with the big sheep rug on top. He's feeling better now, and even had a bit of something to eat around 10pm.

Yesterday (I think), I was reading about passive cooling systems. Pretty neat stuff. Don't know if we can apply any of it to the current residence, but I printed out a copy of the information for future use. I'm working on assembling different sorts of useful information that I'm going to put into binders. I'm even going to label them!

Tomorrow morning I have a chiropractic appt. and have to open a bank account. Then off to Webs since that's in the same town. Then home again so we can make sure fitzw gets some rest. Then later, assuming all is well, we shall help the economy by using our gift cards. Somewhere in there I might get to do some artwork. And I have another client coming over too. So, a busy day.