Dave is once again able to have pancakes, waffles, muffins, biscuits and other baked good that use baking powder/baking soda because I have found a sodium and potassium free form of those products, calcium carbonate based leavening agents!   These are the first pancakes that Dave has had in over 3 years!   

And this is the product that makes it all possible, from a company in Seattle that sells on Amazon!

You have to use double the amount of baking power/baking soda that the recipe calls for.  Through trial and error I’ve found that the amount needed is at least double what the recipe calls for.    So I’ve been using my cookbook and trying things and then adjusting the recipe.  The first try with biscuits wasn’t great, but it is getting better.   And as Dave told me, it is better than NOT having them.  Of course the down side is that everything has to be from scratch, so takes a little more planning on my part.

I decided I had had enough with tripping over vacuum cleaner cords and lousy suction and so I got a belated Christmas present.  It’s a Dyson vacuum cleaner and I really like the ease of use and NO CORDS.  Did I mention how much I hate the cords.   Since both the motorhome and the park model are pretty small, this has made cleaning a breeze.   In the motorhome there is a central vacuum, which instead of a power cord, has this LOOOOONG hose that you have to maneuver around as you clean and thus  even more cumbersome than an electrical cord.   So this new unit will go with us when we hit the road in the Spring.

And the reason that I’m so late in getting this out is because Dave had to have an angiogram done the first part of January and the results kind of set us on our heels for a while.  His physician found blockages that were not amenable to additional stents, thus he will have to have a double bypass surgery performed, about the first of March, so it will probably be the end of May before we can get out of the Valley, if we are lucky.   The wait is for his kidneys to recover some from the angiogram - the dye did a real number on them.   So we are kind of in a ‘holding’ pattern for the next few weeks waiting to see what the next round of lab tests show.   Just another hiccup and something we will deal with and work around.