The New Wood Stove

Summer before last, our sons got together and bought us a new wood stove. It was supposed to be a surprise for their dad. Unfortunately, they didn't really understand what to get. They both knew what our old one looked like, but there were no others like it at the store. What they did have was the best and latest designs made by people who had never needed to rely on wood heat for a single day in their lives, nothing more than the occasional campfire, that is. 

Our old stove had seen some better days. It was starting to leak around the edges here and there and one leg could fall off, but it stayed there if you didn't bother it. The leaks, we calked with some stuff that was made for that, but that was starting to crack away. No biggy really. It worked. The shelf up inside was there to keep the heat from shooting directly up the pipe. It did its job, but it also would catch whatever fell down out of the pipe, and if it collected enough, it blocked off the flow. That shelf could be lifted out, but I didn't know that for most of its life. On hindsight, I probably should have left it out, but it wasn't in the way in any other way than to catch ash. After it broke, I couldn't get the rest of it out.

I was in on the secret because the boys knew they couldn't pull it off with both of us oblivious, not while one was out here and the other one was in town doing the shopping. Anyway, part of the conversation on what to buy involved how big the house was. What they ended up with was this little baby stove that looked so cute, but it was supposed to be able to heat up a house this size. It does, but it takes forever to get it there. 

That salesman must have seen my son coming from a mile off, and he sold him the smallest thing possible with all the fancy bells and whistles imaginable. He really took him for a ride and a half. This cute little stove is good enough for a weekend cabin that's about the size of a postage stamp. Relying on it for actual winter heat is a whole other issue, especially when the outside temperatures are hanging out at minus temperatures Fahrenheit. There has been more 0 or colder temps this winter so far than I can remember.

So what is the problem with this stove? To begin with, those fancy bells and whistles don't work. Well maybe they do a little, but not enough to make them worth the extra expense. There's like three teers of creosote reburners up inside. Now, don't get me wrong, creosote is some nasty stuff. It can eat your stove pipe from the inside out. The trouble is, the stovepipe gets eaten out anyway sooner or later. 

When we built this place, we used the heavy insulated pipe from probably about four feet from the floor to all the way up through the roof. The creosote ended up nearly closing it off and we had no way of chipping it out. All the things we bought that was supposed to dissolve that just didn't. 

We swapped those out for galvanized pipes a few years ago, and they lasted a year. We then swapped those out for steel pipes, but they didn't last much longer. Now, we have double-walled welded pipes and a new stove. The problem with all those reburner levels is that they take up space. Not only does the firewood need to be like four inches shorter, they can't be any bigger than my wrist or there's no room for more than like four or five pieces. This morning (and yesterday), it took four hours before the stove was producing enough heat to start bringing up the temperature in the house. Night before last, I didn't stuff the stove in the middle of the night, so it was completely cold. Last night I did, and I probably should have done it twice last night. This morning, the stove was still warm to the touch, but it still took four hours of burning before it got too warm to touch and thus started actually heating the house. Thanks to all that useless clutter up inside, we almost need to stuff the stove every hour or so. If it gets any colder, we'll need to sleep in shifts - might need to anyway.

Another thing that's wrong with this stove is the fact that it leaks worse than out old one. We almost need to pull the whole thing apart and put that spun glass cordage into every seam. Unless it's cold, and the stove is roaring, smoke leaks out of every seam, or it produces no heat at all. The worst part was the flu in the door can't be shut down all the way, which makes it impossible to run a little kindlin fire on those morning when it's just a bit nippy, but we don't want a fire all day long. 

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Arizona

  

 

 

Arizona is a unique place. I grew up in Eastern Colorado in an area called the sandhills, and there's plenty of sand dunes to earn the name. I always thought I lived in a desert, but it doesn't really compare to here. Spring in Golden Valley AZ is really kinda pretty, though it has been a very dry spring so not all the colors are showing up; I'm told the valley got its name because of the profusion of golden flowers when they bloom. There is, however, more color than I recall back home. I haven't been there in a long time and last time I was there it was really dry and dead looking compared to what I remember as a kid. However, there, there was sagebrush, yucca, and prickly pear cactus (with yellow flowers, I'm told), and some pretty good grazing for cattle in between. Here, though I see cattle here and there, I have no idea what they eat. Where they are, it is generally open range to a degree, so I think they allow more acreage per head than at home. 

The ground here is compacted rocky debris from the surrounding once-upon-a-time mountains with very little topsoil, though I don't understand why there's no topsoil to speak of. Maybe it all gets washed away with the flashfloods that happen when they do get rain - no idea. But there are lots of interesting bushes and scrub trees and such. 99% of them are covered with thorns, some form of sticker, or are pointy. Others produce some form of burr that might not actually stick you, but they get into your clothes and are hard to get out again. The rest is a very low, very dry, scrub grass that's just barely hanging on. Maybe if there was a little more rain, it would be greener, but it has rained only once since I've been here and then it was only for like five minutes. 

There are some green lawns here. We go to the park every few days for softball practice, and there's green lawns all around there. Of course, they are maintained by automatic watering systems, which turn on probably every night for a few minutes.

One thing I find odd is how few homes bother with a maintained any kind of lawn. The other day we were in Kingman AZ for a couple appointments for the baby that were a couple hours apart. We killed time by having breakfast in a restaurant in between and I don't remember where else we went - a store I think - before going to the second appointment. Those two appointments were not at the same place. At any rate, we were driving around town on some of the back streets to avoid the highway and its traffic. I was stunned by how many homes had graveled yards. It was nice-looking, and most of yards were like postage stamp size, which would have made mowing annoying, but all gravel? I have to say, those people must not have had any kids or pets - you can't really play on gravel and letting your dog poop there would be just yucky. I think I spotted only one or two yards with grass (green) and one I noticed with a more natural growth (meaning the dry scrub grass found everywhere else). I'm not sure if that was watered, but I don't think so. I'm not even sure that house was lived in.

The days are already reaching into the 80s and the nights are not getting quite as cool, but the wind, while annoying, keeps it from feeling quite so hot. I admit to avoiding the sun, but I can't really do that at the park. I can only say that I haven't sunburned yet, and I really kind of expected to. Still, though I find it pretty and interesting, I am not a fan of Arizona. Last time I was here it was winter, and while cooler, it wasn't much better. For me, I would wish for the wind to just go away. All that's left for me to experience here (I think) is one of those heavy rains that cause some of the flooding I've been told about. Some of the back roads have signs warning of possible water over the pavement, but I have yet to see such an event. 

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Homemade Soap #4

Rethinking can sometimes bite me. You'd think I'd learn, but I'm always rethinking something.

Last year I only worked the last 10 days or so and no one used those nifty little soaps I made - sigh. This year, I only worked like half the year, but that's okay - I'm getting too old for this job, plus, I really wanted to welcome my new granddaughter into the world. She was such a tiny doll and she liked to curl up on my tummy, but once again I digress.

As I took over the cabins, I discovered that no one had used my soaps and I had more sitting at home, and no room for them here, so they stayed there. As I worked, I thought on display. Since I was still working on those last soaps from my very first efforts, I was still working on square bars, and they stood up nicely beside the little bottle of shampoo (I think it's like 3 oz, but don't quote me on that). So it would stay on it's side, with my handwritten label in plain view, I angled it slightly with one edge against the wall of the cabinet (there is a nice little cubby perfect for this display) and the other edge supported by the shampoo bottle.

It's this display that I was considering. Throughout all my soap making, my goal was a small bar that was oblong - rather like the bars you buy in a store without any indented stamps or fancy shapes - just rectangular and nice looking.

But...

Looking at my display, those bars that were smaller would have looked really small, and I didn't think there would be enough room to write my label. I thought about this issue all summer long as I worked through my soaps. Finally, like maybe a month from the end of the season, I made my decision. If I remade all those smaller soaps, aiming for the larger size, I would end up with less (in number) bars. (Remember, I had 3 bins that each held 36 bars, and thanks to no one else using them, they were overfull, which is why my most recent batch stayed home) I went through all those bars, wrapped the next 36 bars to pack into the now empty bin. They'd been curing for 2 years now, so I was confident that they would be fine next year. I even taped them closed and wrote my label on them. With luck, the next girl would see the label and know to use them - with luck. Who knows, maybe I'll be there next year, but I'm not planning on it - not much anyway.

End result of removing all the smaller bars, what was used this summer, and what I'd wrapped up already, left only one bin of extra soaps to cure for another winter.

To make sure I would fill my block mold to the brim, I allotted 3 pounds of soap to a batch. Following my tried and true recipe, that meant I would need to add 1.5 cups of water to the shredded soap. So, my jar that I melt my soap in doesn't hold 3 pounds of shredded soap, I mean, it's close, but I didn't want to pack it in, however, after adding the water and starting the heating, it wasn't long before I could pour the rest of the soap into the jar.

Making homemade soap in this manner has always been a learning curve, and I think this effort is my best yet, but I'm getting ahead of myself. At 3 pounds of soap per batch, I ended up with 5 big blocks. Each block yields 12 bars. Not a bad haul if I do say so myself. It kinda reminds me of my very first effort - I'd hoarded so many used bars of soap, which is why this whole adventure got started.

I did something different this year - ever so slightly. This year like 99% of all the soap was my recycles being recycled again. Last year all the full sized Dove bars that had been used had also been thrown away. They were gone from my shelf and just plain gone - what a waste. I hate waste. Anyway, what I did different was melt the soap until the water I was melting it in actually bubbled. Before I'd only waited long enough for the soap to be stir-able - not that the soap got any thinner, but it appears as if it did more melting. Before slivers of different colors from different kinds of soaps could be seen. This year, there's still some variation in the colors, but my efforts to use white bars seems to have made a difference. They're all a creamy color now (not counting a speck or two), and I think they'll cure a lot nicer too, but only time will tell there too.

Another thing I did different was to turn all the soap into my 5 blocks (5 blocks = 5 days), and then on day 6, I started to slice them into their 12 bars - one per day - the oldest one first. You get the idea. Before starting the next bar, I put the last ones down into a square bucket (My husband had weedeated a hole in the bottom, so it was worthless as a water bucket. It was going to get burned, but I'm glad I was able to repurpose it. Between the layers of soap, I put cardboard cut to fit. When all 60 of my bars were in the bucket, the last cardboard square was level with the very top of the bucket.

My plan at this point is that I will let them sit like that until somewhere around the 1st of next month and then I will trim them up and shave off the rough edges - make them pretty, you know - and then put them back in the bucket to cure for the rest of the winter.

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Update October 4

So I prettied up all 60 of my bars and ended up with a whole lot of shavings, so I decided I'd melt them into bars. I figured if they were on the small side, I'd just recycle them with next year's project. As it turned out, they were a little smaller than the others, but still square, so I'll give them a few days to dry and then pretty them up too. Two more layers of soap in my bucket will make it too full, but I'll think of something. I'm eyeing a brown paper bag to see if I can decrease the space between layers, but we'll see. 

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Summer in a Hurry

 Let me start this by announcing that subscriptions by email are going away sometime in the middle of this summer, so if you subscribe to any of my blogs, you will no longer be getting those cool emails when I post something. I have no idea if it will be replaced by something else - we'll have to see.

Now on to my post

Less than a week ago temperatures were reaching 0F or colder over night, but the longer days, they were getting into the 30sF and 40sF. For the last few nights, it's not been getting below freezing at night, so it has become time to start worrying about the boats. The goal for today was to go down and shovel out the last boat we pulled, which happened to be the lowest on the bank (easier to launch, you see)

Needless to say, it didn't go quite so simply. 

We headed out knowing the snowmachine trail was going to be soft, but not too soft for the machine. Even going down our hill wasn't bad. Everything was going pretty much as expected all the way until after my husband dropped me off by the boats and headed on down to the river to turn around.

Herein things started to go bad

As soon as my husband hit the bottom of the ramp, soft snow to the side of the trail grabbed a ski and sucked him off the trail and onto his side. I was still putting on my snowshoes, but as soon as I got them on, I headed down to help him. That ramp is a mite steep and I knew it, but I hoped the claws on the bottom of my snowshoes would help. I also had my shovel to use as something of a crutch. That got me about three quarters of the way down when I slipped. I tried to jog ahead in hopes of keeping my feet under me. Needless to say, I sprawled on my face - not hard - I didn't hurt anything - just kinda humiliating - good for a laugh. 

I helped dig the machine out enough to get it mostly upright while my husband unhooked the empty sled (we were going to pick up some firewood on the way back to the house). He dropped the hitch pin into the sled, but I didn't know that. While he was making the loop, I went to roll the sled off the trail so he could get by (bye bye hitch pin). Now he tells me. So, while he goes back to the house for the smaller machine (easier to haul around if needed), and a new hitch pin, I make like an archeologist and go scraping for the missing pin. I finally found it - yay! just as he was showing up again.

He comes down and almost does the same thing as last time, this time aiming directly at me though I was standing off the side of the trail behind where the sled was now. He didn't really get stuck, but he might have if he didn't have to stop. I get me and the sled farther out of the way, and he goes out to do the loop again, this time finding water, but he didn't get stuck in it. He stops at the top of the island so he has a better run at the ramp up off the river, so I push the sled to him so we can hook it up again. The hardest part of doing that was my snowshoes, the sled slid along just fine. 

We get everything hooked up and he takes his run, and the crust - what there was of it - breaks out from under his machine and he gets stuck almost at the top of that ramp - damn!!!! We have to get that machine back down, turned around, and make another run after all our holes are filled in - sigh.

That nice little machine came sliding down that hill just fine after we lifted it out of it's hole. My husband's knee took some painful punishment, and my snowshoe punched down knocking me down almost behind it. I put my other foot on the machine to keep from getting run over, but I got pushed along a few feet anyway. I felt like a turtle on my back at that moment, but it was kinda funny. I just lay there for a few minutes catching my breath and trying to figure out what I could do to get my feet under me again. With my feet slightly higher than my shoulders, it took a little planning. That's the bad thing about snowshoes. I'm glad they were the little ones. I like those. I now have a new bruise on my back hip from when I ended up on the sled's hitch. No biggie, but both of us are getting pretty tired, and we still haven't even gotten to the chore we came down here to do.

We pulled the machine back until we ran out of help from gravity and out of oomph to pull with. Then my husband went to fill in holes while I packed a space wide enough to pull the machine around on. 

Sigh - definitely running out of oomph. 

We got the machine turned around - eternally grateful it was as little as it was - and then he made a run for the ramp without the sled - - - and made it, though it was a close one. 

Next order of business was to go dig up a rope so we could pull the sled up.

We made our snowshoed way over to the boats, going the easy way, which required walking around the back end of our big boat, only to be reminded that there's not much ground behind that boat. No real problem, just shovel some snow into low spots and pack it down. Not bad really. Just running out of ju ju. We worked our way around to the rope we were after; it led from the boat we were going to shovel out to the front of the big boat. I got it all uncovered, but a part of it- about a foot or so - was frozen to the ground, so that rope wasn't going anywhere today. It's uncovered; the snow will melt that in no time at all.

We wended our way back to the snowmachine, and while I was catching my breath, my husband was taking off his snowshoes. As I was taking mine off, he decided to go after the sled and just push it up. It's not all that heavy, and it slides well. The issue is the hill. He gets it most of the way up the ramp, and I'm hurrying to get my shoes off so I can help. I have to dig my heel in, but we get it up, and then we get it hooked up - sigh - almost over.

Not so fast. 

We have an almost switchback on our trail going up that hill, and guess what, he couldn't make the corner. I make my slow way up behind him and hold the brake while he pulls the front over back onto the trail and then the back of the sled over in the other direction. Then it's the rest of the way up the hill - sigh. 

Because it was the little machine (and because I didn't want to walk another six steps), I decided I could ride in the sled, sitting on my snowshoes. It worked just fine.

As I sit here typing this, I feel like I'm about 100 years old. My legs are still stiff from the other day when I hiked down the trail in my snowboots to help my husband cut a tree off the trail - that was the firewood we picked up. Only four rounds and a few sticks - I didn't get there in time to help, and I've been stiff ever since. 

Summer is looming - I really need to get into shape - sigh - not today. I've had enough exercise for one day.

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Making Beds

 I wasn't back to work for more than a day. People left and my boss and I decided to turn over a cabin to make future incoming guests easier to manage - using this cabin meant that I wouldn't have to rush a turnover in another cabin, and if cancelations happened and we ended up not needing that cabin, it's easy to break down and the laundry is all done.

So, I go in intent on needing to make only the one bed - a double, not that it matters - and I look over at the bunks. This cabin has two sets of bunk beds and a full size bed. It being so late in season, upper bunks have already been wrapped up and put away, but the bottom bunks were still made.

Mind you, I'm picky about appearances, but there was only a couple weeks total left in the season, so I was willing to overlook the style of those who worked in those cabins before, but, picky me, I decided I'd just tweak those two beds so they looked more like the one I was getting ready to make. Whoever had made them before liked to fold down the comforter, blanket, and sheet about 18 inches or so and tuck everything in all around. I always hated tucking in the comforter, because once it's out again - in use - the edge is all wrinkled, and untucked, it covers up some of the roughness of the bed frames. Another thing I used to do was iron out the wide hem on the sheets and pillowcases, because at some point in their history, before I worked with them, they crinkled up - some worse than others. My hope was that those crinkles would eventually iron out, but they never did. Laying flat, however, looks better. For just a few more days, I wasn't about to dig out the iron.

So, I was just going to spread up that fold and go back to making the original bed.

Now, mind you, when you pay anywhere between a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars to stay at a place where you will be sleeping in a bed, the last thing you should expect to do is to remake the bed so you can actually sleep in it. 

The moment I moved those blankets, I saw that whoever had made that bed before didn't give a damn about the guests that would be staying in that cabin. It made me wonder how many times she had done this very thing. It kinda made me mad, but looking back, I should have expected something of the sort because I'd already discovered a shorted blanket on another bed. Rather than spread the blanket out properly, it had been folded in half. It would have been fine if the guest was a child. An adult would have had cold feet, being left with only a sheet and the comforter to cover them. 

But back to this issue.

I grabbed those blankets to smooth them up and discovered that they only went so far as the wall, and carefully so, which pissed me off even more. I turned to the other bunk bed and discovered the same thing. Carefully smoothed to pass a casual inspection until someone sought to get in. The comforter was wide enough to nearly reach the floor once untucked from the front. Each layer was lined up to the wall as if they'd used a ruler. Not even an inch made it around the far corner of the mattress. Double my work if not my laundry. 

Sigh

Now I had 3 beds to make, but at least the end product was the way I liked it and my picky self was happy (short of the ironing).

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2020 - The Year of Changes

 Thanks to this most wonderful pandemic ravaging this world, I've been out of work all summer long. I go back tomorrow for the last days of the month - its something, but not exactly what I planned.

Being out of work this summer has kinda been a blessing. For starters, I managed to blow out my knee somehow just before coming out and snowshoeing around made it worse. Even now, it still bothers me, especially walking over uneven ground - ground slanted down is the worst. So, sitting around all summer helped that a lot. I would have had to quit, and I really didn't want to.

Another problem with me going to work - all our boats are giving up the ghost. Well, not all, but you get the idea. Last fall - oblivious to the future, of course - we had our two best running boats pulled out by a lodge owner who does that for $300 a year (winter) per boat. Not bad, they'd be back in the spring and we'd have our boats back in record time.

Then came 2020 

Then came Covid

The owners of that lodge still have not been able to come here, let alone out here to run their business. It is only thanks to the fact that locals who come down once a week to look after the place that one of those boats was launched. Not the one I usually drive. I wasn't going to work so I didn't really need it. Besides...

We had my old 'sports car' boat. Last year the steering cable broke, but we could put a tiller handle on it to steer it - so we did, but then the throttle cable was acting up worse than usual so my husband grew concerned about that, and then, last time we drove it, it wouldn't start (it has a key start, and there was nothing). Turns out it didn't recognize that it was in neutral, and if it's not in neutral, it won't start. Good thing my hubby was along - he could use a rope to start it. 

We also had a little 15hp we bought from those same lodge owners to troubleshoot, only now it runs worse than when we bought it. Correction, it ran okay when we got it, just not long enough to get me to work. No idea why. So there it sat. Now, after having sat for several years. it hardly starts at all and won't keep running. Kind of a mess.

That brings us to the one we had launched. A compression test says that it's really really low on both cylinders. I can't start it anyway. So, now that I'm going to work, my husband has to take me. Fortunately my boss brings me home. 

I was going to apply for retirement after this summer anyway.

And therein is another issue.

It would seem that the social security people think that everyone has loans so they use those loans as a means of identifying people. So, when I try to apply online, they ask me if I have these two loans and for a selection of choices for how much those loans are. Since I haven't had a loan for like 40 years or so, my information doesn't agree with theirs so I can't apply online. I might have to go to town this winter just so I can use my phone. Time will tell - sigh.

Not really a good year for me, but I suppose it could be worse.

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My Lazy Thyroid

Last winter, as it happens, we had the necessary paperwork so we decided to see if we qualified for VA benefits. As it happens, since both of us had served in the Army, both of us qualified, and since my summer job wage isn't all that impressive, and since my husband is unemployed, we qualify for 100% coverage, to include transportation to and from appointments. (We'll be testing that this winter)

Anyway, as part of our initiation, I got a blood test, and, other than being otherwise healthy, my thyroid was a mite lazy. I think they started me out on the lightest prescription, and after another blood test, they were happy with my numbers - woohoo. Now I get to take a pill for the rest of my days. That's okay - it's just a little thing, but I have to take it first thing in the morning, and then not eat or drink anything except water for half an hour - so much for my cup of coffee first thing in the morning.

However, I may have discovered my magic pill, just as I wanted. I had hopes that it would indeed be magic, that all my extra weight would melt away and I would get down to an ideal weight. Ah, but it didn't work that way. Hopes not withstanding, I knew it was doing something because I stopped gaining weight. I was 217 pounds when I weighed in for my physical, and that's where I stayed, not counting a slight monthly fluctuation. Even though I'd stopped bleeding every month long ago, my body still did it's water retention, making me tired once a month, and then I would get rid of it a few days later. I gained almost five pounds during that time, but then I was back down to 217 pounds. Well then, that was an improvement at least. Putting on a pound a week (or so) all winter long, and then being unable to get rid of all of it during the summer was getting very old. My new hope was that I might lose my summer's weight and not gain it back during the winter.

Update:

As of the third week of October - almost two months into my winter's non-working schedule, I have yet to gain a single pound - I'm thrilled. I started my summer at 217 pounds, give or take one or two pounds, and I ended the summer at 196 pounds. I need to get down to 190 before I stop snoring, but this is a good start. I'm thrilled. Best of all, I can eat again - within reason. I still eat not so much potatoes, but I can enjoy homemade bread and homemade cinnamon rolls now. I keep my indulgences to a minimum, but it's still kinda nice. Oh, and corn. I like corn, but since my husband can't eat the vegetable, I don't order it. I did, however, order some popcorn. I really like popcorn. I have missed popcorn.

Can I do the same next year? I certainly hope so. I do intend to try. It will be so nice not to start my summer feeling like a whale. Being out of shape is bad enough.

Update #2 - second year:

Went back to town for another winter and the flight thing didn't work quite as we'd been led to believe. I just love how they tell you bits of information only if you wring it out of them. My son paid for our chopper flight in, but we were able to get reimbursed for that, so, woohoo for that. What they didn't tell us was that we had to go back within 30 days to get the return flight paid for. I asked specifically about staying for several months and they said it was cool, just let them know. Ggrrrrr Even though we had more appointments just before coming out, they refused to pay for our flight back home because it had been too long. 

Anyway, as to my thyroid issue. Blood tests said my thyroid was lazy again, even with my nifty little pills so she increased the dosage. Sigh. Anyway, after taking that pill for like 3 months, I decided to quit entirely and stop taking them. My body has a bad habit. It tends to do the opposite of what medicines are supposed to do. I notice it most when I take pills that might make me drowsy. I got a pretty big buzz after taking Tylenol with Codeine when I had my wisdom teeth taken out. The thyroid controls not only weight but also energy. Supposedly, with it working properly, I should have lots of energy (which would also help me to burn off fat). However, I felt kinda tired. Nothing major - I wasn't exhausted, and I do like to sleep. Maybe I'd have noticed nothing if I was working, but thanks to this virus, I've been home. The thing that confirms my decision was that I actually felt better after I stopped. More alert. It will be something I'll talk about with my Dr. next time I see her. I tried sending a message, but I never got a reply. It is my belief that my slightly lazy thyroid is what it is, and it will refuse to be corrected. To keep trying to mess with it is to dig a danger hole I may never be able to get out of. 

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