We have King Cake at the office. Boring Publix grocery store variety, but cake nonetheless.

I just ate half of a leftover donut from yesterday in honor of Mardi Gras. So that was fun.

Go Adele! (BTW, I love her voice, but then I love almost any female singer who doesn't sound like she's trying to be 8 years old.)

I didn't realize I was pronouncing paczki all wrong.

FWIW, I do believe in acupuncture for some things -- it seems reasonable to me that the mild irritation on certain nerves could send interfering feedback to the spinal cord that might correct/encourage the body's own healing or pain-handling processes.

A while back I heard a doctor being interviewed about new innovations in tissue-rejection drugs, and he said, "We were wrong to try and obliterate the immune system. What we should have been doing was to seduce it." Sometimes what you want is not to fight the body but to get it to work with you, which is why we're seeing now that medicine is paying more attention to things like helpful bacterial in the gut and sinuses.

medicine is paying more attention to things like helpful bacterial in the gut

That's why I brew my own kombucha. I have a GI tract from hell, and conventional probiotics weren't helping me enough, so I went with bacteria tea.

I have a GI tract from hell

Steph, have you read the icky treatment news?

I seriously think that is awesome. And brilliant. And hilarious.

t edit I don't have C. diff, but I think it's a brilliant way to treat it. Fortunately for me, homemade bacteria tea has gotten my insides in order.

Just out of curiosity, how does kombucha taste? Mind you, I can barely tolerate regular tea, what with my extreme supertasting. (The worst superpower EVER.)

Okay, mine are called fasnacht, and they're not filled at all! Some were granulated sugar, some were cinnamon sugar, and some were powdered sugar, and they're cut into a diamond shape.

Which is more like what I had last year -- little thumb-size pieces of fried dough -- but not really anything like paczki. Weird.

Just out of curiosity, how does kombucha taste?

Well, it's meant to be brewed long enough for it to ferment, so it can be kind of sour, sort of like apple cider vinegar. Basically, you make sweet tea (like almost a gallon of tea with a cup of sugar) and throw the "starter" into it, and cover it and let it ferment for at least a week. If you let it ferment longer, more of the sugar gets eaten by the starter, and so it gets more sour the longer it ferments.

Some people like it sweeter and drink it after a week, some people like it more sour and wait 3 weeks or longer. The commercial kombuchas (like GT) aren't horribly sour, I don't think, and they're usually flavored with fruit or ginger or something.

I brew mine long enough for it to be barely sweet; despite my crazy sweet tooth, I like it to be really tart (but not totally vinegar-y, because that would be a bit much).

Adele is the best.

Steph, isn't acupuncture the one alternative cure that has clinical studies that support it?

Did I mention we were trying to take off in heavy snow last night? Well it's been raining since about 3:30 and it's one sluchy mess out there. I need to go shovel...