Allergy Rotation

Last night I accidentally posted the spread sheet that Margaret and I use to rotate the foods that we eat for our allergy rotation diet. Someone had a question about it, so I will explain. We are sensitive to many foods (i.e. we don't go into anaphylactic shock after eating said foods, so we aren't "allergic", but the reactions that we do have are uncomfortable and restrictive enough to make avoiding them well worth our while). The hope is that by following this rotation, we will avoid becoming sensitive to more foods and possibly lose our sensitivities to corn, wheat, milk, and soy products, as well as some other things.

The rotation assigns food families to specific days, ensuring that you do not eat a food, or any of its close relatives, more than once every 4 days. While it can be a hard plan to follow, I have learned some interesting things: did you know that onions and asparagus are in the same family? what about mangoes and cashews? If you are interested in looking at the table and learning about the different food families, you can check out the spreadsheet here. There are many foods that are not on the list, as well as ones on the list that we don't eat. You can tell when foods are in the same family by looking at the number next to it.

South Bend Sunday

(departure)

Gina, Anne, and I come to South Bend for the People of Praise Community Meetings as often as we can while still being students on track to graduate when we want to... We've also recently been reassigned to the Action Division, and their meetings are, at least for the moment, before the CM's on Sunday. So this last Sunday, we got in the car and took off for the POP meeting double header. Here's sort of a photo tour of our trip down and back, though I didn't take pictures of the most interesting parts, the two meetings...

Moo and Oink's on StoneyIt was a gorgeous day.South Bend!The CenterTerry Kelly and the burning bush...

Back to Chi-town(the bridge is up)

More pictures on my flickr page...

Bonjour!

Margaret brought me this from the Bonjour Bakery this morning, entirely unsolicited, while I was writing multiple papers quickly. It was even better than it looks.

End of Week 6

In the quarter system, we talk about our life in weeks. A full quarter consists of 9 1/2 weeks of classes, followed by a two day reading period and then a finals week. This week ends the 6th week of classes.

Since we are all history majors and seniors, our life pretty much looks like lots of time researching, reading and writing. We have to turn in a 40-50 page original history paper (our BA thesis) at the beginning of Spring quarter (the beginning of April). We each have a faculty advisor who is supposed to help us with the process, as well as a special seminar devoted to learning how to write good history and talking about our individual projects. These past couple weeks have consisted of discerning what secondary and primary sources we might use in our papers, as well as annotating those sources. Annotating them basically consists of reading the sources, which can look like skimming the source or reading academic reviews of it, and then summarizing what the source presents and why we think it will be useful to our project. The next hurdle we have in the process is to write a "problem paper", which I think is supposed to articulate the problem that we think our paper will set out to answer. That paper is still a few weeks off, so I'm still fuzzy on what it's supposed to be.

In addition to these last few weeks being full of annotation, they've been full of the common cold. When you live in household, it seems pretty hard to avoid passing bugs on to one another. I'm the last victim, so hopefully in the next few days we'll be done with it and on to the land of no colds! Please pray for us--all of our work and health. May the Lord be glorified in everything we do!