Jude (my boss) and I walked over to the NCSU library for coffee this morning, her treat. I got a small, plain coffee, and a bagel with cream cheese. She got a large coffee to which she added goop.
We had a nice chat to and fro, some of it about my study circle experience from last night.
I had quite a busy work day all day today, and I heated up a slice of leftover pizza from last night for my lunch, which I ate at my desk.
We had our weekly department/team/staff meeting, scheduled from 2:00-3:00, but we actually finished it about 20 minutes early. We had lots of laughs toward the end of it.
Jude provided Rhonda and I each with a bottle of this homemade remedy that she heard about on the People’s Pharmacy with Terry and Joe Graedon:
Raisins in Gin to Ease ArthritisNewspaper Columns, Herb & Home Remedy Q&A November 4, 2008
Q. My husband is very interested in the remedy with raisins and gin. He is really suffering with arthritis in both knees. He takes ibuprofen or naproxen but neither helps that much. He has seen an orthopedic surgeon, but he’s not ready for knee replacement yet. Short of surgery, he is willing to try almost anything, including something silly like raisins and gin or Certo and grape juice. Can you send us the recipes? A. We have heard from many people who have found the gin-raisin remedy helpful. One wrote: “I have had both my hips replaced due to arthritis, and have been an avid golfer for over 40 years. I thought I was going to need one of my hips redone this spring due to all the pain that has come back. A few days before my spring golf trip to Nevada in mid-March, I started taking the gin and raisin remedy. “I used Fleischmann’s Gin and dark raisins (I didn’t know about the golden raisins). I took 7 a day in the morning and 7 a day before going to bed. “I have been pain free ever since. I was in agony before. My pain was gone in 48 hours from the first day I tried it.” We can’t promise your husband will get the same results, but we are sending you our Guide to Home Remedies with the recipes for gin-raisins, Certo and grape juice, and other low-cost approaches to joint pain. Tags: arthritis, Certo, hip, joint replacement, knee, raisins |
Rhonda (my officemate) is having some arthritis issues in her knees, and I have this crooked small finger on my left hand that has osteoarthritis in it to the point that it is deformed with a glaring bend inward toward my ring finger. Some of the comments about this “Raisin in Gin” therapy are quite interesting posted against the blog entry.
I got an email from my friend Casey, who would like to come and spend a couple of weeks with me in May right after I get back from my long weekend with Robert at DisneyWorld. A lot of the people on Casey’s team work here at the IBM site at RTP, and since he’s a “work from home” employee (that is, he can work from anywhere), he’s going to spend a couple of weeks working here, and go into the office to get some face time with his teammates.
I spent about four or five weeks with Casey in and around November of 2002 and in Irvine, California. We went there to work with a team from a company called Access360, which IBM acquired. It’s there that I found out Casey was gay, and that he was a line-dancer and two-stepper. Woohoo!
I worked until about 8:05 and caught the 8:13 bus home.
Not long after getting home, I headed to the gym for a late workout—from 9:30-10:30. I did some stretching, and then 200 ab crunches. During the first seven sets of 20, I was thinking, “Boy, I’m waiting too long between gym visits; these crunches feel really strenuous on my abs today.” In my 30- to 60-seconds rest between the 7th and 8th set, it occurred to me that I hadn’t checked the bench I was using before I started to see if anyone had left any weights on it. As it turned out, there were three five-pound weights on it! No wonder it was so tough! I took two of them off and did the last two sets of 20 each with just the one five-pound weight still on it.
After that, I did 40 minutes on the treadmill—on the manual setting, with an incline of 12 and a speed of 3.0. I burned off 420 calories.