I love the picture of the three of us! Scola, I'm clipping that for your address book picture instead. Why do you smile for my sister and not for me???
Never mind that she took fifteen pictures getting the hang of the thing. Jessica, you didn't do that thing where you swap the heads to get the best composite? Does anyone amateur do that? I found the ads confusing, myself.
NY was...the services were as you would expect for a woman who grew up in Brooklyn and worshipped at a Lady of Lebanon Catholic church--Mass was partially in Aramaic. I declined the trip to the cemetery in order to rest up, and joined the group for a reception which was very interesting, meeting mainly her daughter's friends in mourning. And got to know her long time boyfriend better (of the decedent, not the daughter).
I try not to imagine the daughter's position--she's a doubly orphaned widowed mother of a ten year old, and she's in her late 30s. She was clearly strung tightly. Cousin O's partner seemed more subdued, like he'd worn himself out mourning, and was now in the quiet long phase of losing your life partner of 15 years.
I try not to think of my parents' mortality at times like these, but it's pretty impossible. I think my sister wasn't showing how much she was affected in that way. She's very close to my mother especially.
I am the sort of person who rehearses loss, just to see. It makes it hard to talk about, not least of all because I sound like a nutcase.
Speaking of the sis, she's been avoiding soy because she's very fibroidy and doesn't want a replay. It's been driving me mad that she's discarding product after product with soy lecithin because she read something on the internet. Her reasoning was that soy encouraged fibroids, so no go. I asked her which components of soy, and were they present in soy lecithin? She looks up soy allergy, which says that the proteins that trigger the allergic reaction are not in lecithin.
So she's okay, right? But I tell her the mechanism of fibroid-feeding doesn't have to be related to allergens. What specifically about soy? Phyto-oestrogen, she says. And too much oestrogen is a problem for fibroids. Okay. But there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, so I suggested she google phyto-oestrogen and fibroids together.
Turns out that soy oestrogen is a dominant oestrogen (way simplified) and is a better kind of oestrogen to have around than her body's naturally produced.
tl/dr: If you're prone to fibroids, eat a diet rich in soy. She'd unknowingly been doing the 180 because she never took it through.
My mother will be so happy. The soy ban bothered her a lot, but she never walked Sav through it (if she had, it would have been much faster, since she's a biochemist who's just never studied that ).