2014: A year of changes.

I haven’t made a post for a long time, and I apologize. This year has been really tumultuous. I mean, at the beginning of the year I was so excited to get to participate in OddMall. It’s hard to believe this is still the same year. God is good, but I sure can’t predict what He will allow into my life next! My father was diagnosed with two different cancers this year. Both are under control now (and the thyroid is gone), and now I know a lot of good low-iodine recipes!  I am the only one left in my immediate family with a thyroid, weird. This is a great site for recipes: Thyca.org

I have been pretty frustrated with the contradictory lists of foods that are allowed/disallowed when you are on a low iodine diet (LID). Some say “nothing in cans” (canning machinery is washed with iodine to disinfect it) some say “no beans” some say “no dairy including butter” some say “butter is ok, just not salted butter” some say “all beans are ok except these specific beans..” As a family we just did the best we could and mostly conformed to “no milk/dairy, no seaweed (carrageenan, algin, agar, nori, etc.), no seafood, no sea-salt, no salt-added-by-companies-when-you-don’t-know-what-kind-it-is (so basically “no prepared foods”), no skin on your potatoes (that one is weird, but it was very consistent, so I had to believe them), no soy (but soy oil is sort of ok.. sometimes).” We found hemp milk was allowed, if not a fantastic flavor. Most of the other ones were either soy based or had seaweed in them. It wasn’t really that bad a diet, which is good, since we were on it for about a month. Lots of fresh/cooked/roasted vegetables and meat, and even pasta was ok – you can find salt-free ketchup, salt-free tomato paste, salt-free potato chips, salt-free peanut-butter. It’s not a perfect diet, but it’s not “two weeks of oatmeal”.

I’m never sure whether this should be a “my personal stuff” blog or a “only come here for art updates” blog. Either way 1) I don’t update it enough and 2) I thought some of this information could genuinely be useful.

My day job has been strange too. It hasn’t gone the direction I wanted, so now I am actively teaching myself web development skills. I think I will make that its own post, listing all the fantastic resources I have found to help me learn. I mean, I don’t want to search for it and hit this article every time.

God is faithful, and life is unexpected.

Such a Deviant

Two reasons why I have not blogged lately, one of which is a decent excuse.
First, I have not blogged lately because when I had that swell idea to write an Artisan story to go along with jewelry, well, writing is HARD WORK.

Second, I had a deviated septum (that’s the bone in your nose) and had surgery for it about a week-and-a-couple-of-days-ago. It was “pretty miserable” (but no one wants to hear how gross nose surgery is so I won’t go into details. Suffice to say I survived it, and if you also need this fairly routine surgery, you also will survive it.) but now I am doing better and should continue to see improvement over the next several weeks. Someone told me she would rather give birth to twins than have that packing in her nose. I don’t think it was THAT bad, but it did make me feel so sure that I was unable to breathe, that I went to the ER – where they explained to me that no, I was breathing fine, and I was in fact hyperventilating.

Thirdly – bonus reason – I have been trying to clean out and “destash” a lot of craft supplies (and even, gasp, books) that I will likely never use (check it out – some are up for grabs at http://glimmerville.etsy.com).

I will post more art/craft/jewelry, but I don’t guarantee a story like I wish I could. It still seems like it would be a good writing exercise for me, but it is kind of onerous to say “post an actual story with each piece of art, or else” – I’ll do what I can.