Anatomy of whatever kind of sinus cold this is

I caught a cold, which started with night-time mouth breathing and passages so dry you could ... well, they were very dry.

On the third day, I had a very low voice in the morning, but sneezed four times and otherwise felt fine. On the fourth, I sniffed some a few times. Each of these nights,  I was mouth-breathing and getting nasty dry all night. I took some echinacea and elderberry tinctures in water, but I was distracted by something else going on that day. On the fifth day, my nose turned into a faucet. I continued with the tinctures and the occasional Vitamin C tablets and used a lot of facial tissue. I made hot honey-lemon tea. Later I had just honey in water.

And then I did a thyme steam bath for my head.

I took about a cup or more of water, heated it in a small saucepan, and when it was simmering, I added about 2 teaspoons of thyme. Then I used a beach towel to make a tent so I got all the thyme steam from that pan. For about 10 minutes. I was bored. But it did feel good! Later in the day I took the thyme out of the water, heated the water again, and added that herb back in. Later in the day I did it again, but added another couple teaspoons of thyme. The sneezing has gone away. The phlegm is looser. The headache is milder. The nose-faucet has been GREATLY REDUCED.

That thyme is great stuff. Look it up. It could help you!

"and time passes ..."

That's what my mom would say when the leading lady and man would embrace very very closely and the screen faded to black.

Well, I have no excuse for  not talking to y'all. I hung my corn after I harvested it onto my tailgate, and for lo these many weeks it has dried in my front porch. Last week I took 30 or more cobs of corn off the cob. I carefully segregated deep, steely blue corn and deep winey-red corn, and got about a quart of each. The rest I just call "calico." They're all in big bulky wonderful quart canning jars to keep the mice from harvesting them. Damned mice.

I never thought that you could sort corn by color and be useful about it, since the mammal phenotypes [physical characteristics] can't be sorted that way. But when people I trusted said they "just threw out the yellow kernels," of their Indian corn, I had to know more.

Corn ain't mammals. If you do some research on how corn is pollinated, it makes sense. The short way to tell it is that pollen grains from the tassel of the corn fall onto individual corn silks. Each piece of silk leads to a place on the cob where a kernel can develop. One grain of pollen + one corn silk = one individual kernel. And when you think about all the successful pollination that has to take place to make ONE cob of corn, well that's just pretty cool. All the time I was shelling my corn, I kept thinking of that.

Of course there are drawbacks. One half block away is a field of what we used to call "field corn," and I now call "GMO corn." All the yellow kernels in my corn can be directly attributed the the pollen from that field getting to my corn's silk.

Where I live there are hundreds of thousands of acres of fields of corn. Where there isn't corn, they grow soybeans, and in the small percentage of fields where there isn't either, there may be alfalfa, wheat, or cattle grazing. So where do you plant your corn? It's a question. For anyone trying to raise a particular strain of corn, it's a BIG question.

Am I replanting my "blue" and "red" corn? Yessiree. I'm learning a lot.

Did I eat any of it this year? Well. The season for processing it got away from me and it dried on the stalk. This means I could use it for corn, but it won't be as good as cooked and dried corn will be. I haven't had the guts to try it in food or try to make cornmeal from it. Besides, I had helped a friend pick HER corn and SHE processed it and shared with me. So. Like. I kinda don't need to! Ha!