Ceallaigh's Blog
A note to guests who have found this page using the links on various eHow articles: I have not given my consent to the authors of these articles to list my work as source material, nor have I approved the content of these articles. In particular, I find the plagiarism of Jessica Cook's article obnoxious and the content of Kelly Sundstrom's article offensive.
A note to Ms. Cook: You claim to be a writer. You should know better than to plagiarize other writers to earn an income. Go write your own damn articles, and stop using my freely-offered work to make money.
A note to Ms. Sundstrom: ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? "How to Write a Name on a Black Candle With a Nail?" Is that where you're at? If you had read my web site, you'd already know I'm Pagan, so I sure as shit know what you're trying to teach in that article, and I wholeheartedly disapprove. How can you call yourself a Reiki master? Who the fuck do you practice on, Darth Vader? May you receive three-fold what you send out in the world, and may it teach you not to teach others how to hurt people.
My husband Sean has been sensitive to chemicals his entire life, and this sensitivity most often manifests in an aversion to non-natural smells. Everything from perfume to glue makes him ill, and the longer he's exposed to it, the sicker he gets. For many years, I limited the burning of candles in our home for this reason, until it occurred to me that since he kept bees as a child, he might not react badly to burning beeswax.
Written by Sean P.O. MacCath-Moran
We LOVE to can food at our house! It's a rare and wonderful treat to be able to pull items from our seasonal harvest off the shelf to find them tasting as fresh as the day they came off the vine. It fills us with pride and joy to give out Yule gifts of our berry and fruit jams or to serve guests sauce we put up over the summer using nothing but vegetables and spices grown in our own garden. Best of all, canning is easy to do and costs very little to get started!
All that being said, there is a dark side to canning. If you mess up, you can grow nasty, nasty things in your canning that have unpleasant effects. Botulism, for example, is a very powerful toxin - just one microgram is lethal to humans, blocking nerve function and leading to respiratory and musculoskeletal paralysis. So, on that cheery thought, let me stress that sanitation is key in successful canning as is good planning and preparation. It's also important not to deviate from a given recipe until you're sure you understand why all the ingredients are there (e.g. don't drop the citrus juice and/or vinegar from a canned salsa recipe as this ingredient insures the acid content of your food is high enough to withstand bacterial growths). In all, it's important for me stress that if you mess things up and kill off your family, friends, or neighbors by using bad canning practices, then it's all your fault, not mine; read "all warranties stated or implied herein are null and void forever and ever and ever, neener neener".