Cheri Sutherland

p.S. For worry, such as sitting in the doctor’s office, or whatever worries are besetting one, HOLD YOUR THUMBS!

A habitiual worrywort will sooner or later fevelop curving thumbs! Because their thumb energy has been diverted from worry.

Gripping one thumb (doesn’t matter which-choose one!) with your other hand, gripping your thumb like holding a bicycle handlebar is the hold for worry.

Do BOTH thumbs because you have identical energy flows: one on the right and one on the left side of the body. So energise BOTH sides, first one and then the other.

Calms the emotions and the body. 😊

Well, here is what I do for the stress, and often grief and frequent grief and frustration of living with a covert malvolent narcissistic husband who is truly off his rocket. He can be cruel to me and to the animals. He has killed so many of my beloved animal friends over the years.

And no, I am not able to leave him. However he is slowly killing himself as well. I am determined to outlast him, and become single and peaceful and happy!

Mybgo-to for strong emotional distress and despair are applying 3 Jin Shin holds. I am a retiree now, but used the art on human clients back in the day, and am branching out into applying it to my animals these days. It works on all mammals, however the specific points of contact are a little varied in the 4-legged critters.

Jin Shin has brrn calked “the Art of the Ceeatir,” and can be compared to accupuncture, but WITHOUT NERDLES!

Various points on the body access our physical and emotions, and can strengthen healing and emotional balance.

Ready to give place your hands where they can help in moments of frustration or despair or grief (I use these often!) ? Here’s where to put them…

First put your fingers on the back of your neck, half way down from your head and your shoulders. Elbows out, and just rest your fingers there. Pressure is unncessary (one can do this tgrough clothing, a plaster cast,etc. Still works.

This hold is the “Thy Will be Done” (or .”it is what it is, let it be”) hold.

B patient. After a bit you will probably feel a pulsing underneath your fingers. This is energy which overflowed tge banks of its regular channel being pulled back where it belongs by your fingers.

Every 3 minutes or so, briefly remove your fingers, tgen put them back on your neck., until the flow underneath your fingers is relaxed (no pounding) and gentle.

Step one done. Good job!

The next hold is forearms crossed so that your left fingers are touching where your right neck meets your right shoulder and left neck meets left shoulder. Again, hold until the pulsing is gentle and quiet, loosening contact briefly, then reapplying if contact is more than 2 minutes to get to gentle pulsing.

This hokd releases old baggage. Often emotional, even the stuff we are not aware of. But it may also release the body’s  over guarding of an old physical injury.

The last hold is calked “Wash Our Hearts with Laughter.” It gives us back our sense of humour - our ability to chuckle at things once again. As one cannot chuckle when depressed or despairing, this lightens us up.

Place your fingers where your body joins your leg. Again, wait for the pulsing may thump under your fingers for a while as your fingers are drawing the errant energy back where it belongs. Periodic breaks with immediate re-contact are, again, the thing to do so that the body does no become de-sensitised to your touch and ignore it.

You do not have to actually set a timer for how many minutes before breaking off and then reapplying or touching again the point. The goal is a relaxed pulsing which pulses under both hands at the same time. Not two different pulses.


You can MEVER hurt your body with Jin Shin holds. You are simply touching your body. There is nothing invasive or foreign that would force it.

While this might not apply to your dead spot, I have suspected that a prior owner may have  spread rock salt there (to rather permanently discourage weeds) kill weeds, and in another property the area was a raccoon pitty site at one time.

Wishing you success to heal your dead spot!
😊

I’ve made a loaf of sourdough bread weekly for a long time now, but have bern quite frustrated by the (too many) failures when I tried to branch out from 50% whole grain to 100% whole grain, and trying to make no fail pastries and pizza dough.

The chickens have been enthusiastic over my many trial-and-mostly-error attempts from recipes gleaned from over the Internet.

(The nice thing about chickens is that they gobble up the evidence…and tell no tales!)

But groceries are expensive these days. A book with the daring to have “No Fail” in its title HAS to mean it. Otherwise the bad press would surely soon sink any chance of sales.

This book will definitely become the next book on my shelf of often used, favourite cookbooks!

Everything worked just fine! Great job!

Back in the Ice Ages (the 1950’s) my mother came across instructions for making very shiny silver Christmas tree ornaments.

The ornaments were strips carefully cut from tin cans, and then curled.

The curly strips were combined with smallish  )perhaps 1/2” across) bright red glass ornaments.

Unfortunately, after all that work constructing different shaped ornaments, because the ornaments were razor sharp! We had some spectacular bloody incidents before mother sadly realised that the ornaments were not compatible with several kids fascinated by the shiny metal and baubles hung on the tree.


Apparently the instructions failed to mention that the edges needed to be dulled.

I have tins in my pantry that are not the silver, shiny bright that they were in the ‘50’s. Grrrr, humph.

I didn’t notice anyone chat about 22 string guitars.

Perhaps they are extraneous to this topic though. If so, my apologies.

Just in case someone has one, they seem to be happiest hung on a “ U” hook screwed into a board on a wall.

The tension of 12 tight strings on their neck has a powerful pull. Hanging by the top of their neck, so a luthier told me, helps to support the neck and keep it from eventually bowing to the pressure.

I agree completely with those chums who have commented that strong sunlight is not a friend to our instruments.

When I was a child we lived for a time in a small beachside community. Folks there ignored Daylight Savings Time nonsense.

I know that I am “preaching to the choir, but it is a barking mad nuisance which needs to be discontinued!

Some may recall Paul’s post on “Spoons” which Burra taught him how to use. Daylight Savings Time is a huge spoon deficit for twice a year: when it starts and when it ends. A disruptor of probably many folks’ internal clocks.

Take it for what it is worth from an old healer (my daughter jokingly refers to me as “the friendly neighbourhood witch doctor ”) that jolts to one’s internal settings are not productive!

However, I have noticed that many Permie chums have far better sense than those in charge of cities, states and the federal government and big business folks.

Which is where one tends to find barnyard common sense…with the grass roots, less sophisticated by choice population.

Attached are pictures of a wool picker that I designed and built back in 2015. Actually, I built three and had plans to sell them until my life threw a wobbler-LOL.

Perhaps a few Permies buddies might want to make s ma similar one for themselves.

I have an iPhone, and it saves videos as .mov - if any can play .mov’s and want to see the videos of the picker in action, I guess I’ll need your email address. Or if a kind Permies soul would convert them so they could be posted.

The wood is hemlock: next cheapest to pine but stronger.

The nails are not stainless-I used what I had on hand.

The yellow strips on the underside of the head or carriage piece are from a bit of plastic sign material purchased at a sign shop.

The idea of making my own wool picker was one of those “necessity is the mother of invention” things.

A shrewd fellow sold me several bags if wool? Putting the good wool on top of each bag, and the impossibly snarled wool below. (Grrrr!)

I am accustomed to living within a small budget, so the thing to do was to dedign and make my own darned picker. I was NOT going to bury that wool in the garden, although the plants probably would have liked that idea!

The prototype picker was made with free wood that a kind neighbor pulled put from under his house (where he stored all of his extra lumber.)

I then made two more out of store-bought lumber (hemlock for strength and budget friendly).

The thing is that regular nails rust so thus has to be kept in a dry location.

My “Super Picker” as I called it, is roughly around 2-1/2 to 3 feet long.

One can get the idea from the two videos, then work up the dimensions from there.

I’m still recouping from successful cancer treatments which had to nearly got rid of me to get rid of the cancer…talk about tossing the baby out with the bathwater almost -LOL.

I only mention this to explain why my 2 pickers (I gave one to a friend) are in storage.

However if anyone wants specifics, I think one of the pickers might possibly be unearthed.

Being quite thrifty (think: a wee bit tight), aI have been scavenging free fiber for decades.

A few observations and take it fir what it is worth: an efficient soap is not necessarily good for scouring animal fibre.

Original, plain Dawn is a winner in the “cheap” category.

If wool is older than it was said to be, the lanolin will become horrifically sticky. That is not good. Bury it around your plants and search fir other wool to use for spinning.

I used to teach folks the basics of drop spindles and the first class having each person make their own with a slender dowel and 3 old CD disks-LOL.

Sure,  like a Schacht spindle better, but a homemade one is a good start fir messing about with a drop spindle.

Another thought is to not expose wool or other mammal fibers to boiling hot water. I have found that temperature extremes are hard on the fibers. And unless you WANT to felt wool, avoid extreme changes in water temperature.

If the wool has a problem which suggests very hot water or strong soap, then it is s gonber and unresurrectable. As cheap as I am, I do not say that lightly. But years of stubborn, sad experience have taught me what can be and what should not be scoured, picked, spun and knitted or woven. Some giber us too damaged, making the process a misery and the end product a crying shame and an utter waste of time.

At one time on the southern Oregon coast, I plopped a dark coloured plastic tarp over a small pile of semi-aged horse manure-a gift from a friend.. And forgot all about it.

Perhaps 6 months later, I remembered the good manure and removed the tarp, which had been held down with rocks (the coast has a lot of wind).

To my utter astonishment, many glittering pairs of eyes stared back at me. Good-sized garter snakes and LOTS of them. I have never seen so many n one place. All twined around each other.

And in the composted manure were red wriggler worms that had initially arrived with the manure.

It had been months and months since the old manure had been dropped off. I cannot know how long the snakes had been in residence, but there was no shortage of worms, all hough it was obvious that the fat snakes had eaten many.

This caused me to wonder if the worms had been able to reproduce quickly enough to keep up with the many large (well, at least for a garter snake) snakes’ appetites. If so, quite a feat of reproduction on the part of the worm colony!

By the way, I carefully replaced the tarp and left the successful little ecosystem as it was.  

By (rainy) winter the snakes had left for a dryer accommodation.