A few months ago, I was really keen on unplugging the refrigerator and making a go of learning to do without one, at least until our cow calved and we were deluged with milk. My husband was reluctant because these innovations always mean more work (both mentally and physically). He rightly pointed out that we were already pretty overwhelmed trying to manage what we already had going on and that going without a refrigerator is probably a pretty big project. At least at first until you get the hang of it.

“Yes, that is all true,” I said, “but this would otherwise be such a great time to try this out. Our refrigerator is practically empty these days which is expensive to maintain and it is freezing outside so we can use our breezeway to keep some foods close to the kitchen. Please could we try?”

He graciously agreed and we did try it out. First I did some rearranging with his broad shouldered help. We have a freezer in the basement which was situated clear across on the opposite side from the stairs ever since we moved in for reasons lost to me now. I asked him to please move it to the plug near the foot of the basement stairs (which lead from the kitchen). I then rearranged our food shelves down there so that I could empty a smaller one and move it next to the freezer right at the foot of those stairs. This would give pretty good access from the kitchen to cool storage and frozen items.

The door next to the basement door in the kitchen is the outside door leading to a breezeway (at least that is what we call it). It is like an indoor hallway with windows. It was empty when we bought the place but not too long after moving in, my husband installed shelves down one wall under the windows and hooks along the opposite wall. It is filled to the brim with boots and shoes and coats and bins of hats and mittens and jars of children’s experiments as well as some tools and the odd outside toy interspersed with lovely bits of wood and stone that have caught the children’s fancy. I rearranged the shelves to clear a few feet of a shelf right next to the kitchen door. I also reclaimed a cooler that was out in the “granny house” holding grit for the hens and put it in the breezeway also.

Then one Wednesday morning after family prayer but before launching into homeschooling, we all went into the kitchen and watched while my husband ceremoniously unplugged the refrigerator. Ah, the kitchen filled with quiet. Blessed quiet. I love the quiet that only a loss of power can give (both materially and spiritually now that I think of it) and I was glad.

Things went pretty well for a couple of weeks. We put the gallon milk jars out in the breezeway. We weren’t getting enough eggs from our hens to live on so I put the already refrigerated grocery store variety in the cooler with ice from the freezer. I put cream and buttermilk in there too. Produce went on the food shelves at the foot of the basement stairs. Yeast and seeds and so on went in the freezer down there. Ketchup and a few other things went in a cupboard in the hutch in the dining room. Everything accounted for, except maybe leftovers.

We ran into a couple of problems. One is that the breezeway which is unheated and otherwise perfect for this use has a wall of south facing windows. This meant that there were lots of days - even in the cold of January - when it simply got too warm in there to keep food and milk sufficiently cold. The other problem was that having leftovers that have to be eaten right away changes meal plans and creates a degree of unpredictability. Paul and I have both spent a lot of time learning to cook so that there WILL be leftovers (which takes some doing for a farming family of eight). Now suddenly leftovers were sort of a liability. Furthermore, we were used to having some time pass between meals of the same food. Now, especially with a breezeway that got unpredictably warm at times, we needed to instantly get used to eating the same thing until it was gone. Somehow the “instantly” part of the equation didn’t get figured in.

Finally my adrenal fatigue got worse again and I started to lose track of it all. The weather warmed up a bit. My husband wanted to put his attention into other things. We had some leftovers go bad which just can’t happen here. We need every scrap. So Paul made an executive decision and plugged the refrigerator back in. I was ridiculously disappointed which he was very understanding about. And there you have it - two and a half grand weeks without a refrigerator to mind our food for us.

As I am writing this, it still doesn’t seem like it should be that hard. For me, it was the adrenal fatigue with resulting lack of mental energy that did me in. It takes some doing to implement a new system until it becomes second nature. I need enough energy to get from “new system” to “second nature.” I also need to tweak how we store the food. South facing windows is a deal breaker. Maybe we could get a second cooler? Maybe I could use the freezer more for leftovers? That just leaves the milk. We don’t have much now because, as I reported earlier, our cow turns out not to be pregnant. But sometime we will have a cow in full milk. Yikes. That will really be something to deal with. Actually this place has a spring house but there no longer is any water flowing in there. We don’t know if we can do anything about that or not and need to research it.

Lessons learned from this experiment?
One lesson is knowing from experience how much we love the quiet that settles after a refrigerator is turned off. One morning my husband woke up and thought for a minute that he was at an ashram. It was just that peaceful.
Another lesson I experienced is how great I felt not having to depend upon a big metal box to keep my food stores good. I was surprised at how much this affected me. I really felt more “self sufficient” in a very tangible, daily life sort of way. It felt GREAT!
A third lesson is that houses are not built for this just as they are no longer built for wood heat. You need a north facing storage area or pantry that is accessible from within the house, preferably the kitchen. After the fact adaptations require thought and planning. For instance, we have a small north facing front porch with a cement floor but it is entirely open with just a little roof over it. That might make a good storage area but we have no idea how to suitably enclose it and not have an eyesore as a result.
A fourth lesson for me is to think long term and get more geared up with making lacto-fermented veggies and sprouts. I need to do this anyway as I think it is really important for our health. Having these two food preparation skills fine tuned, habitual and a long term part of our natural way of eating will smooth out storing produce during the winter a little bit.
A fifth lesson has something to do with leftovers and my rhythm in the kitchen. For as long as I have a freezer, I could perhaps just stick leftovers in there even if they are going to be used day after next. And/or I could change my rhythm in the kitchen so that almost everything is cooked fresh and eaten on the spot (makes me tired just writing that). And/or I could start thinking more in terms of immediately transforming leftovers into something seemingly new for next day. What did folks do in the so-called old days? I imagine they ate what they had until it was gone. They also probably had stronger digestions and could eat beans every day. Some members of my family cannot do that. So ultimately the lesson here in this category is that I haven’t figured the lesson out yet! I will have to keep working on it and get really geared up for our next attempt.

This is tough for me because right now our frig is practically empty and it is cold and snowing like crazy outside. This would be a good time to have the refrigerator off, right? But I think it is foolish to keep turning it on and off. That would be like dating in that it pulls for failure. No, I have to be fully prepared, my husband has to be fully on board, and then we will definitely succeed.

In sum, then, we LOVED having the refrigerator off but it took more than we were ready for to make a long term success of it. However, I cherish living fridgeless as a goal for the future. So I will wait patiently, improve my adrenal fatigue somehow or other, learn some new food preparation and food storage skills, make long term plans that take fridgeless living into account, think more creatively, do a bit more research and then pounce when the timing is right.

Oh, I am really looking forward to it.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Educating yourself about thyroid, adrenal and other hormonal issues is a powerful step to take towards improved health for many of us. The conventional, pharmaceutical medical industry tends to be poorly informed on these subtle matters of hormones and the endocrine system. Even finding an MD who can properly diagnose and treat the very common hypothyroidism is a rare event. I have paid very dearly over and over again for doctors thinking they know more than they do about how to treat hypothyroidism.

What do you do when you think you are suffering from adrenal fatigue? Most doctors do not even acknowledge the existence of adrenal fatigue as a debilitating and treatable condition. Worse yet, what do you do when you know you are suffering from adrenal fatigue and have a sense of how to treat it yourself? Most doctors do not even know how to accurately test for degree of deficiency, never mind have a handle on how to work with you on treating it. In the words of JH Tilden MD about a hundred years ago:

Professional minds are supposed to be trained into a power of discrimination that enables them to sense truth in anything. But it appears that the principle training today is into accepting authority without question.

This painful truth leaves patients with several problems including where to get effective treatment and how to get appropriate lab work done. Sole access to ordering lab work is one of the chief ways the medical industry holds us hostage. Sometimes it really helps to follow the up’s and down’s of your condition with lab work. Lab work can be an important source of information, if ordered correctly and interpreted usefully. But try finding a doctor who will order saliva testing for monitoring adrenal conditions or one who will monitor thyroid levels in the way you feel they should be monitored. It is almost impossible - especially if you are living in the country where there are fewer choices of physicians.

Most importantly if you are someone who is taking responsibility for your own treatment, you need access to lab work as you see fit. Being forced into the system in order to get this kind of information puts your treatment plan at risk. I have fretted and puzzled over this situation for years but now I am very grateful to have a solution.

Through The Canary Club, you can order your own lab work as you need it. The home page notes:

Hormone Imbalances can have a severe impact on your health, and yet, they often go undiagnosed. We understand the frustration and helplessness that comes from visiting specialist after specialist and never really getting what you need to feel yourself again.

Our easy-to-use hormone test kits can uncover the problem and get you started on the road to recovery.

In fact, our home test kits analyze specific hormone imbalances that traditional testing ignores.

The Canary Club makes it safe and easy to find out if your hormones are functioning properly and to help you find the answers you need to get back on your feet and enjoying life.

You can order the testing you need for thyroid, adrenal, and reproductive hormones levels as well as the all important Vitamin D levels. You can get the PSA test as well as order a panel of tests that detect early risk factors associated with Type II Diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The web site also has articles, testimonials, a page of web links, a gland self-evaluation quiz and links to the book Feeling Fat, Fuzzy or Frazzled - Restoring Thyroid, Adrenal and Reproductive Balance by Drs. Shames.

As the Canary Club founders note:

The Canary Club is a premier resource for discounted home saliva and blood spot testing for hormonal imbalance. A health topics of great concern is hormonal / glandular dysfunction. Over 40 million people in the United States alone are affected - and numbers are rising internationally as well. Hormone imbalance, as impacted by environmental pollution, is a worldwide problem which is growing at an alarming rate. Joining the Canary Club enables you to order testing directly from the lab at a special Canary Club discounted price.

Joining the Canary Club is free and the tests you can order through them are very reasonably priced. Observing and researching your own condition and now having the resources to order the lab work you need and have the results come directly to you is an incredibly important key towards not only eventually strengthening your physical health but also immediately strengthening your confidence, your self-reliance and your ‘power to discriminate which enables you to sense truth in anything’.

May you walk in health.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

When a system is functioning properly, you don’t attend to the inner workings because you don’t need to. Rather you busy yourself with gathering inputs, feeding the inputs into the system and then managing the outputs as they appear. Fussing around with the innards of the system is strictly up to engineers of various sorts depending upon the kind of system being used.

As far as physical systems (aka bodies) go, mine used to be one that generated a tremendous amount of energy seemingly on its own. This suited me just fine because I have always liked to do things, and learn new things, and muck about with lots and lots of new ideas. I have loved to work ever since I was a little girl because you learn so much that way. In fact I had the rather odd childhood problem of not being allowed to engage in meaningful work as a child and young person and this was a great grief to me. In any case, my nearly inexhaustible store of high energy was something I simply accepted and appreciated over the years as necessary for achieving goals of all sorts.

Alas and alack, I can no longer take my system or my energy for granted. I collapsed in May with severe Adrenal Fatigue. I don’t particularly attribute my case to the unnatural wear and tear of modern living as is said to be the case for many people, but rather to an abusive childhood. I was actually first diagnosed with adrenal fatigue when I was but 21 years old and life since then has not been exactly restful so any kind of recovery could not have been what you might call “spontaneous.” I didn’t know what to do about it then and was in so much physical pain that I don’t know how much the adrenal problem really got my attention. I wondered about it off and on many years later during my continuous pregnancies and breastfeeding of 15 or so years but no one I knew or worked with had a solid idea of how to safely support/treat the adrenals while pregnant and/or breastfeeding. More time passed.

This past May I was having a conversation with my husband about a very traumatic event that took place in my early 20s. I was always vaguely aware that this event related somewhat to my parents but I had never thought about it much. My husband pointed out some very obvious truths that that situation revealed (he is a champion at this, by the way) and I experienced a profound emotional shock from this sudden awareness. A few days later, I collapsed. It took me a little while to figure out what was wrong with me and to piece together this time line but I am glad that I did because it is important information critical to moving forward.

I don’t have the mental energy to write fully about what adrenal fatigue is as of yet so I will put a few links here for anyone interested. Adrenal Fatigue, Adrenal Burnout, Adrenal Fatigue 101, Adrenal Health in Women, What Causes Adrenal Fatigue.

Having all of my energies drop to so low a point has shown me many things already. Two that are most pertinent to blogging are that just having good ideas requires healthy adrenals and then writing about those ideas requires healthy adrenals. That implementing the ideas would require an energy pack and strong adrenals was always apparent even to me but there is nothing like having a good idea and then feeling exhausted from just that single act to make you appreciate the subtle nature of energy and the power drain that is the brain. I am also experiencing that writing exhausts me. Gosh, reading and writing are two activities I have always done like breathing. Always and forever. However, a head injury back in the late 80s put some brakes on my reading and this adrenal collapse has put the brakes on my writing. Life surely does present limitations, doesn’t it? Since I am a person who has to read and needs to write and has a mind that is a good idea factory, for crying out loud, I have to learn to work within these limitations. This will be one of my many challenges in recovering from severe adrenal fatigue and adapting to forever weakened adrenals no matter how much I recover.

All of which brings me to blogging. For the past year, I got up in the wee hours in order to type out the ideas, insights and experiences that pushed at me to be expressed here on the Pockets of the Future blog. Working on the computer makes me really tired but I persisted because I just had to. I felt compelled. On top of that, we have had problems with the blog since the spring. Wordpress problems and computer problems and then in June, our blog was hacked and we almost lost the whole thing. My husband worked mightily to get the thing fixed and it took a long time. He was victorious in the end but I lost some recent posts which just defeated me. Yes - now I will make copies in Open Office. I have lost posts twice now and it is not an experience I care to repeat.

So this is why I have not posted in so long. Bloggers need strong adrenals… who knew? In the face of this revelation, I am still going to go ahead and add Adrenal Fatigue to our list of categories. According to Dr. Wilson:

Adrenal Fatigue affects an estimated 80% of people living in industrialized countries at one time or another in their lives, yet it has been ignored and largely untreated by the medical community.

Given that it is now a predominating factor in my life and that I am fairly certain that my husband and one of my daughters particularly is affected by it as well and that it affects so many people in so many places, I cherish the hope of writing about it here from time to time. May it be so.

So, dear readers, please be patient with me. It took me weeks and weeks just to write this brief post and I am now exhausted from the effort. I can’t tell you how much that frustrates me. Even with my mind held under the water of exhaustion I have a half dozen posts on the tip of my tongue, so to speak. If I don’t write for a while, know that we are still here and that I am working my way towards another post and that the farm is still progressing which you can see on video and the children are wonderful. If, on the other hand, by some miracle I start to post too much, send me an email in which you very politely (we adrenal fatigue sufferers are a very emotional, sensitive lot) suggest that I not do that.

OK, that is it for now.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie