Monthly Archives: April 2016

47 Uses for Olive Oil Outside of the Kitchen p1

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47 Uses for Olive Oil Outside of the Kitchen

Olive Oil is very useful to have stored up. Not only can you cook with it, there are many things outside of the kitchen that you can use olive oil for. Here, I will discuss 75 of them. But let us begin with some background information on olives and Olive Oil.

What is Olive Oil

Olive Oil is a fat that comes from pressing whole olives. The Olive is in the fruit family. The Olive Tree originated in the Mediterranean basin.

History of Olive Oil

From archeology digs it was found that the first olive oil presses date back to 6000 BC. Olive oil has been an important trade item throughout history. The Spartins used olive oil to put on their bodies and then scraped off for the games in Greece. At this same time women used olive oil in their cosmetics.

Production & Consumption

As of 2013 Spain was the largest producer of olive oil with 39% of the total world production.
Olive oil is produced in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Australia, Turkey, Tunisia, Greece, Morocco, Syria and Algeria. In the United States olive oil is produced in California, Texas and Arizona.

The country with the most consumption per capita is Greece which consumes over 24 liters per person per year.

Names for Olive Oil

Different names on the Olive Oil labels indicate the amount and type of processing the olive goes through, it also describes the quality of the olive oil.

Extra virgin Olive Oil is the highest grade. The word virgin refers to the process that no heat or chemicals were used to extract the oil. Virgin Olive Oil contains the highest levels of polyphenols an antioxidant and the most healthy oil.

Olive Oil is a combination of refined and virgin oils.

Cold Pressed or Cold Extraction means that the oil was heated but not over 80F during processing so that it contains more of the nutrients of the fruit. The higher the heat the less nutrients the oil contains.

Convalescent Care part 2

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Convalescent Care part 2

Toilet / bathroom IF possible the convalescent area should have its own dedicated facilities. An alternative to this would be to set aside the nearest toilet for their use OR if the situation demands it you could use a commode chair.

Toilet / bathroom areas should be fitted with grab bars ahead of time as you never know when a family member or you, will need them. Even if you can not have a private bathroom in the sick area, if all you can have is a sink with running water, it would be great. Also consider some sort of call or panic button in this area in-case someone needs help or falls. It is easy to install either wired or wireless doorbells near the toilet with the ringer in the hallway or some other convenient location. The convalescent person should have a whistle to blow for help on their wrist or as a pendent. You may need to consider stocking a bedpan and urinal in case the person is bedridden.

The shower or tub should be cleaned after use with a 10% bleach solution to cut down on transmission of diseases. If the person has any wounds the bathing area should be treated prior to them using it too. Consider stocking a shower chair too.

Much of the DME [durable medical equipment] is covered by insurance in which case you can get new stuff. It is cheaper though if you have to get it out of pocket to hit garage sales, flee markets or other such places.

Stairs are OUT! Convalescent and elderly people need to be on the ground level. From a health and safety point of view and general convenience issues it is easier and better to be on the ground level. If the person is semi-mobile it is easier for them to be more independent. If they have to be transported via ambulance there is better access. The fire department will thank you if they ever have to evacuate your family member too. Stairs contribute to both the number and severity of falls. If there is no way around having stairs make sure that there are hand rails on both sides and that they are very sturdy. If possible replace stairs with ramps for easier access.

Floors are easy to trip on. How is that you ask? Deep carpet can catch feet and trip people. Throw rugs are dangerous as are cords and wires. Keep the walkway clear and uncluttered.

Lighting is a large issue for convalescent, old folks and actually ALL of us. Night lights are a good idea for safety in walkways and bathrooms. A way to save money and dress the place up some is to use LED Christmas lights. Finding strings of such lights is becoming easier as they are showing up for All Hallow’s Eve more commonly known as Halloween. The lights are cheaper if you wait till the day after the holiday to buy them.

Phones should be accessible and secured so they can not be knocked off the hook. In the convalescent area you may consider a separate line into this area. Consider the doorbell call system as already discussed. This may be a good situation for FRS radios. Cellphones would be great here too if the person can use one.

BTW it is often cheaper and easier to keep someone home V putting them in a ‘real’ nursing home. IF needed you can often hire sitters 24 / 7 cheaper than nursing homes.

As a side note there are a lot of people who have run the numbers and decided that living on a Cruise Ship is cheaper and better than an assisted living facility. ;]

What are your thoughts??

http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/convalescent-care/

Convalescent Care

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Convalescent Care

Setting up your home and family for convalescent care.

In the ‘modern’ world most people live in single or nuclear family homes / apartments. There is mom and dad and 2.3 children. Or it could be a single parent household. Grandma and grandpa live somewhere else, and if you have any siblings they live in yet another someplace else. This may work out well for everyone in ‘normal’ times and situations.

In today’s world if someone gets sick or hurt and they need help or need help with the kids then you have to have someone travel across town or across state[s] to be able to help out. At best this disrupts their lives a bit or a LOT and makes it less likely that you will assistance at times. Some things to consider for the person being helped is that things in the home and your routine have to be altered to accommodate the the helper. On the other hand the helper will end up either bringing TOO much of their stuff OR won’t bring things that THEY need to be away from their home. Depending on their situation it will cause a hardship in their household with pets/plants and security.

Back in the old days most people lived in multi-generational situations and siblings were just down the street from the main family which made for a highly supportive environment. OH well, things are what they are for all of us.

Why would you have to provide convalescent care? It could be simple situations like the kids [or you] have the flu. A family member or friend could need help after a surgery or broken leg. Or your parents could just be old / infirm and can not live on their own any longer. [this is where an in-law apartment comes in nice. More on this later.]

In an ideal situation and new construction your place would be designed much as a modern bed and breakfast [B&B] or an actual better setup would be as a boarding house. What is the difference between the 2? A B&B is short term and the boarding house is much longer term situation.

With this in mind each room or suite of rooms would have their own bathrooms that would include tubs and or showers and there would be a central kitchen. Some may be set up as inefficiencies with a kitchenette. On a much larger scale would be a hotel / event center that has a restaurant, pool with a hot tube and ALL the trimmings. Use your imagination for the set up.

For most B&Bs and many of us normal folks housing would have to be adapted and retrofitted.

Regardless of where and what you start with there are certain considerations to account for.

Privacy – it does not matter how much you love someone nor how well you get along most of us will want someplace to retreat to at least to sleep. A private room is especially important if they are sick and contagious. So, if the room exists the sick person should have a private room.

The sick or convalescent room should NOT be carpeted. Carpets are hard in the best of times to keep clean. Expect in a sick room to have messes, vomiting, diarrhea and urine end up on the floor. There will be other spills to contend with too. Carpets and drapes [as in room dividers or entrance curtains] are some of the biggest harbors of germs in a healthcare setting.

See you in part 2. We would like to hear YOUR thoughts on this and other topics.

Carrot Croquettes

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Carrot Croquettes

This recipe is from World War 2,
About this recipe:
Difficulty: easy
Preparation Time: 30 minutes including cooking
Number of servings: 3 servings

This recipe dates from WW2. The Ministry of Agriculture promoted carrots as a substitute for other, scarcer, vegetables. It was promoted as a healthy food with slogans such as ‘Carrots help you see in the blackout’. To improve its blandness, people were encouraged to enjoy the healthy carrot in different ways.
Today we have carrot cake, but in wartime people experimented with recipes for carrot pie, carrot jam, carrot sandwich fillings, carrot fruit substitutes and even a homemade drink called Carrolade, made up from the juices of grated carrots and swede squeezed through a piece of muslin. Carrots also took the place of dried fruits in many puddings.

Ingredients
6 carrots
1 oz (30g) margarine or real butter
10 oz (300g) corn flour
4oz (120g) oatmeal
fat for frying
seasoning to taste
1/2 cup of milk (around ¼ pint or 0.14 litres of milk)
Making and cooking it
Boil the carrots until tender
Drain and mash through a sieve [reserve liquid for either warm or cold drink or soup]
Add seasoning to taste
Make a thick white sauce with the corn flour, margarine or butter and milk
Add the sieved carrot and leave to cool
Shape into croquettes
Roll in oatmeal
Fry in deep hot fat
Drain well and serve

Fatal Hospital Mistakes

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Fatal Hospital Mistakes

How to decrease the chances of You and Your Loved Ones Becoming Statistics. [this is from traveling nurse’s experience over many years in many states and does NOT represent any ONE hospital or state]

In this insider report, we will show you how to lessen the chances of your hospital stay killing you.

You wouldn’t think people entrusted with your care would kill you, but it happens regularly. A Health Grades study recently showed that over a 3 year period 248,000 patient deaths were PREVENTABLE. [I do find that reported number to be rather low. RBO ]

A study of 3.3 million births in California found that babies born late at night were 16% more likely to die than those born during the daytime. Patients going into cardiac arrest at night were also more likely to die than those in the day. More medication errors happened at night. An analysis of 15 intensive care units showed that children admitted to them at night were more likely to die within 48 hours.

So what’s the problem with night admissions?

The main reason is lower quantity of staff, the ratio can sometimes double the patient load per nurse. The administrative staff –such as the head nurse or unit manager and the nurse who does patient education- on the unit typically does not provide direct care but they will help out during the day in an emergency such as cardiac arrest or patient fall.

The night shift is often 50% staffed with less seasoned people who are often reluctant [because of past gruff treatment] to awaken senior people with a problem.

It takes longer for someone to answer patient call lights at night because there are fewer staff available. During the day, the unit secretary can answer the call light via the intercom and redirect the nursing staff to higher priority situations first – such as new complaints of cheat pain or needing help to the toilet V needing the water pitcher refilled.

Another reason is fatigue. Have YOU ever tried working between 3am and 6am when most people are asleep? Not only that- 24-hour shifts and 80 hour work-weeks are not uncommon for residents and interns (student or junior doctors). A Harvard study showed interns on nightshift injured themselves twice as much as those on dayshift. With the nursing staff it is common for the evening crew to be required to work ‘a double’ shift to cover the floor if a night shift person calls in sick. In this case you may have been assigned to work an ‘eight’ hour shift originally which by the time you get all the massive paperwork done is actually 10 or 11 hours and then unexpectedly have to work another 8 to 10 hours.

Research has also shown that people who worked 24 hour shifts had the performance of someone who was legally drunk (blood alcohol 0.10 in most states).

Some pointers for a safer hospital stay:
o Do some homework on hospitals in your area. Some have better fatality rates than others.
o Avoid being overnight wherever possible.
o It is better to be admitted during the day on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
o If possible get discharged from the hospital before 7 pm on Friday to avoid spending the weekend there when incident rates go up dramatically.
o Make it your job to know EXACTLY the name and dosage of medications you should be taking (if any) during your stay. YOU are the final check that it is the correct medication.
o Have a relative or friend stay by your bedside if possible 24/7.
o Get to know your care providers BY NAME in other words become a real person to them and not just the gallbladder in room 5.

ARCHER Complex show

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ARCHER Complex

Join us at the ARCHER Complex Cheyenne WY this [today] Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday. It should be a lot of fun. We will have books by local authors. Most likely there will be long term storage foods with the Farmer’s Daughter along with custom jellies by Dona. There may even be contemporary authentic Indian artifacts.

3 on the 3s for 3 part 2

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3 on the 3s for 3 part 2

Earlier, in the post on 3 on the 3s for 3 we discussed check in times aka monitoring times…. On some things and in some situations this may need to be varied a bit. Let us say that your out of area contact person for the family has only the one phone line and you have 4 people in your family or group who are separated from each other. – You ALL can not be on the same line at the same time can you? NO, of course not!

So what do you do?

For your family Comms plan to work for this situation you would have to make use of an offset plan. In an offset Comms plan you would assign a number to each person [or group leader]. In this case Dad would be number 1 so he would call Aunt Betty at NOON on the hour as in the basic plan. Mom would be assigned the number 2 and she would check in at the hour PLUS 15 minutes as an example a quarter past NOON or 1215. The first born would be assigned the number 3, so their check in time would the hour PLUS 30 –so a half past NOON or 1230. The second born would be assigned the number 4 so that their check in time would be ¾ past NOON or 1245. Part of the report would include up dating each member of the other member’s status until they are all reunited.

At the next check in block the Dad [or person number 1] would get a report on everyone else.

Up to now the information on this post would be for right away and perhaps several days depending on the situation how long it takes to get everyone together again. After everyone is gathered you could slack off on checking in with the out of area contact person. You may want to dwindle down to daily contacts which should be coordinated with your out of area contact person.

During ‘normal’ times you would most likely have a routine time frame to contact people. As an example I talk with our main contact person at least every other week. Basically whatever works with you group is fine as long as everyone has a copy of the plan and has accepted and agreed to it ahead of time.

A friend likes to go solo camping and his wife worries about him- a LOT. For them he has invested in a SPOT transmitter. He sends a message to his wife twice a day giving his GPS position and saying that he is OK. The device sends it as a text to his wife’s phone and e-mail. If memory serves me they can be set to notify up to 10 people at the same time. The device can also be set to send his GPS at set times during the day which would make it easier for Search and Rescue to locate him. In the event of him getting hurt and needing help sooner than the check in tomes he can push another button which sends a general distress message to his contacts AND the authorities. The way that he makes use of this is in my opinion the best choice of all of the systems currently available.

Others that I know just use their cell phones and text messages and at specified times they climb to a point where they get cell signals and down load the texts. While they are out roughing it their contact person has a grid map of the area they are going to operate in with their general location noted with vehicle info noted so that the Sherriff can be dispatched to locate them if they are needed at home urgently.

What ideas do you and your group have which you think could improve upon this Comms check in plan? Please share the ideas with us so that everyone can learn and improve their plans.

http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/3-on-the-3s-for-3/

http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/comms-part-1/

http://www.preparesurvivethrive.us/cb-radio/