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We finally got some rain. Not enough, and pretty late in the growing season, but better than nothing. Huzzah! The weather report states that even east Texas is getting some rain. I had an e-mail exchange with an acquaintances there, and she reported her rain gauge showed more than an inch so far.
The peat bogs in the northeastern part of North Carolina are burning underground where they can't be reached to extinguish. They need rain there to soak down to where the fire is at.
I prepared my first milk kefir smoothie from my own kefir with fresh blueberries. After I removed the mother culture grains by straining, I put the kefir into the blender with a lot of blueberries, blended them real good, covered it with a paper towel over the top to keep out pesky bugs, but let the kefir breathe, and set it back into the refrigerator to ferment slower from the baby grains that got through the strainer.
Last night I got it out and poured an 8 ounce glass of it to taste it. It tasted okay, but I wanted it a little sweeter, so I put a single packet of Splenda in it, and that did the trick. It was thick and fruity and very yummy . This morning I drank the other half of it first thing. The only facet I might change would be to use fewer blueberries. I think I tried too hard.
In some ways I'm going a little nuts again for growing and consuming bacteria. Sure, it's reputedly friendly bacteria, and I'm being very careful to keep it that way, but my thinking about diet is being completely altered.
Now, I'm thinking about why dogs eat shit. They're trying to get gut bacteria from other creatures that will help them digest their own food better. Gut bacteria manufacture vitamins, and convert minerals into usable forms. What is easy is simple.
The weirdest part of this is the milk kefir "grains". They don't "look like" grains in the same way the water kefir grains look like cooked white rice. When I put the water kefir "grains" into sugary water that contains minerals found in nearly all ground water, their babies look like teeny tiny grains of cooked white rice. Not the milk kefir grains. They get bigger and bigger like a matrix. I have one milk kefir culture that's as big as a golf ball, and others that are growing.
The crazy idea I'm getting as I go along here, is that these biological matrixes get other bacteria they need to act as a part of themselves from the environment they find themselves trying to survive in. That's why I'm freaking on the notion of wild yeast. The kefir matrixes are able to discriminate which "wild yeast" to bring into themselves from the outside to create products that cure and heal their hosts. In this case, me.
I'm not reading this anywhere else yet. I have done a brief web search using the entry "wild yeast", and there were plenty of hits. Wild yeast is a well known subject. It's particularly well-known to bakers of sourdough bread.
The first article I perused was instructions from this amateur baking nut who wrote about how to create your own individual sourdough culture from scratch. Apparently, it takes a while to employ the process, but the yeast is from thin air.
If kefir truly does become a genuine obsession for me I will naturally have to learn a lot about the process of fermentation in general, much less specifically. I asked my friend who teaches chemistry about fermentation processes, and he started calling them off the top of his head like beating the band. This is beginning to look like just another case of me being the last to know.
I won't have to take to the highway to find competent gurus to inspire me when and if I get stuck with some problem involving fermentation. I did have to "take to the highway" to satisfy my spiritual quest. As it turned out, not so much to find competent gurus (there are none), but more, perhaps, to get away from the dogmatic influences that kept my nose to the grindstone of living in the Bible Belt.
My nomadic traveling as a beggar exposed me to all sorts of other ways of approaching the spiritual aspects of life. All sorts of people believe all sorts of things, and what they each do seems to provide just as much satisfaction for what they put into it as any other approach.
I taught myself the occult practices to help me upgrade my nomadism to a little easier way to survive, but only after I turned thirty years old. Before that I had no particular skills other than youthful innocence and occasional sincerity to touch other people's greedy hearts.
Astrology was particular difficult to learn while bumming around North America because it required implements like huge ephemerides tables to look up the positions of the stars in the night sky, and compasses and paper pads and awkward to tote stuff like that.
Eventually I had to settle down and stay in one place long enough to learn the rudiments. That was my second marriage in a nutshell. Astrology is the mother lode of all the other occult practices, and in the end game, all one has to know to operate out of an intuitive relationship with the world around them.
In a way, the individuated person is like a milk kefir matrix. They draw what they need from the ambient environment around them. Wherever they set up their tent becomes the center of their universe, and by charisma, other people's universal center for that event.
I have a friend who uses music in much the same way as I used homelessness. He and his friends set up their camp at music festivals in a very appealing way. Its how other people wanna see themselves as being carefree spirits, instead of working on assembly lines in the 9-5 mode.
The last time we talked about this, he spoke of having conversations with other festival owners to the effect that, if his gang would bring their tent act to their festivals, and set an example for others of how to make their camp sites attractive, they would get a free pass to musical happiness. Smells like a career to me.
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