Quick Relief for Poison Oak

...til I found one I liked from good ol’ Dr. Weil. He recommended running hot water over the rash, as hot as you can stand it. I don’t remember that he said how long you should do this, but I decided to do it as long as I could stand it, which in my case was probably a minute or so. He said the heat will cause the itching to flare temporarily, but then suppress the itching for hours, and speed healing as well. Results? It worked like a charm for me....

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Our Disastrous Summer Garden

...ed by climate change. Drought, of course, made everything worse. We had to water our already alkaline soil with alkaline water. Only the native plants and what we call the Biblical plants seem happy (e.g. the fig and the pomegranate). The drought and an extreme heat wave pushed everything in the garden to the edge–and a few over the edge: in the last month we abruptly lost some garden stalwarts, including a rosemary bush and a culinary sage. Despi...

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Kelly’s Goals for 2014

...along with everyone else on the beach–watches me flail pathetically in the water, looking like a oddly leggy, chubby seal in my wetsuit.) The last time I was super-fit was when Erik and I took the Sierra Club’s Wilderness Training Course. We had to climb many mountains and do challenging winter outings involving heavy backpacks and snow shoes. I trained hard for the climbs, in morbid fear of collapsing midway up the mountain and having to be mediv...

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Root Simple Visits Simparch’s Utah Compound

...posting toilet all housed in and around a repurposed WWII era Quonset hut. Water is biked in with specially adapted cargo bikes. Solar power pumps the water up to the tower where it is heated by the sun in a black drum. A solar panel array and batteries provide more than enough power, all day and all night, to run power tools and pump some tunes out on the powerful stereo system. The composting toilet features, what must be the most stunning view...

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Essential System #10 – Shelter

...ld be number one. It’s possible to survive for at least three days without water and there are documented cases of people surviving for forty days without food. But your ass could be either fried or frozen damn quick without shelter even in temperate Los Angeles. The handy rule to remember is three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food. In addition to having a place in our grab and go bag the concept of shel...

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