Author Archives: Holly West

Are you looking forward to watching the presidential debate tonight?  I sure am.  Not so much from a competitive Obama vs. McCain standpoint, but more because I'm just totally into politics right now and want to hear what they have to say.  I'm hoping for some good television.

Anyhow, that's not what I wanted to talk about.  Today I did my volunteer dog walking (which I do on Monday and Friday mornings) and I got to talking with the lady I'm helping out.  I knew she was recovering from breast cancer surgery, and occasionally she's spoken about her treatment, but today we talked about it in a little more detail.  I'm worried for her, because it seems like she might be barking up some of the wrong trees.

Let me stop here and say I do not know the specifics of her treatment.  She has mentioned that she is not having chemotherapy, which is certainly a valid personal choice, however the way in which she presented this information made me think that she has a distrust of evidence-based medicine–at least as it pertains to her cancer treatment.  Furthermore, she's mentioned supplements (but complains of their expense whilst extolling their virtues, as if this validates their efficacy), special water, and a special diet.

Today, our conversation went something like this:

Lady:  Can you give the dogs some water?

Me:  Sure.  [I got the bowl and went to the sink and started filling it up].

Lady:  Oh, don't give them sink water!  Give them the water from this bottle [she points to the large water cooler with a bottle].  I never give them tap water.

Me:  [As I fill the bowl].  My dogs just get regular old tap water.

Lady:  You shouldn't do that, it has too many chemicals.  There is a big difference between tap water and this water.  You don't drink tap water, do you?

Me:  Yeah, sometimes, and sometimes bottled water.

Lady:  Bottled water is no different than tap water.  You need to drink this water.

From here she explains that her friend has a machine which uses electrolysis to take the acidity out of the water and make it alkaline, and that cancer can't grow in an alkaline environment.  There are three types–that which is for drinking, that which is for cleansing the skin, and that which is for cleaning in general.  The machine is very expensive, but apparently they have a payment plan.  She is lucky, she says, because her friend brings her the water for free.

She assures me it makes a "big difference."

I don't know what that means.

What I do know is that there is no scientific basis to her belief that this alkaline water is helping her or that acidity in the body causes disease–at least not in the way she thinks it is.  The only benefit it might be providing (besides simple hydration) is that she believes it works, and thus she feels better mentally about her situation.  Kind of a mind over matter thing, which is certainly important, but won't prevent the cancer from coming back or spreading.

In general, I am very skeptical of alternative medicine.  This isn't because I believe that evidence-based medicine has all the answers, because it doesn't.  At best, however, alternative medicine puts a premium on faith that something will work with little or no evidence to support its claims.  At worst, it is a group of hucksters looking to make big bucks on the naivety of the population. 

Much of the argument in favor of alternative medicine seems to be that evidence-based medicine has a hidden agenda (that invariably involves making money for the drug industry) and that it depends on keeping people sick rather than preventing illness.  To wit:

My advice is to stay away from "quack watch" and other self-proclaimed "quack busters." My experience is that they always have a hidden agenda, notably protecting the financial interests of the drug industry by casting aspersions on their competition – the alternative health care industry. If they would stick with the truth that would be fine. But they are constantly misrepresenting the facts and perpetuating outright lies in order to further their hidden agenda. It is not the place to find the truth.

Hmmm.  I invite you to take a look around the website I got that quote from and make a decision about its credibility yourself. 

The problem with this critique of those who speak out against quackery or are proponents of evidence-based medicine is that it is a case of the proverbial pot calling the kettle black.  What is alternative medicine if not an opportunity to sell, sell, sell?  For even the well-meaning practitioners, alternative medicine is a lucrative business opportunity which is not hampered by the shackles of scientific evidence or pesky regulators.

Look, I'm not saying that people should automatically shun alternative therapies or that there definitely isn't a place for them in medicine.  That is a personal decision that one needs to make with regard to one's own health.  But educate yourself, apply your critical thinking skills, and make an informed decision before spending your money.

I'm kind of in a weird place right now.  I've been having trouble with motivation which is a little odd for me and I'm not sure what the problem is.  While I'm not exactly unhappy, I'm not particularly happy either and this lack of motivation is contributing to this.

That said, there are a few things in my life right now that are making me very happy, and I thought rather than focusing on the negative, why not highlight the good stuff?

1)  My garden
I have never really had luck with growing vegetables or herbs, but I have high hopes for the things I planted a couple of weeks ago.  Everything is growing quite nicely, flowering where appropriate and in general preparing to bear me some lovely gifts.

This is the zucchini plant, which has several "boy flowers:"

I harvested the flower in the photo and I'm going to save it so I can use it in cooking when there are more.  My housekeeper, who seems to know everything about plants, told me I should make a quesadilla with them and I think I will.

The salad greens are growing with great speed.  To remind you, here is a photo of them when I first planted them:

And here they are today:

Finally, a very long time ago, I blogged about my nectarine tree and my hope that someday I'd actually get a piece of fruit from it.  Well friends, the time has come:

Yes, that is indeed a nectarine you see growing on the tree.  I couldn't be more proud of my little tree.  It's first fruit!

2)  Speaking Spanish
My friend Teresa's mother is from Spain and now and then, Teresa has relatives that come to visit.  For the last couple of weeks, her cousins from Madrid have been visiting and I am having a lot of fun with them.  They speak mostly Spanish and I of course speak mostly English, but talking to them has been a great opportunity to practice my Spanish (and for them to practice English).  I've long had a goal of becoming fluent–which wouldn't be all that difficult here in Southern California–but I tend to revert back to speaking English because it's so much easier.  But if you're talking to someone who doesn't speak English, your only choice is to speak Spanish.

My husband Mick is getting into it.  The other day, he found a cool website presented by the BBC called Mi Vida Loca.  It's an interactive video "mystery" that helps you learn beginning Spanish.

3)  Knitting
Despite my recent lament, I really am enjoying knitting right now.  I'm trying to get Christmas presents done early this year and it's been fun planning and working on projects.

4)  My leg muscles
I know it's an odd thing to include here, but over the course of the summer I've gained almost 10 pounds and I'm not happy about it.  Still, I've been working out fairly regularly and I've been really pleased with the shape of my legs and it's a direct result of running and working out.  The weight gain is all about food intake–I've been eating like there's no tomorrow, and even if I'm working out regularly I'm not burning off all the calories I consume.  So losing the summer weight is my current challenge, but in the mean time I am enjoying feeling good about my strength, which is most obviously seen in my legs.

I've recently added a couple of new workouts to my week and I'm excited about it going forward.  One is hill-walking.  The area around my house is very hilly and walking up and down them is a great workout.  The second workout I've added is jump rope intervals.  Wow, jumping rope is hard.  I can only do it in 30 second spurts but it feels really good and it's a little more interesting than running (kind of reminds me of my childhood recesses).

5)  Fall is coming
It's my favorite time of year, and it's right around the corner.  2008 is rushing by!

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an "I Love Lucy" episode.  You know the one where Lucy promises Ricky she'll economize so she makes her own dress?  When Ethel sees her attempt and laughs, Lucy says "I made it with my own two hands," and Ethel replies "It looks like you made it with your own two feet."  Yeah, that's the one.  That's how I often feel after finishing a knitting project.

Last week I reported that I had a WIP called Coachella.  Yesterday I finished it and today I tried it on for the first time after blocking.

This is how it's supposed to look:

Model and photos by Fathom Harvill

Very sexy, eh?

This is how it looks on me:

Note how it makes my bosom look as if it's hanging somewhere around my navel.  Note also the diapered dog in the background.  That's Kramer, my sixteen year-old, who is now outfitting himself in Pampers Cruisers.  I can't take a photo anywhere in my house without one dog or the other appearing in the background.

This photo better illustrates the droopiness created by the short rows I added to accommodate my bust:

I seemed like a good idea at the time, but I definitely didn't need the added bulk in front.

Here's the back, which from this photo doesn't look too bad.  Thank goodness for cropping!

In an attempt to salvage this top, I tried it with a jacket, thinking it would make a good shell:

And in fact it doesn't look that bad as a shell, but I'd never be able to take my jacket off, so it's unlikely I'll ever wear it this way.

All right, now for a critical analysis of what went wrong.  First and foremost, I shouldn't have added the bust shaping, but of course I had no way of knowing that until it was pretty much too late.  I did follow the recommendation in the instructions of putting the live stitches on waste yarn and trying the top on to make sure it hung right, but at the time it did seem to hang all right.  Looking back, however, I feel like I probably ignored how bulky it was in the front, thinking it would end up okay.

Note to self:  If I think something is going wrong, don't blindly finish the project hoping for the knit faerie to swoop down and magically fix it!  This is a terrible habit of mine, both in knitting and jewelry making.

The second problem might well be (and almost certainly is) a problem with the gauge.  I checked it carefully, but even then sometimes things go wrong.  The garment, which I knitted in medium, fits well in length and girth, it's mostly only the bulky front that is the problem.  It's kind of a weirdly constructed garment so perhaps the addition of the bust shaping and the slight error in gauge contributed to this.

Third, I used an entirely different kind of yarn–a cashmere blend versus "suede."  This does add bulk and might also account for the gauge problem.  I hate being restricted in my yarn choices though and if the gauge matches and I think the yarn fits the style of the garment I will usually use the different yarn.

Hmmmmm, this may account for my abysmal record of wearable finished projects.

I include this critique here because I can't possibly be the only knitter in the world who has this problem.  Or is my personality just not so well-suited to knitting something I can actually wear (besides hats, scarves, and socks)?  Sometimes I wonder.

Having never really had a yard of my own, I have never done any landscaping beyond setting up a container garden on my balcony.  One thing our Oregon house has is a backyard, and it needed a lot of attention.  Even though we’ve owned the house for a couple of years now, I didn’t want to do anything to the backyard because I figured it would all die while we were away.  This summer, however, Mick and I have been spending a lot of evenings sitting outside and staring at that ugly mudhole of a backyard was too depressing so I got to work.

See?  Ugly!

I know very little about landscaping or gardening in general, so the first thing I did was a little research on the internet.  I found a landscape plan I liked and that I thought would work for our yard:

Of course I knew I wouldn’t do anything as complicated as all this, but there were elements of this garden that I used in my own design.  First, I decided that the left hand side of the yard would use (roughly) the same type of plants as shown in the left hand side of this picture.  For this I needed tall grass, a shrub, and some smaller grasses to use as groundcover/accents.  As these plants mature, of course, they will fill in the space better.

The next element I decided to use was the water feature, although I planned on a simple garden ornament rather than a fountain.  Mick told me he’d really like a sundial, so I ordered one from yardenvy.com.

This is the space where I knew it would go:

In the “model” garden, the garden ornament is surrounded mainly by groundcover.  I decided I wanted to include some tallish flowering plants around the base of the sundial, then fill in the rest with groundcover:

Though it wasn’t part of my initial plan, I decided to add some containers to the middle of the garden.  They add balance and color to an area that would have otherwise been too plain:

The final element of my landscape was a simple cedar garden bench:

We also replaced the small bistro set we had with some more substantial (and comfortable) wicker chairs:

I am really proud of the job I did on this landscape.  First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard in my life!  They don’t call it “yard work” for nothing, that’s for sure.  More importantly, however, I planned it carefully and there was almost no waste—which is not my usual M.O.  The only things I have left over are a little potting soil and a few groundcover plants.  If you don’t count the bench, sundial and new chairs, this landscape cost well under $100 and it really transformed the yard.  If you include the bench, sundial, and chairs, the price still came in under $400, which I don’t think is bad at all if you consider that we now have an outdoor space where Mick and I sit almost every evening to read, chat, and of course, drink wine.