Julia: January 2008 Archives

First, I want to tell you how much I wish you could feel my face! Yeah--I know that sounds very weird, but my face is as soft as...no, softer than a baby's behind! I first noticed this when I reached up to rub my eyes one evening last week (please don't tell Dr. Becky, my opthalmologist!) and thought, "Wow--did I just put on moisturizer and don't remember doing it?" so dewy-soft was my face. (If you have reached middle age like me, or are just a space cadet--also, like me--the notion of doing something and not remembering you did it only seconds later is not that far out there!)

But after focusing for a moment, I realized that I had not applied moisturizer for almost 24 hours! Next, I felt my hands, which had not seen lotion for as many hours and they were soft, too! Unheard of in Denver's dry, cold winter and our dry, warm house without a humidifier! My skin is soft and moisturized all over my body--which is especially great because I am really slack on lotioning up! It's just amazing. No cracked skin on my fingers, and absent are my typical bouts of winter itching! The only thing I know that I've done differently is religiously drinking Holy Tea (pardon the pun). I had heard that one of the benefits was soft skin, but this is crazy! Crazy-wonderful!

I received an email from my friend, Nancy, and she said this about the tea (she's been drinking it since September): "Well, a few people have mistaken my 31 year old son as my brother! And when I took my close-to-the-same-age friend to the hospital one morning, the nurses thought I was her daughter!  I eat pretty much anything I want (which is a lot lately), but am maintaining a significant weight loss.  
PLUS, like you said, I just feel CLEAN! Love it!" Lots of people report spontaneous weight loss. If you haven't read the testimonials on the Holy Tea Products page, definitely do. There's lots and lots of things this tea helps with.

I haven't personally noticed weight loss yet, though my stomach is not bloating since starting the tea, which kinda makes me look a little sleeker through the middle, but losing weight is something I'm definitely looking forward to. First, I think I need to get my post-menopausal hormones straightened out. That's something the tea is supposed to help with as well. I am also going to consider a new product that someone told me about that is supposed to help with hormones, and I'm going to up my maca consumption and use of progesterone cream. I may even go so far as to get a hormone assessment when I figure out the best course of action for that. But meantime, I'm so thrilled to know that drinking the tea is such an easy way to be helping my body at a foundational level.

The business is still amazing, too. I have been totally stunned at how it has built itself. I now have more than 2 dozen people in my downline without even trying. Rick's and my monthly tea bill ($80) is way more than paid for by all the commissions just from people buying the tea through my site at retail--people I don't know and have no clue how they even knew to buy it from me! (I guess from other of my retail customers raving about the tea and giving them the URL for my Holy Tea site) And I'll be receiving a lot more money from that in commissions from the distributors I've effortlessly sponsored. The tea is positively magnetic! But I must tell you--I wonder at the wisdom of buying it retail.

You can become a distributor for free--you get your own Holy Tea Club website for FREE--and you never have to sign up another person and you get the tea wholesale, a $10 savings on a month's supply of tea! If you opt for Auto-Ship, which doesn't lock you into anything because you can cancel or change it at any time, you get your shipping for free! That's the key to this--just sign up as a distributor and either just buy the tea for yourself wholesale, or, if you get as excited about the tea as I am and as so many others are, then sign people up under you so they can get the tea wholesale, too, and have a passive income as well if you want! No obligation--totally your choice. Actually--you don't even have to sign them up--that's the beauty of your free website--they just go there and sign themselves up!

Well...I'm finally almost completely recovered from the dog-eating-xylitol episode. It took a far greater toll on me than on Lilah! You may find it astonishing that something that happened Tuesday night and that had a happy ending would still be a factor for me this many days later, but I guess the same sensitivity that makes me good at receiving higher information and putting it into words has a flip side: I get knocked sideways more easily than most, and it takes me awhile to reassemble all the pieces/parts.

Anyway...the real, enduring issue with that episode is something I want to share with you now: The day and night that the incident occurred was a day when I knew the moon was void of course. You can look up what that means, but in a nutshell, when the moon is in transition from one sign to the next, there is a period of time that lasts for a few minutes up to many hours where it is not influenced by any sign. This happens every couple of days, and, supposedly,  during this time, if you are someone who is particularly influenced by the moon, your decision making is off, along other related phenomena. The general wisdom is to avoid doing anything of importance during a void-of-course moon, especially making decisions.

I had been running a moon-phases program on my computer that put a little symbol in the bottom tray on my screen that would tell me the sign the moon was in. If the moon was void of course, it would turn the symbol red, so I'd always know when it was void. Well, here is the problem with that. I became paranoid about those periods. I felt I couldn't trust my inner guidance in case the void-of-course moon was causing my discernment to be off. When I saw that it was going to be void of course from around 4 a.m. Tuesday, to 4 a.m. Wednesday, I began to dread that 24-hour period and to almost expect that I was going to screw something up.

So, of course, I did.

First off, I consciously left the cookie piece on the floor for the enjoyment of whichever dog found it first, but was totally not thinking about it containing xylitol and being harmful. I just totally spaced that out. Was that the void-of-course moon's influence? Then, once I saw Lilah had eaten it, my immediate intuition was that she had not eaten enough of the cookie with xylitol to cause a problem. But could I trust that? I mean--what a horrendously bad decision it might turn out to be if I didn't seek medical help for her and my discernment was off due to the moon being void of course. It seemed the only thing to do was to cover the bases--call the emergency clinic, poison control, etc., etc. and be sure she wasn't harmed. She never did show any real signs of xylitol poisoning except that her blood sugar went a little low but not even enough for the emergency hospital to give her a glucose drip. So, my original instincts were correct, but I was too fearful to trust them because I knew the moon was void of course. It cost us $500 and a lot of trauma. We don't resent that expenditure--it was the prudent thing to do. But the real loss was not the money--it was my separation from my inner guidance.

So I decided to get rid of the symbol on my computer, but when I remembered to do it, the red symbol on my computer told me that the moon was void of course again--this time, for just under an hour. This was the day we were supposed to take Lilah back to the vet for a blood panel to rule out liver damage, but neither Rick, nor the vet, nor I really thought it was necessary--it was just what the protocol dictated. But what if we were making a faulty decision? I spent the hour swimming and stewing in paranoia. I felt totally trapped--I felt I couldn't make a decision and that anything I thought might be off. It was a very long hour. Finally, that afternoon, I could feel in my body that it was a waste of time, energy, money, and poor Roly's nerves (he is so freaked out when she leaves the house!) to take her in for a blood panel. I just gave her some more milk thistle (liver protective) and made note that she seemed as healthy as ever if not more so. And she still is.

I am a complete believer in that which is behind astrology. That the stars and planets with their various geological/mineral constituents and electromagnetic fields influence us, with our own responsive mineral makeup and electromagnetic fields, really seems totally obvious to me. But astrology is a left-brain thing. It's using the mind to interpret. And that is fine. Except when it interferes with our ability to be receptive to our Spirit and stay in the now with our inner guidance. I have decided not to consult the void-of-course chart again unless I feel guided to. The symbol is gone from my computer screen. I do not want any more void-of-course head trips to get in the way of my being able to listen clearly to my inner wisdom, which is always impeccable.

This has not been my favorite 24-hour period.

Lilah, our little girl dachshund, ate a bite of a cookie I dropped on the floor and it could have been fatal.

Thankfully, it wasn't, and she is fine--well, they have to run another test Friday, but I just know she is fine. The story: I made sugar cookies last night--baked them around 11:00 pm--and substituted xylitol for the sugar (xylitol is a sweet ester extracted from various plants like corn and birch trees, commonly found in chewing gum, but also used in low-glycemic cooking--it measures cup for cup like sugar and tastes just like it, too). When the first batch came out of the oven, I gobbled up a couple, and about a fifth of a 1 1/2" cookie dropped on the floor. While I had been very, very careful with the bag of xylitol, knowing from an email that circulated, by the way, that it can kill dogs, I was a little out of it and it didn't even register to me that the bit of cookie I had dropped would be a problem. Until after she scarfed it up. And suddenly, I realized what I had possibly done by leaving it there for her, and was powerfully motivated to go online and look up xylitol poisoning.

Yikes! I found out it doesn't take much at all to kill a dog! Only a tiny bit. So I called the 24-hour vet, who told me to call the ASPCA poison-control center. It costs $60 for a consultation, but even though it was only a very small amount she could have ingested, it seemed like the only thing to do. So I woke Rick up and told him what was going on and then called the center. Indeed, they calculated the per-body-weight amount of xylitol to be in the dangerous range, so told me to make her vomit using hydrogen peroxide. No luck after 2 tries, so I called them back and they told me I needed to take her to the emergency vet. So off we go, reaching the clinic just after midnight. She's showing no abnormal signs, but the most common manifestation of xylitol poisoning can show up as soon as 30 minutes after consumption, or up to12 hours after. And it can take for up to 2 days for some of the issues, such as liver failure,  to occur.

They made her vomit at the emergency clinic, and then had us leave her so they could monitor her blood sugar overnight. Because they are an emergency clinic only, they had us pre-pay their lowest estimated cost for their basic charge and what they expected to have to do for her overnight (observe her and check blood glucose levels) and the price was shocking--$307, with an estimated high end up close to $500! It also freaked me out when they had us initial that we wanted them to administer CPR if necessary. They advised that I would need to pick her up between 7 and 7:30 a.m. and transfer her to our regular vets for continued observation. So, we left her, and I sobbed my heart out all the way home because I knew it was my carelessness that had caused this--the danger to Lilah and the big--and still growing--vet bill.

Needless to say, it was not a very relaxing night. By the time we got home and I got myself to bed, it was almost 2 a.m.--not usually an issue, but it was this night because of having to get up so early to go get Lilah. Roly was a wreck without her. A little background on him: He's a rescue who had already been through several traumatic separations by the time he came to live with us when he was 7 months old, and was totally in love with Luna, the elder girl dachsie we had for his first 3 and a half years with us. He was devastated when she died, but took up quickly with Lilah when we brought her on board, and has always worried that she was going to leave,too, checking the house to be sure she was still around, even when he'd only been outside without her for a few minutes. So when we came home without her last night, he was deeply worried, and had a hard time settling down. But we made it through the night and thankfully, the phone never rang--they had said they'd call if her blood sugar dropped or anything else happened of significance.

Though I'm not a morning person, I invoked Easy World about 10 times, and things went well. I managed to hear a traffic report on the radio that cued me to take a detour, and I got to the clinic to pick her up at 7:25. Happily, they hadn't even had to do $307-worth for her, and so we got a refund of  $28. She was so excited to see me, she practically levitated as she covered my face with kisses. Amazingly, the vet said she'd been the best patient in the clinic that night--well, I'm not sure if she meant of all, or just of the dachshunds that had been there--but it was great news to me as she is not at all used to spending the night away from us--this was the first time in her almost 6 years, and I figured she would cry all night. Her relief was short-lived, though, as I had to take her directly to the other vet, which was, only about 3/4 of a mile away and on the way home. The emergency clinic had already faxed all the info over to them, so all I had to do was drop her off--very easy--and go home.

Roly was, as you can imagine, both upset that she wasn't with me when I got back, and excited to smell fresh Lilah smells on me. We managed to get in a few hours of a nap, and then, at last, it was almost 3:00 and time to pick Lilah up. It was snowing, so I was especially eager to go on and get her, and they discharged her to me a few minutes early with instructions on what to watch for and to bring her back either tomorrow or Friday for another blood panel. Their bill for watching her for 7 hours and testing her blood sugar was $143.50. When you add it all up, it comes to just under $500 (not counting the last bloodwork she needs) and she never showed a sign of a problem other than her blood sugar being a little on the low side this morning. But better safe than sorry!

Tonight I was inspired to give her a capsule of milk thistle, which I had on hand, and is excellent for supporting liver function and keeping toxins from settling there. I don't know if she actually needed it, but it made me feel better to do something!

The moral of this story is to stay on your toes and never, ever let your dog consume xylitol. But if she does, call the vet a.s.a.p. Lots of dogs have not been as lucky as Lilah and a few xylitol cookies or just a couple of pieces of sugarfree gum made with xylitol have been fatal, even in dogs much, much larger than her 13.5 lbs. Needless to say, the cookies and the rest of the dough went down the garbage disposal (instead of the trash, as that seemed the safest way to be sure other dogs would never be able to get to them).

Tonight I am so, so grateful to have my sweet little Lilah Jane home and safe and sound! And Roly is, too. If I ever doubted how much I love Lilah, I don't now. (For the story of Roly's now-humorous adventure with the emergency clinic, see "Roly's $93 bender".)