Visiting

I decided to visit my daughter Mary and her family today.  I had a list of other things to do but I needed to give her money for insurance on my car and I hadn't seen her youngest, Tevita for several months.  As I drove up to her place I thought of how much I would enjoy some well prepared shrimp.  When I got to her house she was in the process of preparing dinner for her husband and her father.   She was making curried shrimp for her husband and teriyaki shrimp for her father.  I chose to have teriyaki shrimp and she gently braised large shrimp with broccoli.  It was delicious  We had several hours of simple visiting and I gave her the insurance money.  Visiting now and then is very nice.

Art

Today I picked up two paintings from an art exhibit at the Covey Center.  I am working on a painting of my grandson James Hancock.  I went to a meeting of an art group I belong to this evening.  A museum curator critiqued art of those who brought their paintings.  I was there to act in my capacity of membership chairman and treasurer.  I continue in the group for two reasons.  I enjoy having a motivation for continuing as an artist which I feel helps me stay mentally alert, or more than I would be if I didn't exercise my mind.  At the moment I am more interested in completing my plans for my chickens.  There are many problems to be dealt with because I tend to make things difficult.  The other reason I continue is because it is a service to others.  Any organization requires a few people who are willing to offer others their time and effort.  It feels good to see our organization attract artists.

Pink Cake

I had an ambition to complete the coop today to the point the chickens could inhabit their new home.  I made a fair amount of progress, including refurbishing the door that had been moldering in the weeds for several years.  I cleaned the front of dirt and mold, let it dry, then painted it hunter green to coordinate with the slide tower which has a dark green slide and closures made of hunter green shutters.  I was surprised at how well it turned out.  I cut u-shaped edges from pvc fence boards and mounted them around the edge of the door.  I might have accomplished my goal of moving the chickens, but pink cake was more important.  Diana had her eleventh birthday today.  She had purchased a strawberry cake mix and strawberry flavored frosting.  I asked if she would like to come to my house since I have the special pans and decorating tubes that allow for something fancy.  It was a cooperative effort.   When shopping this morning I purchased a can of cream cheese frosting.  We ended up using most of both cans of frosting.  The two layer cake had cream cheese frosting in the middle and was given a ruffled appearance with pink up the sides and over the edge of the top.  The top was covered with white and three pink roses along with yellow centers and green leaves were in the center of the cake.  It was very pretty.  I enjoy my grandchildren and which I had more to do with all of them.  In the afternoon Ralph did a great job of clearing out the wood that has been stored under the slide tower for several years.

Sunday

Sunday is a deliberate break in routine.  Because of various religious practices I try to stay free of most of my regular projects and simplify my activities.  I go to Church and include more study of religious information than on other days.  Since adopting a daily routine and practicing it for several months I finally realized that I should also get up early on Sunday, although I accepted this reluctantly.  Church begins at 10:30 AM and my clock is currently set for 6:30 AM.  This morning I was pretty much on schedule although I delayed showering and dressing for a few hours in order to avoid messing up my Sunday clothing.  I listened to the talk featured in the Relief Society lesson and listened to part of the Tabernacle Choir Memorial Day program in addition to my regular listening to the Book of Mormon.  I hope to continue getting up at the regular time on Sunday although it is a powerful temptation to sleep longer.

Finishing (almost)

I made a lot of progress on my chicken coop today.  The door can be fixed by notching the edges for the hinges and removing a couple of channels from the plastic lining on the floor.  I need to make a chicken ladder then secure the temporary fence.  The latter can easily be done with lattice I have on hand.  I foresee that I could have the coop ready for a transfer of the flock by Monday afternoon.  Of course a lot of that depends on the weather.  Today was mostly clear and the greatest hindrance to me was the need to rest now and then.

Another Damp Day

Yesterday one of my chickens managed to get out of the screened party enclosure and I was able to head her off and catch her then located the place of egress and fixed it.  I have been stymied in my progress on the chicken coop but today I took significant measurements and I believe things will get back on course.  I worked with the coop design and also watched a significant amount of youtube videos.  I came across mention of 'snake juice' and the 'snake diet' but it turns out that the mix of salt, vitamin C, lemon powder and my intake of calcium, potassium and magnesium pills adds up to pretty much the same thing.  There is a sort of mania for fasting in the diet community which is coming from either end. Both carnivores and vegans seem to be entranced with the idea of fasting for relatively long periods, both 'dry' fasts of several days and water fasts of up to 40 days.  It seems the most obvious damage to the body is done through socalled 'fruitarian' diets which are actually more like mainlining fructose.  The Vegans seem to be mainly weedy and androgenous.  The carnivores seem to be building better muscle.  I am mostly doing intermittent fasting which means I eat nothing for about 16 to 20 hours a day and concentrate my eating in a window of about 8 to 4 hours.  It helps to learn new things about what I am doing.  There are some uses for damp days.

Cream

I have found a source of very rich cream.  I was aware this kind of cream was available from the overstock supply shared with my daughter, which she in turn shared with me.  That was in late 2019 when I was still a happy omnivore.  I made the most delicious caramel with crispy cereal and cashews.  I made a lot of it since I had a lot of cream.  The cream was so thick from sitting around for a while that it had a consistency more like pudding than liquid.  Earlier this year I began to toy with changing my way of eating.  At first my goal was merely to get rid of floaters in my eyes, but then I found information that I could possibly delay or even prevent the onset of dementia, Alzheimer's Disease or even heart disease if I returned to the ketogenic diet that helped me so much when I first came to Utah more than 19 years ago.  At that time I lost 60 pounds which I more or less kept off for the following ten years.  I messed around with other diets, including a low glycemic diet which in addition to adaption a low meat and dairy diet didn't have much effect.  The low meat and dairy diet along with relaxing my control of sugar and other carbohydrate intake may have hurried the onset of my colon cancer.  At any rate, I am now benefiting in at least one measurable way from ketogenic eating, which fortunately includes lovely, heavy cream, having lost about 35 pounds.  The cream has twice as much butterfat as other 'heavy' creams and comes in pot-like small bottles which require a deposit of 2 dollars.  I just keep returning the bottles for the deposit.

Washers Dryers and other conveniences

I have a small laundry area with the dryer stacked over the dryer.  They are in a niche I recovered from bathroom space when I remodeled my bathroom several years ago.  They are only a couple of steps from the plastic bins, one for white clothes the other for dark clothes, that fit under the bathroom counter by design.  This makes it very easy to do laundry in presorted batches.  My son Richard is the only other person who does laundry in my washer and dryer, aside from occasional use by my grandson during football season.  Now and then I have needed to wash clothing by hand and I have figured out a good way to wash silk and wool garments using my shower wand, but most of the time I am satisfied with the arrangement provided by my compact laundry area.  Now that I use pods the process is even easier and less messy.

Learning

I am grateful for the opportunity to go to youtube and follow various subjects.  My most frequent views lately have been about chicken coops and ketogenic diets and their benefits.  A video I watched today addressed the problem of overcoming previous programming about food.  I wasn't particularly attracted to the fruit I saw at Sprouts or Walmart, but in anticipation of the visits to those stores I played over how delicious it would taste to eat grapes.  I now don't recall seeing any grapes although they played a large role in my fantasies.  I bought heavy cream, pork rinds, lettuce and a baked chicken but by the time I had visited Lucinda I was outside the window of consumption that I practice and I will have to be content with lettuce wrapped chicken for breakfast in the morning.  I have gained some useful insights about chicken coops as I viewed various videos.  I find that installing an automatic door on my coop holds no interest for me.  I am reminded of a demonstration of effective ways of feeding fish.  It turned out that having a man on the edge of the tank throwing in food was the most economical way to operate.  When the fish began to stop rising to feed he stopped feeding.  It wasn't a matter of time spent but of sensitivity to the behavior of the fish, a technological feat that remains outside the range of practicality.  Visiting egg layers twice a day is just a matter of due diligence. 

Order

Today I was able to make some progress on my chicken coop and when I quit working for the evening I cleaned up the trash I had generated and put my tools where they are protected from the weather.  I find I am grateful to be able to restore order.

So Much

As I reviewed the week gone by I can be grateful for so much.  I am grateful for the atonement of my Savior and the restoration of the Gospel.  I have a large and loving family who have helped me in so many ways.  I have relative financial security.  I have my health and know how to become more healthy.  I have the opportunity to make progress and achieve new goals. 

Strength and KIndness

Today I woke up to another day of rain with a forecast that seemed to indicate it would be drizzling all day.  I resolved to do what I could under cover.  I went out and brought up the plastic bins I intend to convert to nesting boxes, worked on my picture of James and Patricia and planned what I would need in terms of plywood.  I had an appointment to meet with Christine Peters for ministering report with Sister Perry and I arranged to pick up Adam and Calvin and go to Home Depot afterward.  A mixup in the plywood pricing involved the man who had cut the plywood who offered a steep discount because of the confusion.  I got the plywood panel I needed for under 15 dollars.  Earlier in the day I had forestalled disaster by transferring funds from my emergency account into the checking account.  I stopped by Wendy's and got shakes and sandwiches for my helpers and stopped by Smith's to take advantage of a sale on butter as well as getting some pork rinds and some rubbing alcohol for my painting.  In the afternoon the girls came up and cleaned and worked on stained glass and I stabilized the coop platform and my three grandsons who are weightlifters lifted the coop onto the platform.  So a lot more was accomplished than I had anticipated. 

Timely Intervention.

It has rained almost continually the past 24 hours.  This afternoon I decided to go into my backyard and I found the chicken tent had begun to collapse.  I was able to stabilize it and later removed the plastic roof.  Calvin and Adam helped me corral three chickens who escaped.  I'm grateful I checked in time.

Alignment

I have been obsession about my chicken coop and chicken run.  Today we made a great deal of progress, putting in three posts in the morning when Calvin mixed the concrete and then, in the evening when I realized that it was important to have the entire set of posts set up and curing for the next few days, I had Ralph and Adam come over to help because Calvin was at the library. Much to my surprise and gratification, Adam was able to mix the concrete and we set three more posts, completing the setting of posts with the one remaining bag of concrete.  The most difficult aspect aside from mixing the concrete was aligning the various posts and avoiding a trapezoidal affect.  Fortunately the diagonals were reasonably congruent.

Meg

Meg has an inquiring mind and good intelligence.  Unlike her brothers and sisters who gave the statement of assets mailed out by her father's conservator a brief and rather cursory glance, she detected at least incompetence and possibly malfeasance in his account.  She got on it and wrote a complaint to the court.  She was the first to detect his decline and involvement in possibly dangerous and at least expensive scams.  He certainly won't thank her for 'interfering' but he is blessed to have such a daughter.

Celery

Celery has become my substitute for crackers.  I fill it with cream cheese or liverwurst.  I chew on it in the evening as a sort of crunchy form of water.  The mild but green taste accents cheese and other fillings.  I need to go ahead and look up if my assumption of it's relative lack of nutrition is as low as I assume.

Intelligence and Opinion

My children are all quite intelligent to some degree.  Most of them are fairly successful in their main focus in life.  I have one son who is brilliant but he is a man of set opinion.  When he has satisfied himself about the truth of a proposition he is very unlikely to change his mind.  On some subjects like the reality of God I find this very reassuring.  Eternal truth should not be a matter of casual affiliation, but there are some things that he doesn't have the best information about.  He will become very upset if his premises on these things are questioned.  I am confident that on particular matters his information is unfounded or outdated.  I need to realize that argument will do no good.  I have seen him change his mind on some matters when presented with more current and accurate information.  I am not the person likely to convince him in certain matters.  At least our deepest and most important beliefs are congruent.

Party Tent

My chickens now live in a party tent.  It came yesterday which surprised me.  It was packed into boxes one very heavy, one light.  I engaged the six oldest Hancock children to put it up.  It was a lovely day and they seem to enjoy the process which was rather like putting up a really big puzzle.  One of the most difficult aspects was getting the chickens into the tent.  I believe we have secured everything they won't wander or fly away.

Innovation

I spent the day making small hangers larger.  It was a rather clever innovation.  I used some aluminum hangers formed from u-shaped sections that I found a way to snap onto the smaller hanger.  Then I wrapped the joint with a patch of copper foil and covered the patch with solder.  It took all day so it could be considered a waste of time, but it was fun to complete a successful innovation.

Efficient Tools

I try to keep my car clean.  I employ one of my grandsons to keep it from getting dusty and spotted.  It is a black car and shows every dried raindrop.  Recently I used the back of my car to transport soirme plastic waste to the trash bins and later I used it to bring home a bag of top soil to use for spring planting.  The carpet in the rear of my car was a mess that I didn't think my grandson would easily conquer.  First I used a little hand vacuum which hardly touched the problem.  I cleaned out the filter which helped slightly.  Next I tried to use a tape roll made for removing lint from clothing with more success, but it was still quite messy.  At last I hauled out my vacuum and used it in carpet mode.  It virtually eliminated the problem. 

Getting up in the morning

I didn't set my alarm and I slept in.  Still, it was finally time to get up and I went ahead and did what I have been doing for several months, following a plan.  Yesterday I had an appointment to take my grandson to seminary and a plan to go to the temple afterward.  I prayed, made my bed but didn't do my exercises or listen to my scripture for the day because when I woke up it was ten minutes before I was due to leave the house.  I skipped breakfast and showered and dressed in appropriate clothing for the temple.  I moved fast enough to meet my grandson in time. I parked at the far end of the parking lot and took the grand staircase to the chapel in order to make up for the missed exercise and I read the scripture assigned for that morning once I was seated in the chapel.   I'm grateful for my morning routine even when I am forced to bend it to meet my circumstances.

Mentors

I enjoy finding new information on youtube.  In the past few days I have revisited Ben Bikman's presentation on the importance of taming my craving for sweets.  Today I indulged myself by purchasing crab and eating a good portion with garlic butter.  Tomorrow I plan to bake some mushrooms.  I became attracted to keto eating through the influence of another mentor, Jordan B. Peterson.  I learned that his wife is very ill and have been praying for her.

Done

Except for a small detail of some plastic on one side of the gate my gated fence project is done just in time for me to move on to renovating the coop.  Overnight I discovered roll away nesting boxes which should much improve the experience of keeping hens.

Hair Product

Today is Hannah's 16th birthday.  Last year on her fifteenth birthday she was preparing to go to a dance dressed as a flapper.  When I got to her house I saw that although her costume was in order, her shoes were a problem.  I took her shopping at The Rack which was only minutes away and we found some appropriate shoes,  fortunately they were also on a very deep discount.  As I recall they were only a few cents or dollars.  She liked them well enough and I felt satisfied that I had taken care of her birthday gift.  Hannah is blunt and she told me the shoes were a failure.  She danced and danced and the shoes grew painful.  In order to avoid another blunder with a gift that didn't suit her I called her aunt about the process she has been using lately to tame her thick, curly hair.  I was given several hints.  Fortunately the product was bogo.  I bought the product plus the free tube and added large hair clips.  When I presented them to her today she really liked them. 

Getting Organized

My backyard is an active area.  I have been building a section of gated fence for the front of my chicken run and today I ordered vinyl siding to put on the outside of the coop I made several years ago when I first had to face winter with chickens.  I had Calvin and Adam bring the coop to the south side of the yard where it will be close to the slide tower.  I had an idea of putting lattice panels up around the coop but now that I plan to have a layer section protruding from one side it seems even more impractical than it had seemed before.  I have quite a bit of lattice that is in narrow shapes but it is possible I will be able to integrate it in the surrounds of the run beyond what I've done so far.  Meanwhile the chickens are inhabiting a temporary run that consists of my swing pavilion which Richard and I put up nineteen years ago for Eliza's wedding reception in my backyard.  There were no buildings in my backyard when I moved here but there will be four or five by the time I put up what I am calling my 'bug out' shed. 

Fences and gates

My computer has a nasty habit of eating my lengthy compositions.  I just wrote at length about my history with making white vinyl trellis items, particularly a wedding arch and several fences.  My computer ate it.  I am not going to try and recapitulate.

Living for the Best Result

I bought a package of Haagen Daz bars again today and consumed them while driving through the foothills above my house in the ritzy neighborhood.  I had made a list of foods that I enjoy.  All but one of them are permissible under the eating plan I have adopted of low carb semi carnivore eating with intermittent fasting.  I fasted breakfast because I got up late and today was the day I weigh in each week.  I had lost a couple of pounds since last week, which was likely due in part at least to fasting breakfast.  For lunch I had burgers cooked with onions and mushrooms with Swiss cheese melted on top.  It was delicious but I was soon sated and left most of one of the two burgers for Richard to eat.  Eating the Haagen Daz bars was counter to my desire to live for the best result.  It was a childish impulse.  I have been able to establish a number of beneficial habits during the past nine months since July of 2018.  First came meaningful actions to organize my home and maintain it.  Eventually I addressed other issues.  For the past two and a half months I have been  following a stringent diet that has resulted in the loss of more than 27 pounds.  Midway through my effort and exercising I injured my hip, possibly a crack in the bone.  I didn't seek medical treatment but over a period of several weeks I used supported motion as a means to heal.  It has been successful. 
One of the primary reasons I began my diet was to change my prognosis of the possibility of mental deterioration in the form of dementia or Alzheimer's Disease.  My reading and viewing has convinced me that continuing to eat a standard American diet would almost guarantee eventual mental and physical deterioration because of insulin resistance.  Giving in to the impulse to indulge in a favorite ice cream treat was folly.

Challenges

My hip has healed.  Most of the time I forget which leg was affected.  I have begun exercising in the morning again and on Tuesday I climbed the grand stair case at the Provo City Center Temple after avoiding it for the past two months.  I also chose to come down the staircase.  I decided to go to the temple an hour later than my usual time in order to use the south ordinance room and see the lovely murals.  I made good progress on my fence and gate project with the help of Adam and Calvin.  I helped Ralph put the finishing edge on his glass project.  Challenges continue but often they are the basis of blessings.