Sinus Dilation & Other Stuff

Last Friday, five days ago, I had a sinus dilation procedure in the office of my ENT (ear, nose & throat doctor). For about six weeks prior to the procedure, I had terrible headaches almost everyday that nothing would help. Not nasal steroids, sinus washes, antibiotics, Tylenol, pain pills, nothing. You should really feel sorry for Frank. One, for having to put up with me and two, because I have just not been myself. I have never been one to have headaches, especially not ongoing, seemingly never ending, headaches. Am I healed? Not yet, but I am well on the way. Has this procedure taken care of my sinus problems? The verdict is still out since I still have some occasional pain from the procedure, but the never ending headache seems to be gone, for which I am truly thankful.

Until recently I had never heard of sinus dilation. Here is a site that explains what it is and how it is done. We have a neat doctor that let Frank stay with me and watch the whole thing. Some things hurt and some didn't. The doctor dilated both of my frontal sinuses and both maxillary or what I call cheek bone sinuses. He calls it bone cracking, and sometimes it sounded like that was the case. When he got to the left maxillary sinus he poked and prodded and poked and 
prodded and couldn't get in. He said something about a flap in the way, so he cut it out. I think he actually had to cut a hole to get in and when he did, a stream of white, creamy ick came out, which he expected. The CT scan they did prior to the procedure showed the left maxillary as solid instead of with any air in it. He cleaned everything out of there he could.

So now I am healing. It is still uncomfortable to bend over to do much so the garden is patiently sitting out there waiting for me, just doing it's thing all on it's own. I think the aphids are having a hey day. By next week, I hope to diminish their population greatly. We have made cheese a couple of times, it doesn't take much physical effort, I just had to concentrate more to make sure I didn't skip a step.

The new online program I am using for my contract work with the school district, which is statewide, is really taking a lot of time. Since it is new, there are many, many data fields that have to be populated for each student, and of course with school starting and families moving around, there are many new students to contend with as well as the ones that are returning. I have spent so much time on the computer today, at one point I had this picture of a ball and chain coming out of the laptop attached around my ankle. Silly, huh? It's not hard work, just time consuming. 

It's always good to use your mind to learn new things, but right now it would be more fun to research greenhouse plants for winter. Soon enough the school work will calm back down and I will do just that. Frank and I are already talking about the plants we want to experiment with over the winter. It will be exciting to be able to walk out there and harvest fresh food for the table in December or January.

Since I have been in recovery mode and busy with school work, we are behind on answering the comments and emails on the blog. Please bear with us, we will respond, it just may not be quite as timely as it has been. We really do enjoy hearing from you and appreciate the time you take to share with all of us.

I know you are watching the financial news, the news of yet more hatred and murder being splashed in our faces, the news of countries flexing their military muscles and the news of natural and man made devastation around the globe. Ponder long and hard what you need to be doing for the near and far future. We sure are. We think about it, talk about it, and pray about it every single day. 

Until next time - Fern

Back to School

It's time for school to start in our neck of the woods which means I will be going back to work. This will be my 30th year teaching special education in a public school system. My experience covers a wide geography - from urban to remote bush Alaska - and many, many children. Working with these children has taught me much over the years and this profession has allowed us to live in some of the most challenging, adventurous places. I continue to be blessed with employment that I enjoy.

Because of my return to work, our blogging will decrease somewhat, but we will still be here. The usual adjustments are being made around the farm to accommodate more time away from home.

We are drying up one of our does to lessen the milk load. Velvet is producing less milk than One Stripe or Ivory so she was the likely candidate. It has been easy to switch to milking her every other day without any distention of her udder to worry about. Now I will switch to just checking on her to see if I need to take any more milk at all, or if she will just reabsorb what milk she has.

Time to tend to and process the garden will be squeezed in after work. The fall garden will hopefully be able to tend to itself for the most part. The weather is different this year with lows in the 60's in August. It almost feels like winter will come early, which is strange for this part of the world. We usually have temperatures around 100, with lows in the low 80's or upper 70's. If the frosts come early, I will do some more experimenting with the frost cloth I used in the spring for the late frosts. It may extend our harvest of winter squashes.

 

The winter squashes and pumpkins are growing well. I got about two thirds of the corn stalks moved to mulch behind the winter squash when I ran into a pile of fire ants. So the rest of the mulch will have to wait for them to move on after I disturbed them.

 

Today I got the sugar beets planted since the ground finally dried out enough to work. 




 

I tucked the snap peas in between the two volunteer tomatoes and the volunteer
 
  jalapeno on this partial piece of stock panel. It all fit just right. I think I will plant the carrots around the tomatoes after I can till in a few more weeds. The potatoes haven't come up yet. We will just have to wait and see how that goes. 

Like many folks this summer, we haven't had many tomatoes and I haven't been able to try my hand at making tomato sauce as I had hoped. But there will be another time and another garden, if all goes well with the world. We still have some peppers, okra, purple hull peas, squash and cucumbers to pick and process, not to mention the milk and eggs from the goats and chickens, so there will be more than enough to do.

So for the last day of summer vacation, I got some things planted in the garden, canned 9 pints of purple hull peas, made a quart of fresh salsa and cooked up 3 or 4 pints of green beans for a casserole to take to church tomorrow for lunch.

And for everyone that is following Frank's radio communications posts, we will soon be explaining the new radio he installed in the car today. It is the same radio we use for a VHF/UHF base station. This will help standardize what we are using and give me more power in the vehicle to reach home when I need to. We feel effective means of communication are more important than ever.

Until next time - Fern