My Blog’s 10th Anniversary

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I started my blog 10 years ago this month. It was part of my transition from being career focused for more than 40 years. And I’ve kept it going – it’s an enjoyable daily rhythm for me. I’m savoring my history of the past decade in this post.

The blog posts from 2011 included a trip to Longwood Gardens and a long road trip to Tucson, Arizona (with photos of rest stops along the way) where my daughter was in graduate school. I stated the gleanings of the week and enjoyed posting recipes and photographs of places I was visiting. The new technology was a Kindle Fire; I was making the transition from physical to digital books…it would take several more years to complete the transition and I’d graduated from the Kindle Fire to an iPad, Smartphone (and laptop) for reading. Some of my favorite posts form 2011 include: Recipe of the Week: Homemade Soup for a Cold Day, Water Lily Pictures, and 10 Cosmetics from the Kitchen.

In 2012, I started the monthly ‘10 days of little celebrations’ and experienced the trauma of my parents getting older…beginning to experience substantial health problems. We added a bird feeder on our deck – visible from my office window and I started enjoying birdwatching through the window. Some of my favorite posts include: Birds from my Office Window, Gray Day Reflections, Yucca Seed Pods, and Ten Days of Little Celebrations - November 2012.

The next year I started the zooming and free eBooks posts. Over the years my camera’s optical zoom capabilities have improved dramatically and I enjoy using it to get better images. By this time, I was almost completely transitioned to digital books too. We made a road trip to Florida for a satellite launch at Cape Canaveral and I got my first close view of Sandhill Cranes in the Orlando airport cell phone lot waiting for my daughter to arrive. Some of my favorite posts close to that anniversary include: 3 Free eBooks - December 2013, Sandhill Cranes in Florida - November 2013, Herons in Florida - November 2013, and Zooming - December 2013.

In 2014, I started my effort to reduce the ‘stuff’ we had accumulated from living for more than 25 years in our house. My volunteer work has gradually increased…and would be easily sustained until the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of my favorite posts from the end of 2014 include: The Grand Cleanout - December 2014, December Sunrise, and Fall Field Trips.

The big event at the end of 2015 was our travel to the big island of Hawaii…including a day trip to the top of Maunakea. It was an wonderful experience but I find myself wondering if I ever want to take a long flight like that again.

2016 was our first birding festival – the Festival of the Cranes at Bosque del Apache. We also discovered the Bald Eagles at Conowingo Dam, closer to home. I started my monthly Zentangle posts. Here are some sample posts: Highlights of 2016, Conowingo - December 2016, Zentangle® – November 2016, and First Day at Bosque del Apache.

I started the monthly eBotantical Prints posts in November 2017. I’d been browsing historical botanical books in the last decade of my career and was beginning to figure out a way to share my list. At the time I thought that I had about exhausted the supply, but I’ve continued to add 20 or so books every month until there are now over 2,200 books on the list!

In 2018 we attended our second Festival of the Cranes in New Mexico then enjoyed the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival early in 2019.

In the last few months of 2019, there was a last road trip with my parents at Thanksgiving. We enjoyed the Christmas lights near home and planned for a birding festival in Laredo, TX in the early part of 2020.

As we were coming back from the Laredo birding festival, COVID-19 was in the news and soon we were ‘staying at home as much as possible’. By November 2020, we were anticipating that a vaccine was going to become available and the pandemic would end. We were doing virtual birding festivals and otherwise keeping ourselves happy at or close to home.

And here I am in November 2021, still not like I was pre-pandemic. I enjoy many of the same things I have in the past 10 years, but I am not out venturing into crowds…not flying. I am facing a health challenge of my own (cancer). My parents are home bound in Texas, and I have made visiting them my rationale for 3 road trips since the spring when I became fully vaccinated. At this point, it is not the pandemic that causes most of my anxiety, but the changed behavior (sometimes abrasive and violent) of people under stress that has become so apparent over the past year.

The blog continues…it’s a way to document my present….and notice the subtle changes in the way I am ‘living well.’

Jaws – The Story of a Hidden Epidemic

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Most of the books I feature in my blog are free eBooks available from Internet Archive (or similar sources). This is a more recent book that I purchased in Kindle form:

Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic by Sandra Kahn and Paul R. Ehrlich published in 2018 by Stanford University Press. It’s available from Amazon for about $10.

The basic idea is that the way we grow up and live now causes our jaws to be malformed compared to the jaws of our ancestors.

It has been observed that ancient human jaws had room for wisdom teeth….and the lower jaw continued to fit with the upper over the lifetime. That rarely happens now and there is a lot of orthodontic intervention to correct problems that develop.

So – the book sets out to identify what is different now…why is there so much malocclusion in childhood and beyond….and obstructive sleep apnea as we get older?

One of the ideas from the book was that breastfeeding and then providing chewing opportunities for babies (rather than relying exclusively on pureed foods) as soon as they begin to get teeth helps the jaw form properly. In my family, that happened well enough that my sisters and I didn’t need braces (although we did need to have our wisdom teeth removed). I was old enough to remember when my youngest sister had just been weaned and was teething; my mother had given her a piece of celery to chew on; my mother took the celery and gently felt to see if the tooth had emerged and my sister bit down so hard that the finger bled a little (I always though my sister had assumed that the finger was the celery and she was finally going to get the bite!). The next generation was not so lucky – all 5 of my mother’s grandchildren required braces. I hope pediatricians are prompting new parents to give toddlers opportunities to chew after being weaned. And - it turns out that breast feeding requires more jaw power than bottle feeding so why don’t we have modified bottles that can do the same for situations where a baby is not breast feeding!

Another idea is that not only do we need to learn good posture for our back; jaw posture is important too! Correct jaw posture is the mouth closed with the teeth slightly touching….not with the jaw lowered. The airway is at its maximum when the jaw is closed! The muscles developed to close the jaw are important to maintaining that open airway. In some cultures, mother’s gently close the baby’s mouth after they finish nursing to encourage them to breathe through their nose and develop good jaw posture. I’ve been consciously monitoring my jaw poster and building up the appropriate muscles…I do find that my sinuses empty more easily, and breathing is very relaxed…although it felt strange at first. I rarely breath through my mouth but I was holding my jaw slightly open as my ‘default’ rather than the closed jaw that is good posture. Notice that it is also easier to swallow pills with the jaw closed!

There was an article published in Bioscience by the authors in September that is available online that provides some highlights from the book and pictures that illustrate the difference proper jaw posture makes.