Health and Happiness

Okay Boston, enough with the germs. Apparently it wasn't enough that I had that little MS incident a few weeks ago, because last week I had yet another cold - my fifth one of this season. I took 2 days off from running, which wasn't so bad actually. You can run faster when you're constantly taking days off. It's like a neverending taper. Anyway, I'm feeling much better now and hoping I can get a good string of days and weeks of training in. Besides, it's getting too warm for colds.

I'm still reading The China Study, and I've got my next nutrition book queued up: Whole, also by T. Colin Campbell. And I'm reading anything else about nutrition and autoimmune disease that sounds vaguely interesting. Like this article about gut flora by Michael Pollan in the Times:

Keeping the immune system productively engaged with microbes — exposed to lots of them in our bodies, our diet and our environment — is another important ecosystem service and one that might turn out to be critical to our health. “We used to think the immune system had this fairly straightforward job,” Michael Fischbach, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco, says. “All bacteria were clearly ‘nonself’ so simply had to be recognized and dealt with. But the job of the immune system now appears to be far more nuanced and complex. It has to learn to consider our mutualists” — e.g., resident bacteria — “as self too. In the future we won’t even call it the immune system, but the microbial interaction system.” The absence of constructive engagement between microbes and immune system (particularly during certain windows of development) could be behind the increase in autoimmune conditions in the West.

Speaking of sickness and health, this happened yesterday:



Sean's wedding ring broke on Friday night. We've had our cheap but sweet wafer thin gold bands for 9 years or something, even before were actually married. It was time for some real ones.

After we got the rings, I surprised Sean with a spontaneous vow renewal in the town common. Our officiant was very young but utterly professional:

There's some happily ever after up in this gazebo.

It was so nice marrying this guy again.