Day 183 (Tuesday) – January 29
Today’s been a slow bit of recovery. It seems that everyone that was gonna get it, got it, and is now at least on the road to recovery if not actually recovered.
I’m even too tired to have heartburn. I asked Saen if she would mind making that curry again for those of us who could eat; everyone that had had the shigella/dysentery thing was still on liquid diets. I was thankful she said yes because I just couldn’t face the kitchen after all the dirty, grungy work I’ve done today. I managed to write the recipe down this time.
Thai Red Curry
15 oz. coconut milk
1/2 chicken,chopped into small pieces(you can also use other birds, pork, beef, ect.)
3 tablespoons of sugar
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup bamboo shoots, sliced into ribbons
5 leaves Thai sweet basil, chopped.
2 tablespoons "Nam Pla" aka fish sauce
1-5 tablespoons Thai Red Curry Paste (to taste)
Red Curry Paste-
1/2 cup fresh Thai Red Bird Peppers
1/8 cup garlic
1/8 cup small (indian) onions
1/8 cup lemongrass
1/8 cup galingal root
1/8 cup green Thai peppers
1 pinch cinnamon
1 tblspoon grated fresh ginger
2 kahfir lime leaves, minced
juice of 1 lime
1 tsp salt
3 tablespoons sugar
Pound in a mortar and pestle until you have a paste. Put coconut milk into saucepan. Stir while bringing to a boil. Add curry paste herbs and fish sauce. Stir and bring back to a boil, and add chicken, hold at a slow boil for 5 minutes, add 2 cups of water, salt, and sugar. Simmer and stir until chicken is cooked thoroughly. Garnish with sweet Thai basil.
We were all very lucky that Saen brought her Thai veggie seeds back with her. I’m amazed they survived everything she and Glenn have been through. She had them stored in little film canisters and we put up a green house for her and keep it heated on cold days/night for the stuff out of season.
Something else that Glenn and Saen have shared is how you can take a member of the ginger family called Galingale, chop it up and then crush it to release its resin and then you mix that with water, ferment overnight, and then strain the biomass to create an extract. Then you take that extract and mix it in a 1:10 ration to more water and spray it directly on your fruit trees and bushes to prevent fruit flies which can be a bad problem in the subtropics and tropics. I happen to know that a patch of this was planted over in the USF Botanical Garden and we'll definitely be getting starts so I can grow some plots of this around Sanctuary. Plus one for the good guys; now we have a completely herbal remedy for some varmints that could destroy our fruit supply.
I can’t wait until all my really hot peppers are ready for harvest. I’m going to use them to poison the rat and mice population around here. They are getting completely out of hand. Sanctuary’s feline population just can’t keep up with them. The two little boy kittens that we rescued way back when are now fully male … as in they are spraying everything that they can which is terminally gross. One of them has started to roam and I fear one day he’ll leave the compound and never return. The other little boy cat doesn’t seem quite as bent on roaming but he is twice as aggressive. That one I may have to send off somewhere myself; he’s nearly attacked Sarah and Bekah twice now and that isn’t going to continue. He doesn’t do it to me but then again I’m top cat around here, the girls however appear to be fair game. Maybe I’ll talk to Austin and see if he knows if there is another way to fix him. That might calm his ferociousness down some.
Pup is one strange dog. She is a mouse hunter. Whoever heard of a mouse hunting dog?! I really do think that dog must have been brain damaged or traumatized or something. She doesn’t want to have much to do with the big dogs except for Mischief and only when Mischief is in the mood to be very tolerant. At least Pup keeps the rats and mice out of the garden.
The gardens are doing fairly well. I’m losing a few things here and there to the squirrels which really lights my tail feathers on fire but I’m not sure what I can do about it at this stage. I have the kids building little cages for individual plants or long caged “tunnels” over some of the rows but we don’t have a lot of spare chicken wire just lying around; it’s not like we can just run to Home Depot, Lowes, or Ace Hardware to grab another roll any time we want it. I tried putting up chain link but the varmints just crawled through the holes. I tried using clear plastic and screening from the destroyed houses but the squirrels just chewed through that. Anything too solid keeps in too much heat and “cooks” my little plants.
The main problem with the squirrels is over population. We don’t really eat them because the ones around here have problems with worms and other parasites. There aren’t enough predators to take them out … sure as heck they aren’t playing chicken with cars and getting taken out that way. When Angus is feeling better I may ask if he can organize something that the younger kids can do.
Squirrels and rats aren’t the only rodent-caused headaches I’m having. Those rabbits that the guys brought back? What started out as just a couple has blossomed into a pretty good sized bunny hutch. Only the adults that were brought back are big enough to eat yet and I don’t want to do that because then we’d lose our breeding stock. But we are definitely going to have to do something. We’ve got almost too much livestock to take care of these days.
One of the angoras got out the other day and I was standing there like an idiot telling it to go back home and getting mad because it wasn’t doing anything but hiding in the grass. About that time Sarah comes around the corner with Pup on a leash and I finally realized my mistake. Sarah thought it was hilarious. Hmmmm. Well, at least she got a kick out of it.
Aside from the demon squirrels I’ve managed to hold onto most of the garden, all of them actually. The only place that I was hacked off was one that I should have known better than to tempt fate with. I planted a small patch of greens within sight of the goat pen, before they were moved permanently into the large animal enclosure. Goats will be goats and I don’t know if there is a fence on earth that will really keep a goat in if it wants something on the other side of it. Boy did those collards give Ol’ Billy a belly ache. Otherwise, no harm no foul as it was one of my redundant back up gardens.
Most of the Temple tangerines have been harvested. I’ve managed to juice quite a few as well as can whole segments. The remaining ones will go into fruit salads until they are all gone. That’s if the kids don’t eat them all first. Some of the kids just can’t seem to help themselves, they are always hungry. Mostly the crowd that was under the “care” of the pirates. They probably have food issues or whatever you want to diagnose it as and it’s hard to convince them that there will be enough tomorrow. They still wolf their dinner down but not as badly as they did in the beginning.
Poke salad greens are finally starting to come up. I would have expected to see them sooner but the weather must have held them back. I’m pretty sure we’ve seen the last of the really cool weather which is a relief to me. Of course come summer I’ll probably be singing a different tune.
The tropical apricots and the loquats are coming in nicely as well. The loquats took a little bit of a beating in that windstorm the other night but I think I got most of them up off the ground before any harm was done.
I can’t wait for all the other stuff to be ready for harvest. The radishes are almost there and they’ll be a really nice addition to the salad greens that are maturing.
I’ve spent most of the afternoon trying to get some organization going so that the group of us that is going can leave and make a gathering run tomorrow. I’m a little concerned about the whole situation. I don’t know how I got elected to this position. Sure I wanted to go on the run but I’m talking about all the other stuff. Setting the meal schedule, making sure the Wall watches and hospital watches are covered and coordinated, making sure the kids all have chore charts to keep them out of trouble. Part of me feels like I’m being really bossy but when I try and get some other people’s opinions they just look at me like “why are you asking me?!” I just don’t get it. Individually all of the women have a pretty good dose of independence but as a group it’s like everyone is looking for someone else to take the lead. I can understand Anne and Saen not being interested in the position, they are still feeling their way around here in Sanctuary. I can also see why maybe Rhonda or some of the other younger women don’t want the responsibility or feel like they may not have enough experience yet. But Betty and Reba? What about Patricia?
I try and not get too bent out of shape. Actually I think I’ve handled the last few days rather well. I didn’t panic, cry, pitch a fit, or any other less than constructive behavior. I got a few snide comments for an overheard comment to one of my own kids where I told them that it was going to be ok, to “have faith.” I guess when people don’t feel well that they don’t exhibit as much tolerance as they would otherwise. Gets to me sometimes how I’m supposed to have tolerance and understanding for other folks but they don’t offer any to me or mine on this subject. Oh nothing that I haven’t had to deal with over the years even when things were good but it does give me pause and it is a warning that people are always going to be people no matter what the environment they find themselves in is.
Speaking of people’s attitudes and perceptions I’ve asked everyone that feels like it to give me something for my journal. Some are playing around with the idea but not everyone has done it yet. Other priorities; but the short blurb that Chris gave me tells me that I’m not the only one that takes my personal beliefs seriously and tries not to freak other people out.
------------------------------------------
Something I think bears a bit of explanation is my habit of going off on my own for a while, as well as that rosary I keep with me. Religion’s always been a big part of my life (thanks to my mother) and my meditations are a way of keeping that alive. Plus, seeing as there isn’t any sort of priest down here, I need to see to it myself. The rosary itself is a bit of an heirloom. It was given to me for my Confirmation by my mother, who got it from her mother, who in turn got it from her mother. After four generations in the same family, something like that gets pretty valuable to a person. I’m not gonna get all preachy or anything. It’s just an old habit that refuses to die and a way to remember my family. Sorry if I’ve been weirding anyone out with that, but maybe the explanation makes it seem less odd. Hopefully, this helps explain the "why" behind the "what."
-----------------------------------------
I thought it was sweet of him to explain things like that, especially given how important we all can see the occasional bit of alone time is to him. I’ll have to tell Scott, James, and David and hopefully they can head off anything that might turn snarky; though on second thought maybe I'll leave off the "sweet" comment as that might not go over well with the guys. I really don’t foresee anything uncomfortable happening, but like I said people are people and sometimes people just don’t seem to be able to control how they react to stuff.
For instance, I know it is just about killing Scott to let me lead this run. He said some really hurtful things without even realizing he was being hurtful. Maybe it was how I was taking it but then again, all he did was make me even more determined to go.
Matlock and Dix are still too weak to do much more than fuss but I know that if even the tiniest of things go wrong they’ll put us all in a gilded cage for quite some time. Cotton batting and gilded cages were never the fashion statement I wanted to make so I’m praying and planning that things go well and turn out constructive. I think the only reason that we are still getting to go is because James, who has made an amazingly quick recovery though he is still on soft foods, will be going as will Eric. Samuel would go if he could but that isn't happening. Despite his size he is still very sick which means to me he may have gotten a heavier contamination than some of the others.
Once the other guys all started acting like they were well enough to complain about being bored I asked them if they wanted to take the time to write something down for my journal. That shut quite a few of them up really fast, although I think of few of them were scribbling notes and saying they would get back to me later.
I also had to deal with Jim's bit of hard headedness today. He was walking – just barely – and insisted he could walk himself to the outhouse without our help. After a while you just have to give a guy some room to have some dignity so we let him go. When he didn’t come back though a couple of us got worried and went looking for him. When I found him he was over near the still. He was “just checking” on it, or at least that's what he said. Well, I’ll buy that as the last thing we want is an exploding still on top of everything else we have going.
However, he wanted to show me something. He took me over towards a lesser used area of the Wall and asked me to look in the container. Unsure of what I would find I slowly looked inside. A luuuuuuve nest; complete with mattress, candles, pillows, and a cooler of canned snacks. The number of people that would have to do this is rather small. On the other hand, maybe one of the married/committed couples was using it as a getaway. I don’t know, but this only reinforces the idea that some things are going on below the surface that I don’t know about. I wouldn’t care except that I suspect this might be some of the kids … or maybe it was leftover from Marty’s highjinks, I’m not sure. Makes me go all mother hen-ish however and that isn’t good.
By the time we actually did get back to the hospital Jim was exhausted and slept most of the afternoon away. I’ve put Tina, Rose, and Melody on notice that he’s probably going to try the same thing tomorrow and they may have to pole ax him to get him to stay put.
And with that bit of nonsense I am off to bed. I am taking early watch, the one that David normally takes. This will leave them plenty of day watch staff and I can go on the run with a clear conscience. I thought I would be more excited about going after having to fight so hard to set it up. Maybe I’m just tired. Hopefully I’ll lighten up tomorrow and can have some much needed fun with it.
Today’s been a slow bit of recovery. It seems that everyone that was gonna get it, got it, and is now at least on the road to recovery if not actually recovered.
I’m even too tired to have heartburn. I asked Saen if she would mind making that curry again for those of us who could eat; everyone that had had the shigella/dysentery thing was still on liquid diets. I was thankful she said yes because I just couldn’t face the kitchen after all the dirty, grungy work I’ve done today. I managed to write the recipe down this time.
Thai Red Curry
15 oz. coconut milk
1/2 chicken,chopped into small pieces(you can also use other birds, pork, beef, ect.)
3 tablespoons of sugar
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup bamboo shoots, sliced into ribbons
5 leaves Thai sweet basil, chopped.
2 tablespoons "Nam Pla" aka fish sauce
1-5 tablespoons Thai Red Curry Paste (to taste)
Red Curry Paste-
1/2 cup fresh Thai Red Bird Peppers
1/8 cup garlic
1/8 cup small (indian) onions
1/8 cup lemongrass
1/8 cup galingal root
1/8 cup green Thai peppers
1 pinch cinnamon
1 tblspoon grated fresh ginger
2 kahfir lime leaves, minced
juice of 1 lime
1 tsp salt
3 tablespoons sugar
Pound in a mortar and pestle until you have a paste. Put coconut milk into saucepan. Stir while bringing to a boil. Add curry paste herbs and fish sauce. Stir and bring back to a boil, and add chicken, hold at a slow boil for 5 minutes, add 2 cups of water, salt, and sugar. Simmer and stir until chicken is cooked thoroughly. Garnish with sweet Thai basil.
We were all very lucky that Saen brought her Thai veggie seeds back with her. I’m amazed they survived everything she and Glenn have been through. She had them stored in little film canisters and we put up a green house for her and keep it heated on cold days/night for the stuff out of season.
Something else that Glenn and Saen have shared is how you can take a member of the ginger family called Galingale, chop it up and then crush it to release its resin and then you mix that with water, ferment overnight, and then strain the biomass to create an extract. Then you take that extract and mix it in a 1:10 ration to more water and spray it directly on your fruit trees and bushes to prevent fruit flies which can be a bad problem in the subtropics and tropics. I happen to know that a patch of this was planted over in the USF Botanical Garden and we'll definitely be getting starts so I can grow some plots of this around Sanctuary. Plus one for the good guys; now we have a completely herbal remedy for some varmints that could destroy our fruit supply.
I can’t wait until all my really hot peppers are ready for harvest. I’m going to use them to poison the rat and mice population around here. They are getting completely out of hand. Sanctuary’s feline population just can’t keep up with them. The two little boy kittens that we rescued way back when are now fully male … as in they are spraying everything that they can which is terminally gross. One of them has started to roam and I fear one day he’ll leave the compound and never return. The other little boy cat doesn’t seem quite as bent on roaming but he is twice as aggressive. That one I may have to send off somewhere myself; he’s nearly attacked Sarah and Bekah twice now and that isn’t going to continue. He doesn’t do it to me but then again I’m top cat around here, the girls however appear to be fair game. Maybe I’ll talk to Austin and see if he knows if there is another way to fix him. That might calm his ferociousness down some.
Pup is one strange dog. She is a mouse hunter. Whoever heard of a mouse hunting dog?! I really do think that dog must have been brain damaged or traumatized or something. She doesn’t want to have much to do with the big dogs except for Mischief and only when Mischief is in the mood to be very tolerant. At least Pup keeps the rats and mice out of the garden.
The gardens are doing fairly well. I’m losing a few things here and there to the squirrels which really lights my tail feathers on fire but I’m not sure what I can do about it at this stage. I have the kids building little cages for individual plants or long caged “tunnels” over some of the rows but we don’t have a lot of spare chicken wire just lying around; it’s not like we can just run to Home Depot, Lowes, or Ace Hardware to grab another roll any time we want it. I tried putting up chain link but the varmints just crawled through the holes. I tried using clear plastic and screening from the destroyed houses but the squirrels just chewed through that. Anything too solid keeps in too much heat and “cooks” my little plants.
The main problem with the squirrels is over population. We don’t really eat them because the ones around here have problems with worms and other parasites. There aren’t enough predators to take them out … sure as heck they aren’t playing chicken with cars and getting taken out that way. When Angus is feeling better I may ask if he can organize something that the younger kids can do.
Squirrels and rats aren’t the only rodent-caused headaches I’m having. Those rabbits that the guys brought back? What started out as just a couple has blossomed into a pretty good sized bunny hutch. Only the adults that were brought back are big enough to eat yet and I don’t want to do that because then we’d lose our breeding stock. But we are definitely going to have to do something. We’ve got almost too much livestock to take care of these days.
One of the angoras got out the other day and I was standing there like an idiot telling it to go back home and getting mad because it wasn’t doing anything but hiding in the grass. About that time Sarah comes around the corner with Pup on a leash and I finally realized my mistake. Sarah thought it was hilarious. Hmmmm. Well, at least she got a kick out of it.
Aside from the demon squirrels I’ve managed to hold onto most of the garden, all of them actually. The only place that I was hacked off was one that I should have known better than to tempt fate with. I planted a small patch of greens within sight of the goat pen, before they were moved permanently into the large animal enclosure. Goats will be goats and I don’t know if there is a fence on earth that will really keep a goat in if it wants something on the other side of it. Boy did those collards give Ol’ Billy a belly ache. Otherwise, no harm no foul as it was one of my redundant back up gardens.
Most of the Temple tangerines have been harvested. I’ve managed to juice quite a few as well as can whole segments. The remaining ones will go into fruit salads until they are all gone. That’s if the kids don’t eat them all first. Some of the kids just can’t seem to help themselves, they are always hungry. Mostly the crowd that was under the “care” of the pirates. They probably have food issues or whatever you want to diagnose it as and it’s hard to convince them that there will be enough tomorrow. They still wolf their dinner down but not as badly as they did in the beginning.
Poke salad greens are finally starting to come up. I would have expected to see them sooner but the weather must have held them back. I’m pretty sure we’ve seen the last of the really cool weather which is a relief to me. Of course come summer I’ll probably be singing a different tune.
The tropical apricots and the loquats are coming in nicely as well. The loquats took a little bit of a beating in that windstorm the other night but I think I got most of them up off the ground before any harm was done.
I can’t wait for all the other stuff to be ready for harvest. The radishes are almost there and they’ll be a really nice addition to the salad greens that are maturing.
I’ve spent most of the afternoon trying to get some organization going so that the group of us that is going can leave and make a gathering run tomorrow. I’m a little concerned about the whole situation. I don’t know how I got elected to this position. Sure I wanted to go on the run but I’m talking about all the other stuff. Setting the meal schedule, making sure the Wall watches and hospital watches are covered and coordinated, making sure the kids all have chore charts to keep them out of trouble. Part of me feels like I’m being really bossy but when I try and get some other people’s opinions they just look at me like “why are you asking me?!” I just don’t get it. Individually all of the women have a pretty good dose of independence but as a group it’s like everyone is looking for someone else to take the lead. I can understand Anne and Saen not being interested in the position, they are still feeling their way around here in Sanctuary. I can also see why maybe Rhonda or some of the other younger women don’t want the responsibility or feel like they may not have enough experience yet. But Betty and Reba? What about Patricia?
I try and not get too bent out of shape. Actually I think I’ve handled the last few days rather well. I didn’t panic, cry, pitch a fit, or any other less than constructive behavior. I got a few snide comments for an overheard comment to one of my own kids where I told them that it was going to be ok, to “have faith.” I guess when people don’t feel well that they don’t exhibit as much tolerance as they would otherwise. Gets to me sometimes how I’m supposed to have tolerance and understanding for other folks but they don’t offer any to me or mine on this subject. Oh nothing that I haven’t had to deal with over the years even when things were good but it does give me pause and it is a warning that people are always going to be people no matter what the environment they find themselves in is.
Speaking of people’s attitudes and perceptions I’ve asked everyone that feels like it to give me something for my journal. Some are playing around with the idea but not everyone has done it yet. Other priorities; but the short blurb that Chris gave me tells me that I’m not the only one that takes my personal beliefs seriously and tries not to freak other people out.
------------------------------------------
Something I think bears a bit of explanation is my habit of going off on my own for a while, as well as that rosary I keep with me. Religion’s always been a big part of my life (thanks to my mother) and my meditations are a way of keeping that alive. Plus, seeing as there isn’t any sort of priest down here, I need to see to it myself. The rosary itself is a bit of an heirloom. It was given to me for my Confirmation by my mother, who got it from her mother, who in turn got it from her mother. After four generations in the same family, something like that gets pretty valuable to a person. I’m not gonna get all preachy or anything. It’s just an old habit that refuses to die and a way to remember my family. Sorry if I’ve been weirding anyone out with that, but maybe the explanation makes it seem less odd. Hopefully, this helps explain the "why" behind the "what."
-----------------------------------------
I thought it was sweet of him to explain things like that, especially given how important we all can see the occasional bit of alone time is to him. I’ll have to tell Scott, James, and David and hopefully they can head off anything that might turn snarky; though on second thought maybe I'll leave off the "sweet" comment as that might not go over well with the guys. I really don’t foresee anything uncomfortable happening, but like I said people are people and sometimes people just don’t seem to be able to control how they react to stuff.
For instance, I know it is just about killing Scott to let me lead this run. He said some really hurtful things without even realizing he was being hurtful. Maybe it was how I was taking it but then again, all he did was make me even more determined to go.
Matlock and Dix are still too weak to do much more than fuss but I know that if even the tiniest of things go wrong they’ll put us all in a gilded cage for quite some time. Cotton batting and gilded cages were never the fashion statement I wanted to make so I’m praying and planning that things go well and turn out constructive. I think the only reason that we are still getting to go is because James, who has made an amazingly quick recovery though he is still on soft foods, will be going as will Eric. Samuel would go if he could but that isn't happening. Despite his size he is still very sick which means to me he may have gotten a heavier contamination than some of the others.
Once the other guys all started acting like they were well enough to complain about being bored I asked them if they wanted to take the time to write something down for my journal. That shut quite a few of them up really fast, although I think of few of them were scribbling notes and saying they would get back to me later.
I also had to deal with Jim's bit of hard headedness today. He was walking – just barely – and insisted he could walk himself to the outhouse without our help. After a while you just have to give a guy some room to have some dignity so we let him go. When he didn’t come back though a couple of us got worried and went looking for him. When I found him he was over near the still. He was “just checking” on it, or at least that's what he said. Well, I’ll buy that as the last thing we want is an exploding still on top of everything else we have going.
However, he wanted to show me something. He took me over towards a lesser used area of the Wall and asked me to look in the container. Unsure of what I would find I slowly looked inside. A luuuuuuve nest; complete with mattress, candles, pillows, and a cooler of canned snacks. The number of people that would have to do this is rather small. On the other hand, maybe one of the married/committed couples was using it as a getaway. I don’t know, but this only reinforces the idea that some things are going on below the surface that I don’t know about. I wouldn’t care except that I suspect this might be some of the kids … or maybe it was leftover from Marty’s highjinks, I’m not sure. Makes me go all mother hen-ish however and that isn’t good.
By the time we actually did get back to the hospital Jim was exhausted and slept most of the afternoon away. I’ve put Tina, Rose, and Melody on notice that he’s probably going to try the same thing tomorrow and they may have to pole ax him to get him to stay put.
And with that bit of nonsense I am off to bed. I am taking early watch, the one that David normally takes. This will leave them plenty of day watch staff and I can go on the run with a clear conscience. I thought I would be more excited about going after having to fight so hard to set it up. Maybe I’m just tired. Hopefully I’ll lighten up tomorrow and can have some much needed fun with it.