Friday, March 6, 2015

7QT: A Birthday trip to Wisconsin.

In which I visit mom in Wisconsin, we celebrate my birthday with grainless mug cake, and I start mom on Dr. Ellie's mouth care regimen.

--- 1 ---

Mom showed up at the tiny La Crosse airport with a festive Christmas pin that she had forgotten to take off of her coat. That was fitting since this was our post-Christmas Christmas celebration. I brought my white sweater with black polka dots and, coincidentally, mom has a white jacket with black polka dots! So we decided to be twins for church on Sunday. Later in the week, we made grain free, microwave mug cake in celebration of my birthday and took a trip to Mall of America to get the Minnesota experience. The most remarkable part of my Mall of America trip was seeing ashtrays on sale for the first time in over ten years. And there was such a huge selection!



--- 2 ---

I brought a bunch of little bottles of liquids with me since I have been using Dr. Ellie's Complete Mouth Care System for the past two months. It uses a combination of three mouthwashes and regular Crest toothpaste. After my other experiments with oil pulling and using baking soda toothpaste without fluoride my teeth had become extremely sensitive, one of them chipped, and they started to look translucent making me think my enamel was probably pretty thin. Not trusting modern dentistry to solve my problem without additional pain and major medical bills I turned to my trusted friend Dr. Internet. This turned up Dr. Ellie and another tooth self-help resource called Cure Tooth Decay. The latter is based on the Weston A. Price Foundation diet that is suppose to cure just about anything. So far my family has been really good about driving me to yuppie grocery stores for food that I'm allowed to eat on my 'tooth diet'. According to this diet, grains should only be eaten after being sprouted in a particular way and all nuts need to be soaked before eating. And of course, no more eating sugar, among other things. Since my visit, mom decided to give Dr. Ellie a try too!


--- 3 ---

Because of my grainless and sugarless diet, mom and I had to get creative in celebrating my birthday. We ended up making this grainless mug cake that 'bakes' in the microwave for two minutes. The primary ingredients are coconut flour, eggs, and maple syrup. As far as I can tell, anything Paleo fits the WAPF diet. It turned out better than I expected but one mug would have been enough for both of us.


--- 4 ---

We went to Sunday Mass at the Cathedral of St. Joseph the Workman which has some strange modern kaleidoscopic windows that reminded me of the Richter window at the Cologne Cathedral in Germany. There is also a gorgeous, 14-ton pipe organ that led me to this interesting website for Pipedreams which is apparently a show on public radio.


--- 5 ---

Later in the week we visited the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe which I had not realized was built while Cardinal Burke was Archbishop of La Crosse. We went to a Mass celebrated by a Franciscan with an extremely deep voice and an accent. I could only understand part of what he was saying and thanked God that I was able to catch the part about communion always being received while kneeling at the altar rail. On the way back down we stopped at a memorial for the unborn and a prayer chapel with a huge tower of prayer candles. The setting is lovely, perched on a hill where we saw a group of deer relaxing in the brush.



--- 6 ---

We had quite a prayerful week. Mom had agreed to lead the Wednesday night prayer service at her church. We were the only ones to come that night but we decided to stay because "wherever two or more are gathered…" On my last day in La Crosse we went to Mary of the Angels chapel at the convent of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. This awesome picture is from a Wisconsin photography blog. We watched a little video and then went on a tour led by Sister Fran who must have been a school teacher because she quizzed us on the various icons throughout the chapel. Mom and I made it out without suffering too much from public school PTSD. We finished just in time to make a quick trip to Grandad Bluff and walked out toward the observation deck but it was windy and FREEZING! So we gazed at the nice view for about 35 seconds and then turned back.


--- 7 ---

Because of the ridiculous amounts of snow that came down yesterday, our Stations of the Cross were cancelled today. So I'm taking the opportunity to go through the Liam Neeson narration of St. Alphonsus Liguori's version. I'm not sure if this intro comes from St. Alphonsus, but it's pretty intense. Happy Lent everybody!






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