Just for the fun of it… I searched Google Earth.

This is not a current view… over one year old.

FYI: A “down to earth” picture. Very current!!

Break time; lunch time (12:30). It has been a busy morning!! I started the “first time” project of storing items under the bed (winter things). A hot sweaty job (but somebody’s got to do it, LOL). It is 84.7 degrees inside the trailer and 96.8 degrees outside!! There are some swarming insects all over the screen door and side of the trailer. Some are inside and I keep swatting them off me. Even as the days have gotten warmer, I haven’t wanted to turn on the air-conditioner. Today may be the exception?! ~~ I didn’t want to embarrass myself by posting a picture of “before” I started the project; the bed was loaded with bedding, clothes, and “what do I do with this?” stuff. ~~ While starting lunch, I saw Mama Chickadee fly out of the bird house so ran out and took a picture. I’ll monitor the nest for additional pictures because the babies sure look like Bluebirds.

It may be a busy afternoon–despite the heat. I plan to get the Black & Decker Weed Eater out of the box and “weed wack” the yard.

The storage building is crammed full of stuff. I don’t want to embarrass myself by posting a picture of the clutter piled in front of the electric fan. I persevered… and extricated the fan from the far back corner. It is oscillating in my kitchen area and cooling the living area. Sweet relief!! The thermometer hasn’t registered a cool down but my body has!! ~~ I’ve used some of my homemade insecticide on the flying nuisance but it does not seem to affect them. ~~ I’ll postpone “weed wacking.”

The Black & Decker Weed Eater was calling my name. I assembled it in the shade. I “wacked” for a few minutes before retreating to the “fan”-conditioned trailer.

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Postscript/Confession: It’s 4:44 PM and I’ve folded up like a wet noodle! This heat has taken my energy and eagerness to complete a project.

Welcome to Texas?!

Life’s Book

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Living at the CARE Center, I am surrounded by many people with health problems.  Yesterday I “sat” with a convalescing husband while his wife made an emergency trip to her dentist. Hours later she enlisted helpers to get her husband into the car and started (at 9:00 PM) for Houston VA Hospital. ~~ So many residents rely on electric scooters to get from RV to CARE Center. ~~ I have a blind neighbor–and several blind residents on another street. ~~ Every day I count my many blessings that I am able to work in my yard and see the flowers and birds. (At this moment [9:15 AM], I see a female Cardinal on a feeder.)

Considering all the dirt I have under my fingernails, I suppose I’m right-in-line to celebrate Earth Day.

…after ditching diets, losing 160 pounds with healthy food choices.

Monday, April 21, 2014
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

(NaturalNews) Forget fat diets… and don’t leap into unhealthy shortcuts like bariatric surgery. The new weight loss paradigm is based on making informed, daily choices about healthy eating. Using this simple system of avoiding liquid sugars and eating whole foods like quinoa and fresh vegetables, a Texas woman named Teena Henson achieved extraordinary results without dieting. Over two years, she accomplished a 160-pound drop in body weight and restored herself to a remarkable state of fitness and health — all without resorting to fat diets, weight loss pills or risky surgery.

How did she do it? Her success story baffles those steeped in the American culture of quick fixes and fashionable shortcuts. Henson simply did something that’s increasingly rare in modern society: she took responsibility for her own health and stopped blaming everyone else for her obesity. By understanding that she was responsible for her own health — not her doctor and not a drug company — Teena Henson was able to start making deliberate, daily choices that moved her in the direction of weight loss success.

Those choices included things like switching from fried foods to grilled foods, eating whole foods instead of processed foods, and giving up sugary sodas altogether. Those seemingly simple steps, combined with walking as a form of gentle exercise, delivered extraordinary results: they took Henson from 332 pounds down to 166, shedding literally half her body weight. The feature photo of this story shows Henson’s before and after photos. Yes, it’s the same woman in the two photos!

Simple solutions elude a shortcut culture

What’s so remarkable about this story is not merely the fact that Henson dropped half her body weight through simple changes in diet and exercise. What’s remarkable is that such a success story is so rare: in a culture of dietary shortcuts, a woman who decides to make healthier lifestyle choices stands out as truly extraordinary.

Most approaches to dieting, of course, rely on dubious diet drugs or diet supplement pills that accomplish nothing. Diet fads restrict people to extreme, single-food regimens like eating only grapefruit or cabbage — a sure way to develop nutritional deficiencies. And extreme dieting surgeries rely on the removal of significant portions of healthy organs as we see in bariatric surgery.

While pills, fad diets and surgeries are increasingly popular, they are rarely effective. Henson’s true achievement was in recognizing that up front. As reported by KDVR.com(1):

In the past, Henson would put herself on diets to make everyone happy, but they wouldn’t last long. There was an endless array of rules, from eating nothing but grapefruits to nothing but carbs, until she realized that “diets” just weren’t for her.

“For me, ‘diet’ is a four-letter word for failure,” she said.

What she was looking for was a lifestyle change. And not because her friends and family wanted it for her, but because she wanted it for herself.

“Diet” is temporary, but lifestyle changes are forever

The problem with all weight loss diets is that they prescribe temporary behavior, not lasting solutions. Any diet that says, “Here, eat in this radical way for a few weeks” is doomed to failure from the start.

Lasting lifestyle changes require abandoning processed foods and eating fresh, whole foods combined with regular exercise (like walking). This simple yet powerful principle, however, continues to elude desperate dieters who misunderstand the whole point: it’s not about extreme short-term solutions to your weight problem; it’s about consistent, long-term changes to your daily habits that produce long-term results.

This is why I’ve always had a problem with Weight Watchers, which licenses its name to a whole series of Weight Watchers processed foods such as chocolate cake or brownies. The very idea of a Weight Watchers chocolate cake is contradictory: if you’re hoping to eat in a healthy way, you shouldn’t be eating chocolate cake at all, regardless of how many calories are in a serving.

Although I’m sure there are exceptions to this observation, Weight Watchers looks more to me like a cover story for people who want to pretend they’re making healthier food choices. If Weight Watchers branding was really based on sound nutritional principles, the entire fresh produce section of any grocery store should be labeled “Weight Watchers,” and the name should never appear on processed, manufactured foods like chocolate cakes or brownies.

Also: just because something is named “diet” doesn’t mean you will lose weight by consuming it. Diet sodas, for example, have been proven over and over again to accomplish no lasting weight loss whatsoever.

The rare trait of personal fortitude

When I was growing up, I remember being awarded Presidential Physical Fitness awards in grade school for meeting basic performance standards in pull-ups, sit-ups and running. The awards referred to children being of “sound body and sound mind.”

Today, the medical establishment teaches us that children of sound mind are achieved through mind-altering psychiatric drugs like Ritalin or Adderall. A sound body, we are told by surgeons, is achieved through cosmetic surgery or partial stomach removal. This is true even in children, as bariatric surgery is now being performed on children as young as two. Somehow, the idea that we should control what our children eat is an alien idea across our culture, where children are taught victimization rather than personal fortitude.

The idea that a parent could raise an extremely obese child and have no idea why they are obese has always bewildered me. I’m pretty sure that children can’t go out and buy junk food on their credit cards. Virtually their entire diet is controlled by what their parents buy for them to eat. As such, an obese child is a clear sign of an ill-informed parent who somehow hasn’t come to grasp any connection between the food they buy and the body weight of their child. (Many parents have also forgotten how to say “No!” to their own children, failing to set healthy boundaries on food and soda consumption.)

What we need to be teaching our children is the simple but powerful idea that you are what you eat. If you eat junk, your body will express junk. If you eat healthful foods, your body will express good health. If you eat a cancer-causing diet, your body will express cancer, and if you eat an anti-cancer diet, your body will prevent cancer.

These ideas should not be revolutionary; they should be common sense. Yet in a modern society that has grown bizarrely detached from food and health, these concepts seem to be strangely rare.

Thank goodness there are still women like Teena Henson who haven’t forgotten the simple rules for weight loss success: Don’t fall for fad diets, skip the diet pills, avoid dangerous surgery and earn your weight loss through consistent behavioral changes designed to achieve your long-term goals.

Sources for this story include:
(1) http://kdvr.com/2014/04/21/texas-woman-ditch…

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/044809_weight_loss_success_Texas_woman_Teena_Henderson.html#ixzz2zcEi52A4

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Lorraine here: Thankfully, Mike Adams has the resources to spread the word about health and nutrition. My suggestions–to friends and acquaintances–fall on deaf ears. True story: Several sweet sugary desserts are served at every meal (in the CARE Center). However, sometimes two days go by without fresh vegetable or fresh fruit scraps (from the CARE kitchen) for my composter. The residents complain about gaining weight but continue to eat the highly processed greatly overcooked meals. The greatest insult: What isn’t eaten at noon is served as leftovers. Hence: a doubly overcooked highly processed meal!!

“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”

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This Texas Rat Snake is not welcome in my garden!! Fortunate for me, a neighbor is very knowledgeable about reptiles and came to my rescue!! Tom carried the snake to the woods at the far side of field.

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A curious footnote: This was the 666th blog message (and I didn’t plan this). In Christian eschatology, 666 is the sign of the beast.

Homemade cooked carrots, onions, potatoes & cabbage.  I overindulged at the Easter Sunday potluck and was ill last night. This morning, I forced myself out of the garden, into the kitchen, to prepare a wholesome meal. In my humble opinion, far more nutrition than the overcooked processed food they serve in the CARE dining room. Tonight I’ll have a large green salad.

…of plastic simulated whisky barrel planters. Like any family, there is a resemblance but each is uniquely different. I filled a jumbo-size planter with compost, organic soil, tomato plant and a pepper plant. ~~ I was gone most of the day. First I spent the morning at a local meeting of a bird and bloom club; my first time to any such activity. Second, back to Tractor Supply for more bird seed, planter soil, and stump killer.  By this time next year, I would like to level the craggy uneven soil under the fountain; the stump must die and disintegrate. Likewise, the stump serving as a plant stand must die (it is pushing out prolific new growth). Note my new (used) frame to elevate a planter: upside-down table (without a glass top). It was ugly and dirty but a coat of black spray paint enhances its appearance. Third: Lowe’s for a tomato plant, pepper plant and mosquito plant. Fourth and fifth: Thrift shops looking for something to elevate the veggie planter. In the end, I simply used two cement blocks to elevate it (for adequate drainage). ~~ I changed clothes as soon as I got home and dug into the composter for stinky rotten garbage for the bottom of the veggie planter, followed by soil. ~~ I won’t list all the things I did because long and “boring.”

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Note that I have two brand-new baby Chickadees.

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Wishing you a very happy Easter. It’s almost eight PM; I’ll go to bed early so I can depart before six AM for a sunrise service.

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Sunday, April 20th, 2:15 PM: Now it appears all four eggs have hatched. On second thought, it appears there are still two eggs. Sorry, the picture is out-of-focus but I’m limited in what I can do in that tiny space!!