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Something I never heard in a western country is that pumpkin is a remedy for diabetes. When my health went out of control at the beginning of the year I asked a Chinese doctor about ku gua, bitter melon, which everyone told me was good for my health. I even found it on a natural medicine website as a remedy for diabetes. He told me that bitter melon is good but pumpkin is better. In fact, he said, everything in the gua family is good for diabetes, the gua family being such things as melons and cucumbers. Maybe we could call it the gourd family of vegetables and fruits. Every week I make sure I eat at least one large serving bowl of pumpkin soup and I do believe it benefits me. Do any of you know more about this? Do you have any information about any other natural remedies for this problem? I even found a website where the author claimed ku gua cured his diabetes completely. I think he was from somewhere in South-east Asia. Bitter gourd’s properties are known in countries other than China. It’s such a shame I can’t stand it, euyuch! No doctor in the west and few in China say that diabetes is fully curable. Renee, are you reading this? Can you say more? Just click on the comment or no comment box below. (Renee is a lovely Chinese doctor friend of mine.)

I’ve been really busy learning all I need to know to build a non-blogging web page, finding the right programme to do it with, and actually doing it. There is plenty of space on hostmonster, the server that this blogsite is on, for me to have some more pages so I bought a couple of appropriate domain names and learned how to put my new page on hostmonster too. Today I have finally got it looking the way I want it and you can see it if you want to at http://omnienglish.info Maybe I said already that I am a rep for a translation and a proofreading company. OmniEnglish is a Canadian proofreading company. They are very thorough and I am really happy to recommend them. Now I have to make a page for the translation company. I’ll blog when I have time or when I just need a change of scene. The second page building experience should be quicker so maybe next week I will be able to start writing and finding out more about who is being abused and persecuted in this world again. Take care, be happy and do good when you get the opportunity and I’ll write again soon.

Preparing this blog is very difficult for me but I am putting a great effort into it. Who said something about a learning curve? For me it is a learning cliff that I am climbing carefully, inch by inch. I search for help with the programme I am using to build it, WordPress, but the information I find is usually written in a completely foreign language – computerese! I don’t speak it and I wish some of those clever guys and gals would try to think outside their circuit and chips fed brains and remember just how blank they felt when they first tried to learn that language. They give detailed information that means nothing at all to a lot of us. Where does someone like me find out how to get a plugin into WordPress? They tell me to just put it in a page called wordpress something plugin and I can’t even find the page!

Thankfully many of the helpful features I hoped for when I chose WordPress are in the programme, that is, no brain features that I can use to install ads in the sidebar. I’m very honest that I do want to make some money from this site. Today I actually managed to put a couple of ads on.

To all the amazing people who can talk like a machine, please remember that most other people can’t. I was transferring a lot of blogs from shared blog sites and some of my blogs copied too small and I fixed them by changing Arial 10pt to Arial 12pt and thought I was very clever. At least I know a font description when I see it. Do you get it? If I think that is clever how am I going to understand when you reply to my queries as if I already know about coding. Whenever you do something like that only your peers get it. Please write any advice twice, one for your peers and one for people who speak English. It’s a nice language and can be used to describe almost anything accurately by a writer who takes time to think about it. 

Do you ever wonder about the amazing level of commitment you had when you were young? When I was in high school I used to get up at six in the morning and do an hour of yoga. I would do more at night. There were no yoga classes I knew of within easy reach and I couldn’t have afforded them anyway so I taught myself from library books. What is even more amazing to me now is that I kept it up for three years.

Now I can’t believe I was capable of such a commitment, a nerdy bookworm who has joked for years about being allergic to sport.  I am doing preparation for yoga every day. By that I mean I am doing some basic exercises to loosen up all my tight muscles and joints. It is making a difference after only a few weeks but it will be some time before I can begin what I think of as proper yoga. I can’t even touch the floor in a technically correct forward bend! However, I can get my hands about four inches closer to the floor than when I started. There is an in-between stage where joints begin to loosen but there is a small amount of pain going on in daily life because those tight muscles evolved to support other weak muscles in their job. You have to change it all slowly, loosening muscles and strengthening others to re-establish proper balance. A bit like trying to re-establish a native habitat. Too much of one thing at the wrong time and you don’t get the right result. I am erring on the side of caution. I have a reasonable back for my age but there are a couple of areas that need careful nurturing or I will cause damage.

Wow! I almost thought I knew what I was talking about there! It would prolong my life greatly if I kept it up. Yoga is truly marvellous. I could never run but after three years of yoga I went to a national park with two friends and they started running and I ran with them, and was amazed I was doing it. The crazy thing is that I have always known it was wonderful and didn’t do it, with one exception. My back, though misshapen by bad habits and hours at desks, is better than most men my age. If ever I had a problem with it over the years I used to do spinal twists every day until it was ok. The worst problem was when I picked up a rock that was way too heavy and my back went out badly. The family doctor, who had a bit of knowledge of chiropractic, couldn’t put it in again and I fixed it myself with a few gentle spinal twists. I don’t have any painful trouble spots.

A couple of times in the last few years I almost died from a heart problem giving me pulmonary oedema (fluid in the lungs). My memory of yoga breathing probably kept me alive as I forced air into the few square centimetres of lung surface that weren’t drowning in fluid.