Week 33 - Durham, Hadley

I decided to try a one week juice fast to see if it would accelerate the healing of my ulcerative colitis, and for that I needed a place with enough power to run a juicer and near a grocery store where I could buy fresh produce. I wound up staying at Pearl Mill Flats in Durham, which is an awesome little apartment complex with a courtyard in the middle and a real community feeling. There were lots of sweet older folks gardening and chatting, and what looked like an outdoor potluck on Sunday night. The laundry room had a bathroom, a bookshelf, and chairs. And to top it all off, it was right across the street from the Ellerbe Creek trailhead, so I could easily walk up and down the trail every morning after "breakfast".

The juice fast went great, although the first few days were challenging, especially when walking by all those excellent Durham restaurants and smelling their cooking. But by the end I was quite enjoying it, so much that I'd planned on eating solid food on Saturday for breakfast but felt like juice instead, and the same thing happened at lunch. I did allow myself two liters of kefir and two liters of oat milk over the course of the week. My favorite breakfast juice was grapefruit, carrot, ginger, and turmeric, and my favorite dinner juice was something like gazpacho, with tomatoes, red peppers, celery, parsley, basil, and garlic. Health-wise, I do think it helped, and I noticed that the foods I wanted afterwards were different and probably somewhat healthier than the ones I'd wanted going into it, so I think there may have been some kind of gut reset that happened. Definitely something I'd try again.

It was also a pretty busy week given my limited energy budget. I did a bunch of digital chores I'd been putting off. I drew a "business" card that I can hand people on the road and had 100 of them printed. I applied to get my passport renewed for when international travel is a thing again. I spent some time in my storage unit with Granny, my treadle sewing machine (which turns 100 this September), and sewed a fuel bottle holster and some extra storage space for Punkin. I took a walk with my old friend JW and one with HW. I met up with some of my coworkers for a picnic lunch, and got to geek out about motorcycles with my friend AA, who's currently babysitting Kiddo while he waits for his Husqvarna Svartpilen to be delivered (Kiddo is running great and getting love, AA finally managed to fix that carburetor issue).

On Saturday afternoon I rode back to Hadley in the rain, and my parents hosted a goodbye dinner on their screen porch, attended by AP, GB, and JH. My mom cooked a bunch of plain vegetables for me, which were a perfect way to break the fast. Little A stayed up way past her bedtime and stumbled around like a drunk.

Things I Learned

• It works best to juice the less fibrous ingredients first and work up to the more fibrous ones, because they clog the filter.
• Fresh turmeric juice will turn your poop yellow.

Wonderful Things

• Finding an outdoor outlet right near my storage unit so I could run my heat gun to seal the cut ends of nylon webbing.
• Seeing a snake literally hanging out in a tree about seven feet off the ground. It was sort of knotted around a skinny branch in a sunbeam.