We went to the local farmers market recently and found some real gems. I think that the best one was the family that sells organic free-range lamb, turkey, and chickens. Unlike a butcher shop or grocery where you just buy it as you want it they pre-sell the entire animal(s) during the summer.

In the fall, they have the animal(s) that you purchased butchered, aged, and packaged however you prefer, and then when it’s all done, you just go and pick it up. The price per pound is much less than getting it from the grocery (no surprise there). This is a lot easier for me than buying a sheep via our original method. The family we could buy from only did the dispatching of the animal - the rest was up to us (read me). Doing carcass breakdown is always enough to put you off meat of any kind for at least a week.

Another find was a tasty local goat cheese. The family that makes it has it available in plain, garlic & herb, spicy (which was even too hot for my O husband), and an onion & dill one. The price was about the same as that in the groceries, but we got some anyway because it wasn’t over-priced and it was very good. It’s all gone now (guess who ate most of it on rye-caraway crackers...)

I also found a red lavender plant. It looks very similar to a rosemary bush with red colored lavendar blooms. The plant itself smells, to me, like a cross between lavender and rosemary. My husband also bought me a beautiful bouquet that had bright pink poppies of some sort in it. On the way home, I found an inchworm wandering around in the flowers. When we got home, I put him out on some other plants in our front yard.

In case you are wondering, the mole(s) is still around my parent’s place, but it’s moved way back away from their house and garden now. Mom stuffed the peppermint oil on the cotton down into the holes near the house and the mole retreated. She just kept stuffing oiled cotton in the holes further and further away from the house until she got far enough away that she felt their garden was safe again. The mole, so far, hasn’t crossed the peppermint oil “line”.

I have been reading a book called Mastering Leptin by Byron Richards. I didn’t find it on my own, it was being discussed over on the boards side of this site and it sounded very interesting (thanks Rachel & Glittergal if you’re reading this). I tried a week of applying the Five Rules they discuss in the book (I kept my food choices to my AB blood type lists.) and found that those rules somehow really helped to make it easier to stick to the blood type diet when there were times that in the past it would have been easy to relax the rules a bit! That was a nice surprise.

Here’s the “rub”: one of the rules is that you need to enforce a schedule so that you are eating at about the same times and sleeping at about the same times because you cannot snack. Period. That can be hard to do with the schedule that I must keep due to my job, my husband’s job, and our son’s job and our only having one vehicle between us...or should I have said one taxi? Something’s gotta give. Just not sure which job, yet. The food part wasn’t too hard to get around in and of itself; it’s the sleep part - which messes up the eating at regular intervals...the 100*+ F (38* + C) temperatures aren't helping either.

I hope you all have a nice weekend!