Face Creams

Rosemary Gladstar

I like to make face cream for my family and me.  I usually make 1 - 2 quarts of rose hip infused oils to make my creams with per season.  After keeping enough for myself and mailing tubs to my family, I sell whatever is left at the farmer's markets.  

There are a tremendous amount of websites about making your own cream and it's a fun thing to do.  I use Rosemary Gladstar's base recipe from her book Herbal Recipes and have tested my recipes on willing family members for 3 years.  My Aunt Cynthi commissioned my first creams and was a chief tester and so was my Mom and grandmother.  My brother Jared and Pam bought me Rosemary's book.  So it was a family collaboration.

Part II on sleep disorders and exhaustion

I have lived on the lip

Of insanity, wanting to know reasons,

Knocking on a door.  It opens.

I've been knocking from the inside! ~ 

Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

(As usual, I have to apologize for blogger.com's horrible formatting and at times lack of  or too much space between bullet points..  It is completely random.  There's not a thing I can do about it but switch to another blog format, which I'm working on.)

After writing this post, something seemed wrong or missing; I didn't feel comfortable posting it.  I bought two used books on sleep paralysis to see if there was something obvious I missed and to see what others have found that helped.  In late 2000 when I started looking for solutions, I couldn't find one book specifically about sleep paralysis (SP) or exhaustion that helped.  Lots of other books put together did help (a list at the end), though they were on topics from physics to mindfulness. From those books and experimenting, I found things that worked for me, the things I'm writing about here.  I'm also including things I have found more recently that I also think will help.  I'm not a professional healer and some of my terminology is just a stab at the best description.

Are you tired or just exhausted?

Jeff Hughes - Exhausted

Addressing exhaustion is the first step to recovery in many diseases. There is a difference between tired and exhausted. Tired is when the body has had a long day, the mind and muscles have been well used and need a state of shut down for repair. Tired is a natural state and a useful one. 

Exhausted is when you are completely used up, completely drained of all energy and empty. I think far too many people operate in the red zone of exhaustion and have to use crutches to get through the day. Crutches that later keep them from restful sleep and tissue repair and the vicious cycle of disease can set in. 

Exhausted from www..joeygates.deviantart.com

You cannot take on big life changing challenges when exhausted. You can’t just start eating well and exercising when you are exhausted even though those things are crucial to getting well. Changing life-long poor diet habits and learning new ways to eat and cook aren’t possible if you can’t even get up to go to work or are barely able to heat up a frozen diner for the kids. When you walk hunched over from just the weight of your head, changing your diet can seem as challenging as climbing Mount Everest. 

Addressing exhaustion is the first step and the best way is to increase the chance of sleep. I’ve had periods of my life that I was exhausted in every cell of my body; physically and mentally. I remember not being able to bend over to wrap up the vacuum cleaner cord. I had to pay the neighbor kids to come clean the litter boxes because I could do almost nothing where I had to bend down. Getting back up was too difficult. I breathed shallowly, nothing was interesting and everything was a bother. 

VELASQUEZ Divine Drudgery

 Days when I could go to work were a complete chore and then coming home to the never ending tasks of daily life was just too much. Personal space for self- improvement was a laughable concept. The job, housework, bills, caring for my sick husband, the yard, the animals, cooking and cleaning were all a daily series of drudgery that I tackled with the enthusiasm of walking the plank; if I tackled them at all. 

Drudgery by Edward Chambre Hardman

 If you think people look at you as if you are lazy or if you think that yourself, you might just be exhausted. If all you want to do is sleep, yes you may be depressed, but you may be depressed because you are exhausted in the literal definition of the word – to be empty. Empty of what the body needs to get through the day, what the mind needs to be able to prioritize tasks. If you are missing a craving for life and the need to create, if you look around your house and your life and all you feel is overwhelmed, if the bed is calling you like a high powered magnet at all times of the day, then you might be exhausted.

Fuseli The Nightmare, 1781.  The man on her chest is one way some people see a common character called Bakhtak (there are many names) and he is sometimes seen with the old hag.

During many periods of my life I’ve felt this way, but 13 years ago an illness so horrible finally touched me to the core and uncovered all my failings, all my weaknesses and opened me wide open to clearly see what I had become. I believe they were all related to being “empty” of what I needed to be a human being. Though they look like separate diseases, I think they were all just symptoms of one. 

Heinrich Fuseli - Nightmare. 

I suffered from chronic sleep paralysis (or the old hag syndrome), RLS (restless leg syndrome), jaw clenching so bad that all my molars need repair & only ¾ are so far done, A-typical cataplexy which made it hard to walk at times, A-typical narcolepsy which required hospitalization, legs so heavy they were hard to move, joint pain, lowered immune system, horrible allergies, skin problems, liver problems, gall-bladder attacks, lingering female problems for 11 years that surgery couldn’t correct, migraines, depression, chronic back pain so bad I felt if someone would break my shoulder blade there would be relief, cysts migrating from under the skin near lymph glands that were wrapped in scar tissue began protruding from my neck and had attached to my spine, constant colds, and the list could go on and on. 

The Old Hag, commonly seen in sleep paralysis. She is sometimes with a helper.

One name for the Old Hag helper is Bakhtak, sometimes seen and sometimes not.

But mostly what I remember is being exhausted all the time and incapable of living a normal daily life. Much of the time when I could get up was spent in the Dr’s office or at work which drained what few sparks I could find for the day. 

soda bubbles by Pink Sherbet Photography

 If you take the lid off of a bottle of soda, eventually all the little fizzy bubbles will disappear and all you have left is lifeless colored sugar water. I felt like that flat soda, dense and dark, without appeal, thick and unable to move without any sparkles. Then one day I realized I wasn’t the soda, I was the fizz, the energy that had escaped. I had to find one fizzy bubble at a time to re-build myself into something I wanted to be. As I’ve told this part of the story many times, hands reached out to help me and I started to get well. One day I’ll tell the stories in whole as I’ve never done, but that day isn’t today. 

I’m not going to outline what sleep paralysis is or any of the other problems I had. That would take a book.  If you have the problem, you know what it is and if you don’t – then it doesn’t really matter. Though I hope anyone with exhaustion will receive some help from these tips. 

 There were specific steps I took that helped me fill back up and some steps recommended by experts in the sleep field that did nothing but harm. I’ve tried several times over the years to reach out to people with severe sleep disorders and the subsequent illnesses that come with it, but I’ve almost always shared too much. I further overwhelmed them by telling them everything I did. I got well, however it was one little baby step at a time, one course correction at a time. A 6 page outline step by step of what to do is just one more overwhelming task. 

I’m going to do a series of posts outlining the steps that worked for me to get well. I’ve been told by an interviewer from the BBC that tracked me down, that I’m the only person he could find that was cured from narcolepsy and sleep paralysis naturally. I don’t know if that is true or not, but if it is, I certainly have an obligation to try to help others. I tried helping by joining sleep forums, but they were so unhealthy for me I had to leave. Too much focus on the problem, too many reminders of the nightmares, not enough conversation about healing. The biggest thing to realize is that it takes time. 

Some of the steps seem unnecessary and maybe even silly. If I’m listing them here though, they were important to me. This may not work for everyone and I’m certainly not a Dr. So I’m not making any health claims or prescribing a course of action. 

Image - National Institutes of Health

 Imagine changing your whole body one cell at a time, one decision at a time; it’s not going to happen overnight, but hopefully for you it will happen. In my next post I’ll go over steps I took to begin getting healthy, but first a few beginning tips for those with sleep paralysis that can be done when starting out from a point of exhaustion. 

Some of these tips will help anyone with sleep problems. You don’t always know when you have a sleep problem however, but you do always know when you are exhausted. After one test I took at the hospital, I remember the next day how good I felt. I had slept that night and apologized to the tech when he came in that I was sorry they weren’t able to track my sleep problem that night. I assured him normally I don’t sleep. He told me I woke up 60 times during the night and never hit the target REM stage sleep. So just because you think you are sleeping, it doesn’t mean you are getting enough deep restful sleep. 

 

These are NOT necessarily things I do now, but they were critical when I was trying to stop the illness. Now that I’m healthy and sleep restfully, I don’t need to do much of this. So these aren’t all long term things. 

•  Until I felt confident that the sleep paralysis was gone for good, I only slept on my left side with bent knees. This trick took a long time to discover and I wish I had known about it right away. Sleeping on your back greatly increases the chance that you will have a paralysis. Sleeping on your right side increases indigestion which can lead to nightmares. Putting a pillow behind your shoulder blade can help decrease the chance that you’ll roll on to your back in the night.   

• If you have a cooperative partner, explain to them different signs that might indicate you are in distress. All they need to do is touch you to break the spell of a paralysis. 

• One of the signs is a quiet breathy H sound. It’s from trying to scream help, but in a paralysis you can’t speak. Sometimes you can’t even get the H sound out.  
• If they see you in bed with your eyes open and you don’t respond to them, they need to touch you to pull you out of it. 
• If you sleep in a queen or king sized bed with a partner, it helps to replace the top sheets and comforter with smaller individual ones. We removed the king sized top sheet and comforter and replaced it with two twin sized sheets and comforters for each of us. When you actually do fall asleep, you want to minimize the risk that they will wake you by pulling the sheet across your body. 

•  Sometimes you can train yourself to move your index finger of your writing hand. When I discovered this, I started sleeping with a stuffed animal. Practice every night when you get into position looking at your finger and moving it to touch the animal. I’d keep it in my right hand until I fell asleep so it would be close. When a paralysis would start, sometimes I could focus on my index finger and get it to move enough so that I could touch the stuffed animal and come out of it. I also looked like a loon carrying it to work, but sometimes I had to sleep under my desk or in a co-workers van during the day when I couldn’t go on and was too tired to drive. I certainly didn’t want to have a paralysis at work.  

 

• Start developing a good environment for sleep. No lights in the room what so ever. No little red LED lights on a VCR, no night light, no light coming in through the window. Put cardboard in your window if you have no other way of blocking every ray of artificial light. If you must have an alarm clock in the bedroom, I don’t recommend it, cover it thickly by folding a towel several times over. Then face it away from you. Do NOT look at the time if you wake in the middle of the night. Much of training yourself to sleep properly again requires reducing as much stress as possible. Seeing that it’s 3 am, for me, was too stressful because I knew the odds of falling back asleep were slim.  The stress of knowing that could actually keep me from falling back to sleep. No music, minimize all noise. Make sure the path to the bathroom is the same as the bedroom, no lights, no sound. Blind people are able to use the bathroom without light, so that’s just something you need to learn to do. 

• Pick a certain time every night that would be optimal for bed and stick to it. Starting the habit of a strict nightly routine will help train your body that it’s time to sleep. 

• An hour before bedtime is when you start the process of rocking yourself to sleep and gently carrying yourself to bed. I’ll go over the steps of how to do that in my next post, but preliminarily know that you need to start winding down an hour before bed. NO exercise, no TV, no music, no bright lights. If you can, dim the lights or turn them all off and let just the moonlight fill the room. Sometimes a warm (not hot bath) an hour before helps and get dressed for bed an hour before as well. When it’s time to go to bed you want no activity except slowly and gently walking to the bed and getting in. I would ask my husband to go to bed first and get all his wiggles out before I came in. It's good to even speak in hushed tones and if you have children explain to them that temporarily you need the house very quiet an hour before bed.  Having your wind down time in a chair in the bedroom is a good idea too to reduce walking time. But do NOT wind down in the bed. You need to train the mind that when you are in bed you will be sleeping. If it’s possible to have your room a bit cooler that sometimes helps. 

• My sleep problems were so severe that I talked to my boss at work and got them to agree to be flexible on my arrival time. I know this won’t work for everyone. They agreed that if I got in by at least 10am that would be OK. Since I was still working an insane number of hours the weeks and months I was able to, they had no problem with it. I removed my alarm clock all together and gave my husband strict instructions not to wake me until 9am because sometimes I wouldn’t fall asleep till around 5-6am and just those few hours would make a huge difference. Nights I slept, I would naturally get up around 6am and get to work on time. 

 

• Sit in the sunshine for at least 15 minutes a day. Let the sun touch your eye lids and long bones of your arms and legs. Breathe out long through your nose and then breathe in deeply, holding a few seconds before exhaling again. 

• Any reduction in stimulants like caffeine during the day will help at night. 

I’ll talk about methods of rocking yourself to sleep, meditation, visualization and diet and lifestyle changes in later posts. For now, let’s just keep it to the baby steps. 

Here is to your restful sleep. 

From NicePetsBlog.com

Trench warfare

An Earth sheltered home has many benefits.  The house stays cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, heating and cooling cost are minimized or removed all together.  The walls that are bermed, or have dirt up next to them, do not have extensive foundation requirements since there is no risk of frost heave.  Other than a footer for the walls to have a stable base, there is no need to dig below the frost line to keep the walls from heaving.  Frost depth is 2 feet in our area and we have to consider that for the non-bermed walls.  Most earth sheltered homes typically have the Southern wall exposed for solar gain and on our walls that are exposed, we decided on a rubble trench foundation. 


Frank Lloyd Wright used the rubble trench extensively in the early 20th century.  This method has been called the Volkswagon of foundations and we found it much more affordable than the typical poured concrete foundation wall.  The rubble trench has two functions, it provides a solid load-bearing base for the walls and drainage.  Basically a trench is dug, a base of gravel laid for a 4" perforated drain pipe (tile), the pipe is wrapped in a filtering cloth, covered with washed gravel and compacted. 

There was a bit more to it than that as we discovered when you have very rocky soil.  The trench has to be sloped 1" per every 8 feet and we chose to drain to daylight.  Our biggest delay in building has been caused by deciding to excavate the house site to 4 feet.  We thought that was about 1/2 of the height of the house and we would berm up the rest, or create a hill up to the roof.  In hindsight, 2 feet site excavation would have been much easier and maybe we could have started on the walls already.  After excavation for the house, you still have to dig down to the frost depth for the rubble trenches on the non-bermed sides.  On top of that the waste pipe had to be dug into this rocky soil at a slope of 1" per 4 feet and drain to a septic tank that is even lower.  The depth was just too much when added all together.  Off topic, but in a state like Missouri, the septic tank laws are not as strict.  We were able to go with a much cheaper, non-typical tank. There is plenty of info on line about making your own tanks or other things you can use when you live in a state with few building codes (there are stricter building codes in Missouri if you live in a city or certain counties obviously). 

The excavator had a very hard time with the boulders and we had a hard time hammering at rocks in the trenches with a sledgehammer for the last few weeks (or has it been months) to get the slope right.  After a lot of hammering, there is then a lot of filling in.  To get the proper slope we always tried picking the pipe up where we could and laying something under it in one place to avoid hammering down in another.  There were delays with the weather, equipment failure (digging out boulders is hard on a machine) and the trenches filling with water causing us to have to dig all the slumped mud out to get the slope back.  Though our operator used a 24" bucket, there are few places where the trench was 24".  Digging out big rocks and boulders means a trench with a wide and wiggly border, which equals more cost for gravel.  You can't dump a rock that weighs possibly tons back into your trench on top of the drain pipe.  So that all has to filled back in with gravel.   By the time we worked on the last trench to the septic tank and the hole for the septic tank itself, our arms were (and still are) exhausted with pounding rock.

I did find though that a really heavy, long handled sledgehammer worked much better for me than a pick axe.  It also worked better than the jackhammer we rented trying to finish the septic tank hole.  Being a woman of slighter build you might have people tell you (like a neighbor recently said to me) that you can't do this or "your not made for this type of work".  Hogwash, this isn't something that only men or people with big muscles can do.  If you do have to do this yourself, make sure to cover up as much of your body as you can, wear safety glasses and stretch out your muscles every day.  No matter how frustrated you get, keep good form.  Breathe out with every strike, be mindful of your stance and how you hold the hammer.  Even then, prepare for your face to be showered with rock flecks and wearing thick pants still won't keep the pain away when a big piece goes flying.  It's best to strike the rock with a glancing blow being mindful of your shins.  Sometimes I had to hit directly on top for a while to get a fracture going.  If we had only excavated the house site to 2 feet, I wonder if we would have had to do any pounding at all?  The top few layers of our soil is wonderful here which isn't always easy to come by in Southern Missouri. 

I think we started digging the trenches in July and they were basically filled at the end of August.  But on top of the delays at the site, we also had to get the RV levelled, water and solar power going, build a barn, outhouse and animal housing and the thousands of other things that go into making a homestead.  Of course I imagined the trenches taking a few weeks - hahaha. 

The excavator also dug gray water trenches.  These gray water trenches met up with the rubble trench's drain to daylight trench and are shared.  The fresh air pipe for the woodstove was also laid in the same trench. 

Using a transit made checking the slope of the trenches quick work.  Fortunately the backhoe operator is also a neighbor and we've had his transit on long term loan.  It was a lot of fun learning how to use one and surprisingly easy.  All these years seeing them used on the side of the roads and at construction sites, I assumed it was a complicated machine.  Basically just binoculars on a tripod and I learned to use it for our needs in about 5 minutes.  Now remembering that the bigger the numbers are means you are going deeper for some reason took me a while longer ;-)

If you are interested in rubble trench foundations, there is a wonderful article in "The best of Fine Homebuilding - Foundations and Concrete work" book.  After everything else that we've read, this was the best overall summary and includes drawings and photos.  The trench needs to be wide enough to accommodate your footer which in turn needs to be a specific size based on your walls.  All of this information was easily found in the great books we've read on home building such as Rob Roy's "Earth-Sheltered Houses".  We have 2 dozen or more books on home building, but these two books were referred to over and over again. 

We probably could have skipped the rubble trench foundation, built the footers on grade and used a sheet of extruded polystyrene insulation extending outwards laterally and slightly down to protect the walls from frost heave since frost will only penetrate at a 45 degree angle.  We didn't want to do this at the time because we didn't want to run the risk of something damaging this sheet and therefore putting our walls at risk of heave.  It didn't seem as permanent or as solid of a protection as the rubble trench.  Rob Roy calls this an insulation curtain and in his book there is information on how this would work. 

If we had known how much work was to come with rock pounding, we may have done that instead. 

Here is a drawing of our wall with the rubble trench for the South side.  There are a few mistakes on this drawing, like I called the finished floor the subfloor and I drew the footer too big.  All will be corrected as these drawings change frequently.  We are also going with 3" of gravel under the floor now since our site is very well drained. 

Next up is to finish roughing out the plumbing that didn't have to be buried.   Over half of that is done.  The trenches need to be tamped and Jeffrey found a used tamper online for under $180.  All the trenches and the floor need to be tamped.  Since there is much tamping to do, it was more econmical to buy instead of rent.  Permanent drainage around the perimeter of the site using french drains is one of the next top priorities.  The shallow drainage ditch we have now is working pretty well as a temporary fix.  It is pouring rain outside right now and it was wonderful to see for the first time water pouring out of the foundation drain pipe instead of watching the trench fill up!  We still need to cover the end of the pipe, but there is one more graywater line coming and they'll be covered at the same time.

New Garden almost caught up!

It seems like it was another lifetime when I posted last. We took off running full speed ahead to catch up with the planting season almost the minute after I lost my job and we decided to put in a bigger garden. We had no prepared place to plant and were already weeks behind in planting or starting most things. For these last 4 weeks, every moment has been something new to do and learn. I am learning how to be unemployed, I don't know how to go about all the mind numbing processes involved with not having a job. I get a free month of COBRA insurance and also unemployment insurance, handling these take up a great deal of time.

I seem to find out about things so late sometimes. I just found out about this movie. I loved the quote on their front page:

"Sit, be still and listen for you are drunk and we are at the edge of the roof" - Rumi, 13th Century

Click here for more on the movie. I can't find it used so I hope a used one will find it's way to my door one day.

I continue to find blogs and websites dedicated to simple living and homesteading. Some of these places have been running for years. Almost daily I find more and more information, there is just so much out there. It seems bizarre that I've been interested in simple living for years and I still manage to "discover" sites, or movies or blogs that have been around for a long time.

I found the word "homesteading" through an odd sequence of events. Growing up, I loved being in the country and going to my grandparents house. Though my grandparents had a home near the edge of the city, they spent much of their summer time gardening in the little town where my Grandmother grew up. They always had a huge garden every year that produced more than the family and all their friends could eat.

Going there during the summer and vacations was always a favorite time for my brothers and me. We'd fish, explore, ride the go-cart and had freedom to come and go. Sometimes I would sit on the boat dock at the "Big Pond" for hours just looking at everything. It was always an exciting treat to help grandmother in any way she'd let us. Last year one of my brothers and his wife bought my grandparents country place and are working hard making a home out of it with their burgeoning family. I can't wait for the day when the fields are reminded of the bounty they used to produce. I don't know that my grandmother will ever retire.