We Are What We Eat

...and we don't know where it comes from!  The recent ecoili outbreak in Europe was pretty frightening, sickening thousands of people and killing hundreds.  They might have thought they were being cautious.
This outbreak is thought to have come from vegetarian fare: sprouts, maybe the kind you grow yourself from a packet of seeds?  They still don't know for sure, the source. 
   France now is recalling hamburger thought to be made in Germany, but that is a pretty interesting story in itself.  I like a good hamburger, that is the truth, but I never know what I am eating, where it came from or what is really in the package.
   Just yesterday I was shopping and paused in the meat isle, looking at the pretty red meat packages of hamburger.  It never has brown tinted edges any more, no packaged meat has that "aged look" to it. It has the look of freshly cut beef packaged this morning.  Each plastic wrapped package is puffed up with Nitrogen Gas.  Sealed away from oxygen it will remain red and brights for weeks.  Until you open the package and then it will turn brown almost overnight.
   The hamburger in my store said, "product of Canada, USA, New Zealand, Honduras", and four other countries!  I have been told that in a one pound package of hamburger there may be the DNA of 400 to six hundred cows!  Mass slaughtering plants from all over the world gather up the bits and pieces and send this flesh to processing plants to become hamburger.
   It is not a scene of contented cows munching on  meadows and Alpine grasses.
   There is no safety in being a vegetarian, fruits and vegetables are a huge source of diseases.  Almost everything is genetically modified not only to produce more but to be resistant to the very poisons we spray around them.  Corn that is resistant to Roundup and other herbicides.  and then, we eat the corn!
   Fish are contaminated, poisoned, full of mercury or positively radioactive!  Ice Cream is full of growth hormones and we wonder why ten year old girls develop and mature so fast these days?  Must be what they eat?
   Clean water is almost impossible to find so we drink bottled water in containers known to cause cancer!
   The fire retardant chemicals they put in clothing, our curtains, our beds are in us.  We are surrounded in a sea of poisons and it is amazing that we swim at all.
My other blog is HERE

One More Time...

Having Cancer, surviving that battle, actually getting over it, healing from the horrible Voodoo Chemical
Cocktails the Voodoo Doctors give you, and well on the road to recovery gives one a new perspective on life.  What if this job, whatever I am working on, is my last job?  Eventually that happens to us all, that routine thing we do today could always be the last thing we do!  I am an artist, and, yes, I get lost and caught up in the picayune of daily chores just like others but I also make art, projects from my soul, the stuff I dream about.
   When I was in the thick of this battle, couldn't eat and slept all day, building "stuff" was mostly what I thought about.  Thinking about it was all I could do, couldn't lift 20 pounds.  I was about as close to being dead as one can get.
   Like waking up from a nightmere that won't go away I find relief that it all seems like just a dream now.
My garden is in, now waiting for better weather and it is the best it has ever been.  More stuff, better planted,
nicely worked soil, interesting paths.  I am welding, working again!

 Nice Job, just completed

   It seems that things come when you are ready for them.  I am busy now, with interesting jobs, wonderful clients and I am given "license to create".  Each job whispers to me, could be the last one?  I pay more attention now, marking details for the total effect.  I enjoy the whole process, even in the rain, and never watch the clock, never at all.

 Flowers in my garden

   In over 30 years of construction I was always after speed.  "Faster" was my mantra, the schedule was the most critical and I would always have enough employees to get the job done as quickly as possible. Finish and move on to the next job was all I cared about. This is a photo of a job I just completed, just me and one helper.  It would be okay if this were the last one.  It turned out pretty good.

Despite the weather my garden is pretty good.  The flowers are growing, eagarly waiting for that sunny day.  So far my tomatoes are just sitting.  They hate these rainy days and too cold nights, but they too will improve and thrive when the sun appears.

   I am alive now and my list just keeps growing.  I have dozens of last jobs to do, one at a time and I intend to enjoy every single one of them!

You can find me HERE too!

Permissible Risks

There is always a sense with cancer that you have done something wrong.  Somehow this is a self-inflicted disease and a punishment you deserve.  We secretly wonder what did they eat?  Were chemicals the culprit?
Smokers probably or drinking too much?  Part of the problem is we are living a lot longer than we used to and if you live long enough eventually you will die from something.  Younger people get cancer too and even then we wonder what was in the household, what is doing this to us?
    We have probably eighteen pounds of chemicals in us, poisons that are not supposed to be there.  We are all full of fire retardants and you can't hardly eat food that hasn't been genetically altered or spiced up with pesticides and herbicides. With the Nuclear escapement in Japan, they solved the problem in part by increasing the daily allowed allotment of radiation permissible!
   Cancer is just statistics.  We are allowed so many deaths per hundreds or thousands so the rugs we walk on won't burn.  We know there is death from plastic water bottles, but only so many per thousand and it is so convenient!  Permissible risk.  More people die from auto accidents than our wars going on now.  Permissible risks.  Cancer is very expensive to treat and yet it amounts to less than 5% of our National Health Budget. Permissible risks.  Even smoking, a known cause of cancer, raises billions of dollars in revenue.  Permissible risk.
    Cancer victims have become "parts per million", a permissible risk in our modern world of statistics and industrial development.  Statistics are verifiable and predictable and maybe you could charge a deposit?
If altered corn or chemically laced carpets, plastic water bottles, gasoline in our automobiles and cigarettes, and anything else is a "known cause of cancer", why not charge a health deposit?  A fee or tax to find the cure to cancer or give us the sensibility not to include these dangerous chemicals in our recipes?
   That would raise the price for everyone and that might not be an acceptable, permissible risk?  As it is it is sort of like gambling, isn't it?  Thinking all the time, no, not me, I won't be one of the "parts per million"!
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