Night sweats may stem from gluten intolerance?

I've been plagued by night sweats for about 20 years, way before I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. These aren't, as far as I know, related to menopause. I suffered a bit from short-lived hot flashes (and only one noticeable mood swing a couple of years ago, though I can be a bit of a drama queen) but I seldom get them any more. I've been period-free for over two years now (whee!).

My mother (aged 77, bless her heart) gets them too, as does my older brother. I'm lucky to live in a house with four beds, so if I really had to I could move to another one when one gets too damp, though I usually just move to another quarter of the double bed. I keep a fan going with the window open, in winter I keep the heat at less than 17C (that's about 63F in US gallons), sleep in a T-shirt until it gets damp, cover the wet spots with a towel (and no, not those wet spots, dagnabbit), and usually sleep without covers.

I've read recently that night sweats that are not associated with perimenopause or menopause have numerous causes, including AIDS, tuberculosis, low blood glucose, hyper- and hypothyroidism, and celiac disease (major gluten intolerance with damage to the digestive system, not just periodic GI problems). I read one post from a woman who said she also suffers from calf pain, but that might be peripheral artery disease (PAD), which can be associated with diabetes.

My grandmother had hypothyroidism as well as Type 2 diabetes, but she never talked about night sweats. Problem is, while blood tests for several of these possible causes (I've been tested for HIV and TB since I used to be a regular blood donor), the test for celiac involves a biopsy. Ouch. I've had enough invasive tests for a few years.

So as a first step (which might also help with glucose control) I'm trying gluten-free products. I can eat quinoa, gluten-free oats, veggies and fruit, rice and rice flour. I haven't checked on hops yet...

Oh, the indignity of it all!

Our venerable porch cat Mr. Jones (aka Scuffy, Boss Cat, etc.) has a new moniker, courtesy of my neighbour's nearly-four-year-old daughter: Sparkle Tail the Girl Cat. Where she got this, I don't know: she's not a TV-watching child, much to her mother's chagrin. I'm going to ask her when he can be a Boy Cat again.

For at least a couple of years now both I and my neighbours have been feeding him every morning, and at least three other people on the street have contributed food and warm bedding. Another person has tried (unsuccessfully, so far) to get someone to contribute a recovery room for a couple of days, in hopes we can catch him, get him fixed, and release him in the 'hood.

In mid-winter he disappeared for nearly a month---when he reappeared at my front door in early February (http://diabetes-cats.blogspot.com/2009/02/cat-came-back.html) he'd lost half his winter weight. Now the summer fleas are causing him to suffer somewhat.

Mr. Jones's history is unknown. But one of my neighbours keeps tabs on where he hangs out. When we first started discussing him she swore he'd been around for at least five years. Then it became ten years. We chatted on the street earlier this week and she gave me an update on her observations, and now she claims he's been around for 20 years...

Mr. Jones has a couple of quirks: while he waits for me to come downstairs he stretches up to the window to peer in. When he sees me he sits back down. When I open the front door he steps politely into the hallway, then goes back out. When I put his food in his dish he sniffs it, looks up at me, and waits for me to pat him. Only then will he put his head down to eat.

What's really pathetic is that lately he is trying to walk further into the house when I open the door. My heart is breaking because, with four indoor cats already, and his unknown temperament and health, I can't let him in.

But my four indoor cats are complacent when he appears (unlike their reaction to other outdoor cats they see), and he and Peabo have sniffed noses. So, could he come in?

Benign Neglect

The last time I made banana muffins I neglected to clean the muffin pans out (nice vintage Ecko ones from Value Village). I don't like having to peel a paper off my muffins so the pans had a few crumbs stuck to them. Once that hardened, I decided to give them a good (read: too long) soak. All that did was rust them up and leave stains on my sink. So I cleaned them up a bit, then decided to throw them out. Then I decided to offer them back to Value Village. Then I decided to list them on a free-for-the-taking site like declutterize or ReUseIt or freecycle. Then I decided to clean them with steel wool and extra-fine wet-dry sandpaper from Lee Valley. They still have a few stains on them, but they are in pretty good shape now. Remind me to write a note to myself to buy a few over-ripe bananas. And maybe some paper muffin cups, though I abhor the things.

There are few things that don't suffer from benign neglect -- dental health; my back yard; the vegetable crisper contents. In the garden, lilacs much prefer a sunny location over fertilization to bloom in the spring, and morning glory and nasturtium much prefer a poor soil, otherwise there's lots of foliage and few blooms.

And cat litter boxes.

I've got four of the poopy things. Cats, that is. Pet sites all recommend one litter box per cat plus one extra. I only have four boxes, but one of them is four feet long and two feet wide (it's an under-the-bed plastic storage box that didn't fit under the bed when I got it home). I was mortified when my attached neighbour asked me over. She was quite kind: asking me how I was doing, about the job hunt, and so on. Then she mentioned that the litter box smell was coming through our common basement wall into their upstairs. Augh! I immediately dumped and replaced the litter, after washing out the boxes with washing soda and sprinkling baking soda in the bottoms. I washed the floors with a liquid that's supposed to deodorize cat-smelling areas, and sprayed Febreze around.

Strangely, I suffer (or not) from life-long anosmia -- no sense of smell. So that makes benign neglect all that much easier for me.

And leave a comment if you want my very low-fat, no-sugar banana loaf recipe!

Is it necessary to water during a summer drought?

We haven't had a drought in Toronto this summer (yet). In previous years the August heat and funny weather can cause lawns to go yellow. But grass is resilient and it will recover quickly after one good rain, but home owners still use drinking water from the tap to keep it green.

Toronto.ca provides a LOT of information on lawns, including discouraging them. I say, "Nature abhors a lawn" (you heard it here first). I say, "Grass is one plant." Organic farmers discourage monoculture. A "nice" lawn needs pesticide and fertilizer. The City of Toronto will not pick up grass clippings, unless you hide them at the bottom of a yard waste bag under other weed and clippings.

Two years ago I had my back downspout disconnected. Incompetent workers created more issues with the roof (see http://diabetes-cats.blogspot.com/2009/03/this-has-been-day.html) than they helped, and I've had my eaves troughs and downspouts replaced and the rain barrel moved. My front yard is mostly xeriscaped (drought-loving summer plants).

What I should really do is take out the roses. I have two in the front. One is in a really bad place that doesn't get enough water, though it's survived, blooms only once in the late spring, and then gets eaten by bugs. I don't water or fertilize it. The other is a similar old-fashioned plant that I bought a few years ago. Now I love roses (mine are magenta). But I don't like maintenance.

My brother's blueberries

My bro has a nice big property in a small town -- two-bedroom house with a nice-sized deck and a patio, separate garage with workshop, a storage shed for his lawn tractor and other equipment, and a stocked trout pond, with a small covered bridge he built over the creek that feeds it. He loves to cut down old trees and plant new ones. And he bought some blueberry bushes this spring that have produced some nice big juicy berries, some of which he brought when he visited last week.

I've planted blueberry bushes before, but they didn't take. Besides, I like things I can ignore that will still produce. When I got my big silver maple cut down I lost all the boysenberries.

Canadian blueberries are on special at a few places right now. The cultivated ones are huge and sweet. I should buy a few more and freeze them. Wild blueberries grow low to the ground and are a trial to gather (not to mention that black bears like them too), though they have way more of the valuable anthocyanins and antioxidants, and cost more in stores. One year at camp, my mother picked enough to make 36 500ml jars of wild blueberry jam. That's back-breaking work, and goes to show you how bored she was while my dad worked as Arts & Crafts director.

I bought 9 dry pints of BC blueberries today and am in the process of freezing them for the fall and winter -- they're good on hot cereal!

The Garden "During" File

This is the mess in the back. The weeds were over a foot high before my Big Bro took his gas-powered weed trimmer to it. The electric lawnmower was sort of incorporated in the weeds...but it's worked before after spending the winter outside.



Some of the raspberry canes are up to eight feet tall. They bear fruit the size of the tip of my thumb well into the fall. They aren't doing as well this year due to the rain and cooler weather; last year, even after the 'coons got at them (I could tell by the visible seeds in the poops they dropped on my lawn), I still got enough fruit to make 25 jars of jam.

I plan on building a raised bed for strawberries (I'd like to find a bale of straw somewhere), and moving the asparagus to a sunny location, where I'll also be reminded to fertilize and mulch. I also have rhubarb that I moved and separated this spring.

And the gooseberries are now in a sunny spot, but they didn't like being moved this year and didn't blossom, though they have survived pretty well. I'll have to figure out how far back to prune them.

Family visit and "garden" update

My older brother came to visit on Sunday for a few days. He likes to invite himself; I arrange vacation time; he doesn't show up (well, he's done it twice: once because "I don't feel too good" and once because his car wasn't feeling too good). This time he made it! We sat on the porch and drank beer on Sunday and had pizza for dinner. We ate Thai food on Monday (not much open on the civic holiday). Then we drank our dinner on Tuesday and slept early. Wednesday we had a lovely grilled steak with home-made cole slaw and potato salad. I made a loaf of Jim Lahey's No-Knead Bread with whole wheat flour and oat bran, and we had that with balsamic vinegar and olive oil -- yum.

And he's such a helpful person! He helped me move to this house in 1999, and we exchange items (for example, my mother's portable dishwasher went from Waterloo, QC to Granby to Toronto to Stanstead, and an area rug of mine made a similar trip). My back yard is in shocking condition. The lawnmower was decomposing into the weeds, the raspberry canes are taking over in the back, I left nice clay/ceramic pots out that crumbled in the cold and ice, and I had the biggest dandelions and broad leaf weeds I've ever seen. But he brought his gas-powered weed trimmer and tackled the worst of the mess for me.

I don't have grass any more, since I let a spot of yarrow (mine is pink) take over. I still have a few strawberry plants from Manitoulin Island that are growing in the shade of the raspberry canes, and I have some lumber, so I'll be making a small (4'x4') raised bed to move them to. I'm using corner bead (cheap!) to attach some 1x6 pine planks that came from the old deck I demolished (I hate to throw stuff away -- that was in 2000, I think!).


Two years ago I had two of these Lee Valley grow bins with the strawberries coming out of every hole, and I sold or gave away about 50 more plants. But I neglected to water the bins and I got exactly one strawberry (click the image to have a look: centre left), and the plants were gone the next year...


And my asparagus did NOT get its mulching and fertilizing in the last couple of years, though the plants are mature enough to provide several meals if I treat them properly. I've used it in quiche with home-grown tomatoes and basil. They're also shaded by canes, so I'll attempt to move them too.

Naturally I didn't take a Garden: Before picture. Maybe I'll post a During one.