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Yesterday was physically rough for me. The hangover I got from sharing a bottle of wine over supper at my brother's house stayed with me all day long, and well into the night. I think my drinking was complicated by the medicines I am is taking. I've drunk a lot more wine without getting a hangover. Finally, around three or four o'clock this morning, after sleeping and drinking oodles of spring water, my body gave me some peace.
My fascination with gut bacteria continues. As I watched video after video about how to use kefir grains it suddenly dawned on me why the chlorine the county puts in my drinking water has been a problem. It not only kills the bacteria in the water, but kills the gut bacteria in my body, and makes digesting food a more daunting task. Who needs that?
The videos I watched yesterday were mainly about making water kefir. A different sort of kefir grain is used to accomplish this. By comparison with the kefir grains used to make dairy based kefir they're really small. By the looks of them, they're more like grains of rice than clumps of cauliflower.
Kefir grains, as I've grown to understand it, are clumps of gut bacteria, and they live off sugar. With dairy kefir they consume and digest the sugar in the milk, but you have to add the sugar to water kefir. I don't really grok either process yet. I don't have any kefir grains as of now, but they act pretty much like yeast. Since they do apparently act like yeast, that means I don't really understand yeast either.
Using either of these creatures just got more interesting for me due to a couple of videos I watched in which the presenter was showing how to use them to make ginger ale. I like ginger. One of my favorite forms of ginger is a liqueur that was made from seventeen different kinds of ginger. It was cheap too. I used to buy it at the State liquor store over in Fayetteville until they stopped carrying it.
This commercially bottled liqueur was great for what fresh ginger is commonly used for. To settle one's stomach after a meal. Usually, in Japan, as I understand it, a fish meal. I became acquainted with this liqueur during my working years as a pseudo mechanical engineer. There was a lotta stress, and naturally I ate to deal with it. The ginger was a big help.
Tomorrow is Thursday, an important day for me in a way. I am was born on a Thursday. I've been waiting for six months for a second appointment with the eye surgeon at the VA Hospital. The last appointment I had with him was disappointing, and unfortunately I was very explicit in expressing my disappointment. I didn't exactly go so far as to blow it, I was able to contain myself to some degree.
For the past six months I've been trying to cop an attitude that will serve my purposes better than last time. It's not this one dude that left me in the lurch, but all the optometrists I've seen in regard to the cataracts I have in both eyes.
Each of them has told me something different. Each them have left me with different expectations about what needs to be there for them to remove the cataracts. For the most part I've decided my best tactic is to show up and keep my mouth shut. Freedom of speech simply doesn't serve me well with these medical egos.
I'm hoping to get some kefir grains from the friend of the friend I wrote about yesterday. Since I'm gonna be in Fayetteville tomorrow in order to keep my appointment at the VA I wrote my friend and asked him if he could make the appropriate arrangements. He said he would see what he could do, and get back with me. He hasn't yet, but there is still plenty of time for him to do that.
Even if it doesn't happen I'll be able to buy some more commercial kefir at the same grocery store I bought it at the last time. The commercial variety seems better than the capsules, but neither of them appear to be as satisfactory as getting my own strain of live kefir grains and making it daily for myself.
The temperature today is predicted to be even higher than yesterday. At least as high as my body temperature. One pleasant surprise yesterday was that I was able to use a down comforter to block off this room I'm in to get my old air conditioner to make the smaller space more comfortable.
As a miser the idea of me spending the money it will take to run the air conditioner is grievous to me. The prospect of having the monkey get on my back is more grievous. I know by experience what I'm writing about. Better to be destitute financially than dead.
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