Think I am getting a cold.  It will really make me angry since I will have broken my 4 year record.  Guess I should really be grateful, but Thanksgiving is coming and I have a heck of a lot of work to do.  For the past three weekends, I have done minimal housework and spent the rest of the time cloistered upstairs working with my weaving and knitting to get a lot done before Christmas.  Our Christmas is generally composed of mostly handmade gifts with a few gifts coming from elsewhere.  Always hard to remember what I knitted last year for each member of the family although I promise each year to make a list to help choose this year’s projects.   I generally start in October, but I always end up frantically hoping that I will have all done in time.  Here it is basically one month to Christmas and I am not even halfway there.  In a way, that is a wonderful situation to be in—to have family and friends that I feel so strongly about that I will stay up late and get up early to get it all done.  But, after all, what do we have but time---certainly not money!!

          Back to the threat of a cold.  For years I have promised myself to build upon the medicinal herb knowledge that I remember from my grandmothers.  I have always used my kitchen herbs copiously both for cooking and for minor medical needs – for bites, burns, colds, stomach aches, etc and have grown and dried my own, but I am going to gather my collected books, my bookmarked websites and my ancient sources and begin to study again in earnest.  The medical field is just too expensive and a little too much on the ‘surgery and pill pushing side’ and because Americans are so hesitant (read ‘downright nuts’) in not following more forward-looking nations regarding universal health care (even though after World War II, we were the ones who set up universal health care in Europe and Japan), we probably need to look to ourselves more to help ourselves.  Remember the old saying ‘Physician, heal thyself.’  So, with my anticipated retirement from the University in the next few years, I have yet another project to make my time count.