utenzi

For some odd reason, the fellow below reminds me of an English butler in one of those old movies from the 1930s or 40s. I think maybe it's the jaw (beak?). Yesterday Carli brought up a subject that I'm thinking of exploring further. Oddly enough, Shephard also wandered by to comment and he's the one who originally started me thinking about this subject a few months ago when he referred to a post on Jessica's blog about jala neti . In case you're not familiar with the "therapy," jala neti is the practice of pouring warm saline solution in one nostril, while your head is canted to the side, and letting the saline drain out of the other nostril. The purpose is to clean the nose and sinuses of all the nasty stuff that might be contained within. The link above goes to a Yoga site which has a short article about the practice--and here's an even shorter article on Wiki about something more disturbing sounding: sutra neti . Here's what Wiki has to sa...

I love my humidifier. Since buying it a month ago my sinuses have given me a lot less trouble. Leaning over the unit and directly breathing in the hot moist air has decreased my sinus difficulties in a big way. However, while I do love the humidifier I certainly don't love taking care of it. Particularly not the scale that builds up quite rapidly on the thermal unit in the base. Since the humidifier goes through a couple of liters of water--and since my water is from a well with lots of mineral content--a night, there's a lot of mineral salts building up. I need to descale every week. The typical descaling method is to soak in vinegar. Vinegar is mildly acidic having around 5% acetic acid and a pH of around 3. Traditionally vinegar is produced by allowing bacteria to oxidize a fermented solution, typically wine or hard cider. This process takes considerable time, weeks at least and more often months. Some expensive Balsalmic vinegars are aged for decades. That's acetic acid...

Most of last week I was having really bad headaches. Now I always have sinus headaches to one degree or another but these headaches felt different. I think I narrowed down the reason for them to it being related to dry air. Yes, dry air. I've heard other people complain that dry air would give them headaches but it'd never happened to me before but after having horrendous headaches last Tuesday through Thursday I went to Wal-mart and picked up a $25 humidifier. It's a cute thing with a water tank that holds something like 3 or 4 liters of water and uses heat to create the mist. It also has this little cup in which you can put smelly stuff to scent the mist. I'm using eucalyptus. Anyway, this seems to be working well. Last night I woke up 4 times with a headache and each time I leaned out of bed, over the humidifier, and breathed in the steam directly for several minutes and the headache went away. It's like magic! The negative part of all this is that I really can...