SNOWING INSIDE OF THE HOUSE

The weather in the Chariot Canyon was much different than the weather in San Diego which was located on the Pacific Ocean and surrounding bays. San Diego has a most agreeable weather pattern with sunshine and warmth about 90% of the time. But San Diego County, which was on the same latitude as the State of Israel, had many different climates across her landscape. There were the extreme deserts found in the far east of the county which were covered with wildflowers during the springtime and had hidden springs and creeks that were fun for body-surfing and created little oases in the desert year round.

Then there was a high range of mountains that covered the middle part of the county and this area had strong and sudden snowstorms and lightning and thunderstorms that sprung up out of seeming nowhere but did not last for long. We lived in those mountains but right on the edge of the desert-where we lived was called the high chapparel. The water from the mountain tops ran down the mountain in streams that fed the water table for the entire Imperial Valley. We had to be very careful of what landed in the streams because it would inevitably work its way down into the vast farmlands of the Imperial Valley where it was measured by specialists in the BLM, whose offices were in the Imperial Valley. We were watched for a lot of reasons by the BLM who had the task of keeping the public lands safe and in good condition. The officers who worked with us were very kind and understanding of our various problems and they asked us to keep a BLM weather station at the millsite to track temperature, rain, snow, and wind speeds so that they could keep a handle on how dry the vegetation was getting and if there was the possibility of wild fires occurring and the state the vegetation was in and whether it would go up like a tender box, or resist the fire if the plants had a high water content. Usually, the vegetation was very dry and we had three fire storms in the canyon while we lived there that cleared off thousands of acres of underbrush and trees. Watching the plants and trees make a come-back after the fires was one of the joys of living in such a dangerous place. The vegetation would start blooming and new green shoots would sprout miraculously and pretty soon, the mountain's scars would be once again covered with new vegetation. We lived at the 5,000 foot level and (just an added note) there was a huge wolf sanctuary situated on the top of the mountain behind us and we could hear their howling all through the nights and parts of the day. The sanctuary was actually just outside of Julian proper and was the source of a lot of angry debate, but no wolf ever escaped because they were surrounded by 8 foot high chain-link fencing, and they were kept fed well.

Anyhow, we were not very well prepared for the cold and snow and winds of winter. Our house still had slight cracks in the walls because they were made from used and sometimes slightly warped lumber. When the wind blew and it was raining or snowing, we would get little drifts on the floor of the house. To combat the cold-sometimes getting as low as 7 degrees below zero-we had our one little pot-bellied wood stove which Bruce would spend the winters filling with logs and kindling. The pot belly would turn red from the heat and we all stood or sat right around her. We would be dressed in several layers of clothing and our jackets 24/7. When it was time to go to bed at night-none of the other rooms were heated-we took big flat rocks and baked them in the propane oven until they were very hot. Then we would wrap the stones in newspaper and slip them into the foot of our beds, under the covers. It was sheer joy to get into bed then and the rocks would be warm for about an hour so you could get to sleep without worrying about being cold. Waking up in the mornings was a lot of fun because the fire would have gone out and the cabin would be dark and icy cold. It was Bruce, who woke up at 5:00, that would stagger out to the stove and start the fire roaring again so that the children could run out to the stove and get warm and get ready for school. Since we were always dressed in regular clothes and several layers of them, the children would actually wash up the night before when the house was at its warmest, and put on clean clothes for school, which they would then sleep in so they didn't have to try to put clothes on in the freezing living room the next morning.

Our windows, which totally surrounded the house, were simply screening over large cutouts in the walls. During winter, we had plywood pieces that closed over the screens like flaps and were locked close with a bent nail. We lived in a wooden cocoon in the winter. In the spring, summer, and fall, the open screening kept the house cool during times when the temperature could rise to over 110 degrees.

One day a wind and rain storm came up unexpectedly and the winds were about 50 miles per hour. The wind caught the wooden flaps that covered the windows and they blew wide open letting the rain-soaked wind straight into the house and destroying a lot of our property.

Our friends, Mike and Tony from the Santa Ysabel Indian Reservation, would come up in their big old wood-hauling truck to check on us during the winter. They always brought food and goodies for the children and their happy dispositions went a long way to making us feel safe and cared for, and their advice saved our lives several times.


Tomorrow we will hear about how we survived wildfires and wild animals, and hear about Bruce's constant battle with rattlesnakes and sidewinders and why he would leave their bodies lying around the millsite. I cannot tolerate snakes coming from all directions; they freaked me out.

THE HATFIELDS AND MACCOYS OF CHARIOT CANYON

One day dad, George, decided to hire a workman to help him put up his monuments for the year. He chose a couple who had come up from the Imperial Valley to escape the law. They were personable and dad was taken in by their willingness to help him run the dozers and walk the mountain sides putting new papers in the monuments. Dad figured that they could help him out for months and in return gave them a trailer to sleep in and food to eat. What he never took into consideration was that Bruce would become very jealous of the man and his wife and decide to run them out of the canyon by any means necessary. The man's name was Tom and I don't remember the lady's name as she was as quiet and withdrawn as I was and we never really made contact.

At first, Tom and Bruce tried to put on a good face, but you could feel tensions simmering between them right from the first. All Bruce could talk about was Tom and getting him out of the canyon. Tom also wore weapons (as did dad) everyday, all day long, and even to bed at night-just in case a problem should arise. Bruce screamed at Tom in his sleep and in the daytime he plotted ways to get something on Tom to go to the sheriffs with. He had the boys break into Tom's trailer when they were gone one day in order to look for marijuana or other drugs-which they found and stole. Bruce told the sheriff what they had found and the police told him to mind his own business that they couldn't just accept his word to arrest a man; they had to find a reason on their own and they promised to keep a close eye on Tom as they had already had complaints about him from the Julian merchants.

That was not good enough for Bruce who fussed and fumed all the way home.

Then one day the fight escalated when we left to go to town and when we came to dad's property, lying in front of Tom's trailer, in the middle of the road, was a dead fox who had been shot and then laid out on the road as a "death threat" to Bruce. Of course, that was Bruce's interpretation of the dead fox. It was kind of odd and I remember getting chills up my spine as I watched Bruce create a mountain out of a molehill on the spot. Bruce began to carry a shotgun and a high-powered rifle with him at all times and lean them against the wall at night by the side of his bed.

At first I thought this was just another incident of Bruce's outrageous temper, but the man began to obsess about Tom 24 hours a day and could talk of nothing else. Then he began to stalk Tom in order to see if he had a regular schedule that he kept. He soon knew that Tom would go to town on Thursdays and then spent the rest of the days going past our millsite to other areas of the canyon. Bruce took this as a personal threat. He believed that Tom was stalking him and had it in his mind to blow him away at first opportunity. Usually, Tom's drive by our house was followed by his return within about two hours. Bruce never figured out what they were doing, but he suspected that they had marijuana growing up the canyon and would go most days to water the crops.

Then one day when we returned from town we saw that one of the neighbors had come home from town himself and returned to find his seven wolf-dogs all shot where they had been staked out. Everyone of them dead. He was devastated; they had been his closest friends and he took excellent care of them. Bruce immediately decided that Tom had been the culprit and that seemed to break something in his mind.

The next morning, after Tom and his wife had driven past the house, Bruce started stuffing guns of all kind from hand-guns to semi-automatic rifles and shotguns into his 4-wheel-drive truck. When the truck was filled he demanded that I go with him, threatening me if I didn't go. I got in the truck and immediately started praying hard that somehow there would be no more trouble and no one would get killed. We drove down the road after Tom until we came to a huge stand of scrub-oak trees. The area was also covered with tall bushes and manzanita. Bruce looked the area over then he backed the truck way up the little foothill and positioned it behind some tall bushes where you couldn't see us from the road. We sat there watching the road in front of us, waiting for Tom and his wife to drive by on their way home. Bruce sat there muttering what he was going to do which was to shoot and kill both Tom and his wife when they passed in front of us. I spent the time pleading with Bruce, but I might as well have been talking to the wind. I was TERRIFIED, and sat there shaking and praying with all of my might that somehow Tom and his wife would never come past. We sat thus for four hours with Bruce having his weapons pointed at the road and never moving an inch. I finally broke down and began to plead with him to just let us go on home quietly. I was sobbing and rapidly loosing control. I begged Bruce, "Please let's just go home and deal with this another day. You don't really want to kill someone and then have to go to jail and never be in the mountains again, do you?"

Finally, after five hours of waiting to kill another human being, Bruce relented, and we drove back home and put the guns back in the house.

That was the end of the madness because Tom and his wife quite inexplicably disappeared that day and never returned, even leaving their belongings in the little trailer. Rumor had it that they were arrested in the Imperial Valley over some of his past warrants and couldn't get back to the mountains again. They never returned and I praised God for what I was sure was His intervention.

I began to hate Bruce and was very much afraid of what he was capable of doing. I had terrors for years about the five hours waiting in ambush to kill another human being. I wanted off of the mountain for good...away from the crazy man, but I did not own a vehicle and Bruce never would let me drive one of his vehicles. I had to get myself in shape so that I could walk off of the mountain on my own two feet.


Tomorrow we will talk about surviving the seasons on the mountain.

HARD ROCK MINING & CLAIM JUMPERS

Bruce was a relatively small man, 5' 8" and had a small frame, but every inch of his body was pure muscle. Hard Rock Mining meant exactly what it said: it was hard work; it was dealing with rocks that were hard granite with pockets of quartz, and the mining was not the kind where there is water and sluice boxes. The face of the tunnel wall-where he would be picking, shoveling, and carrying rocks out of the tunnel to a slag pile where we would keep the rock that wasn't ore (98% of it)-was sheer rock and gave up no secrets as to which way he should next plant his pick. It was an act of faith, but when we found good-looking quartz (one that showed some color) we smashed it up and sent it to an assayer to do a spectographic analysis. Usually we would find a few grains of gold which pointed us in the next direction to dig. We often found silver in the assay and a lot of aluminum, copper, and other, baser, elements. Lots of times, the assay would come back negative and then at least we knew where not to dig.

Bruce's tools were mining picks, crowbars, sledge hammers, and during the last five years a hand-held electric sledge hammer that he used to bust the rocks off of the face of the tunnel wall. He eventually built an ingenious contraption that would move the busted-up ore from the floor of the mine into a waiting mining cart where it was then pushed down the track to the outside and pushed over to the slag pile.

The mine was an incredibly interesting place. Bruce had built the walls and the ceiling as he went along with huge beams and running boards. Finally some railroad track was given to him and he ran the track from the face of the tunnel all the way out of the tunnel, and around a corner to the slag pile where he would dump out all of the ore from the very old (1863) mining cart, then haul the mining cart on the railroad track back inside the tunnel to the face of the dig to be filled up again. We had a generator at the tunnel and an electric line ran from the outside of the tunnel all the way to the face of the rock he was working on. The tunnel was very damp and warmer inside than out. It was filled with a number of amphibians/reptiles such as salamanders, frogs, horned toads, and the occasional snake.

The mine was endlessly fascinating to the general public of men and every week-end we would be deluged with those hardy souls who wanted nothing more than to have a hand at digging in the tunnel. It was like the story of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashing of his aunt's fence. Bruce just supervised and he had all of these strong men who really wanted to work in a real mining tunnel. Bruce joyfully and gratefully let them. After working in the mine for the day, we would put on a big barbecue to feed all of the workers; that was my job, and who could complain, the visitors had all brought meat and fixings to feed everybody.

Then there were the other visitors; the unwelcome ones. They would come during the weekdays with their BLM maps showing what claims were open and which were not. None of them wanted to do the work of setting up a mining claim and putting up monuments, they wanted to find an already set-up mine whose paperwork was out of date, and claim that. It made no difference to them that our papers were all in order, they would just throw our paperwork out of the jar and put their paperwork in and think that made them minors. Bruce said otherwise, at the point of a gun. Two examples will suffice. One day Bruce saw men taking our monuments apart as he was driving back from the mine one morning. He stalked up to them with his guns drawn and demanded that they replace our papers back into the jars of the monuments. The claim jumpers pulled their weapons, but Bruce just shot at their feet. They jumped back and cursed him soundly, but they put their weapons away and said they were going to the sheriff and swear out a complaint-which they did. The sheriff told them they had no business up in the mountains with active mining going on and to just go away and stay away.

Once Bruce caught some claim jumpers who also pulled their guns on him. Bruce just shot over their heads until they jumped in their cars and drove rapidly off of the mountain. Bruce chased after them in his truck all the time firing over their heads. He chased them to the highway. They also went to the sheriff but were met there with warnings to go away and not come back.

Bruce was a legend in Julian. He was the last gunman in San Diego County who wore three guns on his person at all times, even when shopping in town. He wore them on a holster around his waist and another one strapped to his engineer boots. He even slept with one gun on him and his holster laying at the foot of the bed with two other guns in it. It was more than creepy for me. I actually feared Bruce and he was a very controlling man.


Tomorrow we have a blood-feud in the canyon and one man is marked for death by Bruce.

A MOUNTAIN OF CHALLENGES

We arrived at the millsite one afternoon with all of our belongings, four children, 16 chickens, and two cats. Dogs were not allowed on BLM land because they ran the cattle and sometimes attacked them.

We had brought John's old army tent for the children to sleep in until we could get more house built, and Bruce and I decided to sleep in the truck that first night and enjoy the stars. The children decided to fight all night about who was touching who, so none of us were asleep when the rain  decided to arrive about 2:00 in the morning. The rain dissolved the old material in the tent, and pieces of it started to fall off in clumps. The children were screaming and Bruce and I were soaking. We all made a dash for the inside of the cabin and huddled on the floor until morning arrived.

The next day, we started to put up a porch around all the sides of the cabin and when we had finished the floor on one side, we put up the cots and beds for the children. The roof overhung the porch enough to protect them from the rain and direct sunlight. They slept on the porch all summer while we finished rooms all around the house. The rooms were only 8' x 8', except for a living room that was about 15' x 20', but we had three bedrooms for the children and a larger bedroom for ourselves, and there was a large indoor workshop for Bruce.

First order of business was finding a source of water. Our creek was dry and we did not have a well yet, so we had to cross to the other side of the mountain to a little creek that always ran. We had two 55 gallon drums and Bruce had made a siphon to get the water out of the creek. It took 5 hours to get 110 gallons of water and it was 5 hours under the grueling hot sun and swirls of insects. Then we drove the water back to the cabin where Bruce had placed a 55 gallon drum permanently on the roof right above where the sink would be located in the kitchen. When it had been filled, again by siphoning, we set the other barrel down on the ground until the water was needed.

We learned to conserve water usage because getting water was such a hard job. We heated water in a big pot on the stove to wash dishes, our hair, and our baths. For drinking water we had several 5-gallon bottles and a bottle stand. We would take the bottles to our friends house, or the Banner Store, to get them filled once a week. Washing clothes meant taking the clothes to town every week to wash them in a laundromat. We also went to town to get the fuel for our generator-regular gasoline-that we also used 55 gallon drums to hold. It would take four 55 gallon drums to run the generator and mining equipment for a month.

We had two propane tanks and a propane business in Ramona would haul propane up to us about every six months. That was some dangerous trip up our severely rutted and torn apart roads, but they made the trips without complaint. We used propane to run our 1920 stove, and our two 1936 propane refrigerators.

The summer passed quickly and just before winter, our house was finished. It was a tar-paper shack with "windows" that were screening covering wide openings in the walls and then a big plywood board would drop from the ceilings to cover the screened "windows" during the cold or rain, or snow. It was a drafty house because the boards that we had used were sometimes slightly warped and there were some very narrow slits in some of the walls. If I sat just right in my rocking chair, I could see the moon shining outside and sometimes stars.

With the winter came the cold, rain, and snow. Bruce mined no matter what the weather was like because weather didn't bother him in his tunnel. We had an old pot-bellied stove that used wood. We used about three chords of wood each winter that was sold to us-at a discount because of our poverty-by the local tribe of Santa Ysabel Indians. They gave us an overabundant amount and became our closest friends for many reasons. They really understood us.


Tomorrow, a look at Bruce's mining operation and claim jumpers.

FORCES MOVE US TO THE MILLSITE

After many months of work, we had finished a 10' by 20' shack on the millsite. She was built solidly and we even had put down tile on the floor. Her roof was made of tar-paper and tar over sheets of plyboard. She had two windows and two doors all of which were locked when we were not in the canyon. We were immediately infested with spiders and ants, but we were able to keep their numbers in control. We would come up on Saturday mornings and stay until Sunday afternoon. The children helped us and soon Bruce had prospected out a place to start digging on the first mining claim, "The Golden Oaks."

Bruce had found an exposed face on the mountain side about a mile south of the millsite. On both sides of the proposed tunnel were manzanita bushes and scrub oak. The creek ran by about 50 feet in front of the mining site. As Bruce stood there staring at his proposed site to dig a tunnel, he felt the presence of someone standing behind him. Turning quickly around he saw an elderly Native American who was watching his every move. Bruce spoke up quickly and said to the elderly man, "Sir, I have no intention of hurting or disturbing your land. When I mine I will be very careful not to disturb any vegetation or move any rocks that I don't have to move. I will keep the area clean and restore it to its former appearance when I have finished. I respect you and your land and will be a good neighbor while we are here."

The Native gentleman spoke to Bruce then, "I can tell that you will keep your word and so I give you permission to dig at this spot. You will find what you are looking for, but it will take you years of work to get to it. Honor and respect our land and we shall help to keep you safe."

Bruce said "Thank you very much," but even as he did so he realized that the Native American elder had disappeared. Many times as he was drilling and picking in the tunnel that he built over the years, to a length of half a mile, he would feel a presence and hear words that guided him as to where to dig next. We found gold in the tunnel, but never enough to make us prosper, and the work was mind-numbing.

We would have continued week-end mining forever, but a fly flew into our ointment. I was working as a Telecommunication Traffic Engineer for Starnet, Corporation. We were owned by Ford Aerospace and Communications Corporation, and working for them was like working in a dream. The benefits and the opportunities that they gave each of us to grow made us very happy employees. But one day, Ford decided to sell us to a Telecommunications Company in Portland, Oregon. It came as quite a shock to all of us, and devastation to our family. I was offered a job with the new company but we had nine children, many in their teens, and they had no desire to change where they lived and went to school. I could not in good conscious hurt all nine children nor upset their lives. I determined to stay in San Diego and find work there. I was unsuccessful in finding another job and didn't know which way to turn. I was the chief provider for the family. Although Bruce received child support for his four children, he was a stay at home father because he was disabled with severe back misalignments after having taken a fall from a high scaffold while he was welding one day years before.

I knew that I could not afford for us to live like we had been living. We had to downsize drastically and the first thing was, we could not afford to pay rent on our house; we had to move. But where to move nine children on an extremely low income when San Diego's rental rates had skyrocketed over the years. The only answer that I could come up with was to move the children to the mountains and let them have a very unique experience. Ford gave us a very generous separation pay, plus two months pay and Cobra insurance. This was enough money to get us moved up to the mountains and situated.

At this time I was struggling with my mental problems and my psychiatrist told me that I was in no condition to work a normal 9-5 job, let alone a job with the pressures that went along with my position as an engineer. He had me apply for Disability Insurance from the State of California. This went through very quickly and so I had an income that-with Bruce's income-would cover our simple living expenses. A year later, I was given Supplemental Security Income because of my mental condition. This, along with all of the help with mining expenses that John gave us, made it possible to live in the mountains. The children would be going to Julian High School.

We put a lot of our things in storage and then took all of our books, pictures, and homey objects up to the mountain. Of course, we had only the one large room to live in at first, and we were crowded. The older teenagers, five of them, decided to stay in San Diego and pursue their own lives, but the four youngest moved up with us; ages 12-15 years old.


Monday we will talk about the hardships of making such a move into the remote back-country and how we learned to survive.

BUILDING A HOME ON A MILLSITE

We started out by staking out six mining claims and one millsite claim. The millsite was different from the mining claims in several ways. First, it was smaller and was only five acres in a square shape. You do not mine on your millsite, it is supposed to be land that has no mineral value to it. Its use was to erect a millhouse for refining ore, other out-buildings for storage, and a cabin if you were planning to live on the claim. At first, we needed a millsite to store mining equipment and to build a latrine so that we could be comfortable when we spent long days at the mine. By latrine, I mean outhouse. There were rules about building the outhouse. You had to build it at least 100 feet away from any moving water-our creek-and it had to be out of sight of the public view. We selected a spot way up a draw in the mountain side. Our son-in-law, Skeeta, dug the hole for the outhouse about 10 feet deep, then climbed out of the hole with a ladder. We constructed a small shack around and above the hole and put in two seats-a double-holer. We put linoleum on the floor and around the seats and filled the outhouse with magazines and a big bag of lime to sprinkle on the waste material to keep the smell and the flies away, and to decompose the matter. It was a wonderful outhouse because as you sat on the "throne" you could watch wild animals as they passed by on the way to the creek. We saw snakes, skunks, racoons, deer, and once a bobcat. They paid us no never-mind but walked past as if we weren't even there. The outhouse was surrounded by trees and brush and you had to walk up a fairly steep path to get to it. When it snowed in the winter time it was a real challenge to make it to the outhouse because of slipping in the snow and ice.

And yes, San Diego County does have snow in the back-country, and it gets down to -7 degrees in the winter time when it is snowing and the wind is blowing up a storm. Not something you see in the city.

We had made a pact between three of us; Bruce would be the miner, John would be the "money man", and I would take care of the paperwork and interact with the BLM.

We decided that we would build a small cabin so that we could stay at the mine and work her for the entire weekend. Bruce had friends who had friends that were in construction. As they built their apartment buildings there would always be boards that would be cut too short, or doors that didn't fit, and a whole range of material that had been damaged in some way. They were looking for someone to haul it away that could use it and in stepped Bruce and John with their trucks. We hauled that material up into the mountains and began to build a one-room shack. My brother, Charley, was the first carpenter we had and he got the foundation going and started the framing on the house. About this time, the BLM came by and wanted to know what we thought we were doing. Did we plan to live at the mine? We assured them that we were just building a storage shed for tools and equipment and to stay in when we came up on the weekends to work. They asked us to stop building until they could approve our plans.

I drew up our mining plans showing where we intended to make tunnels and how we planned to use the millsite. They wanted to know if we were planning on making roads and just where we were planning to dump the rock we excavated from our mining tunnels. BLM land is public land and many people visited Chariot Canyon on the weekends. Besides, the canyon is ancient Indian land and held many artifacts of their living there and they must be preserved at all cost. Also there were OSHA laws that had to be followed for the safety of everyone involved. So much to consider.

I was working as a Telecommunication Traffic Engineer for Starnet Corporation at the time and I used my tools and training to draw out a plan for all six mining claims and for the millsite. Then the BLM met us at the sites one day and had us explain what we were attempting to do. They looked over my work and then breathed a sigh of relief. They had thought we were going to have an operation like Bruce's dad had with heavy equipment and road building and when they saw our modest plans-a family operation-they approved our plans, although they would be watching us very carefully. One other thing, we must not hurt or scare the cattle in the canyon because the ranchers had a prior agreement with the BLM to run their cattle in the canyon and not be harassed. The cattle became our pets although we didn't see them very often.

So we built a one-room shack out of our materials and would spend the weekends living on the millsite.


Tomorrow we have a crisis in our lives and have to move onto the millsite permanently. With 9 children.

STAKING OUT A GOLD MINING CLAIM

Over the last few blogs I have mentioned several times our 14 years of living in the wilderness southeast of Julian, California, USA. It was such an interesting time in our lives that I think you might be interested in some of our adventures.

My father-in-law was a gold miner, since the 1920's, in the mountains of the Chariot Canyon Truck Trail in the outback-mountains of Julian. He had over 20 active mines that he had extracted enough gold from to raise a family of five boys. During our time-frame, 1986-2000, dad (George Herrington, Sr.) was still actively mining. He had built a millhouse that hung over the edge of the canyon and was refining enough gold to have financial backers putting up hundreds of thousands of dollars for equipment and new outbuildings, workmen and salesmen.

Only one of dad's sons was interested in the gold mine, and that was my husband, Bruce Sr. Bruce had been raised on the gold mines-dad had a huge house on one of the mining claims-and gone to school in Julian. He loved the San Diego back-country and had always dreamed of working in the mines one day, but he had four children to raise and thought he would never have that opportunity.

When Bruce and I had been together for about four years, dad asked us to come up to the mine and have a talk with him. He offered to teach us how to stake-out and set up a mining claim and a millsite. You dug for gold ore on the mining claim; it was hard-rock mining, and you used a millsite to put up your cabin and outbuildings for refining the ore. Once you have gone to the trouble and expense of setting up your claims and brought in equipment to do the mining, etc. you need to stay at the mine 24/7 so that claim jumpers don't try to take over your claim and so that the general public doesn't walk away with the "old" mining equipment.

To stake out a mining claim is a fairly straight-forward job. You first go to the County Recorders to see who has mining claims and where they are located; and if they are up-to-date on their paperwork. You can also get this information from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). You will be looking for a claim on BLM land as that is the only land that is freely available for mining operations. You then go out scouting a likely area, that is you walk hundreds of miles poring down at the ground and looking at the sides of mountains for outcroppings of quartz. Gold is found in quartz; but not in all quartz-you are looking for "lucky quartz", if you get my meaning. Walking the mountain-sides and canyons of the Julian back-country is treacherous. There are rattlesnakes-lots of them-bobcats, wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, and tarantulas. Every insect imaginable-all biting it seems-bats and moths at night, skunks, racoons, deer, squirrels-rabies wide spread. The ground under your feet is either going straight up, or you are sliding downhill on tiny loose rocks. There is poison ivy, stinging nettles, and cat's claw, and to top everything off, the weather is either over 100 degrees or 7 degrees below zero.

But dad had pointed out to us places that he had prospected out before and had found gold-bearing quartz. He had the maps of all of the claims in the Chariot Canyon and so he showed us-on the maps-just where we needed to stake out our claims. So taking a compass, and a 100 foot tape measure, tools, wood to built the monuments for the claims, and water, we started our ascent of the steep mountain's side. Every step we made up, we slid back two. The chaparral was over six feet high in places and we had to hack our way through it as there were no paths. Finally, in desperation, we got down on our stomachs and hands and knees and wormed our way up the side of the mountain. Scratch city! All I could think about was meeting a rattlesnake face to face.

Finally at the top, we found where dad had been talking about and after finding one of his current monuments, we stepped out our own claim; a rectangle 600 feet wide and 1200 feet long. We placed monuments containing copies of our paperwork and stating the name and which corner it was of our claim in a glass mason jar, covered it over with a mountain of rocks, and erected a six foot high pole in the center of the monument for easy spotting in the future with red, white, and blue ribbons on the top of the pole (also a requirement from the BLM). This we did for six points, NE, NorthCenter End, NW; SE, SouthCenter End, and SW. Then we took pictures of the claim and prospected it out until we knew where we were going to make the first cut on the claim, and placed an even larger monument there.

The paperwork on the mining claims is filed with the County Recorder and then with the BLM in Sacramento. You must check and date your monument papers every year, do "X" amount of work on your claim each year, and pay fees to both the County and the BLM each year in order to keep your mining claims valid.


Tomorrow...the decision to live permanently on the millsite claim, and building a cabin out of reused scrap lumber and supplies.

UPDATE ON BLOOD SUGAR SOLUTION DIET

What a joy this diet has become. I only get normally-hungry, at meal times, and have had no cravings.

Now, no cravings is a big deal for me. I am a sugar addict and would find myself eating something containing sugar all day long; and most foods have hidden sugar products in them. But now I am eating zero sugar/sugar substitutes and do not even think about them. How is this possible? I find the vegies and nuts are very sweet in and of themselves and I am allowed 1/2 cup of dark berries a day and they are so sweet that when I think of sugary things, I switch to thinking of the next berries and nuts.

I feel nutty talking about food like this, but my kitchen has been revolutionized and I have to say that looking into the refrigerator with all of its colored vegetables is a beautiful sight. Makes me hungry.

The statistics are 15 pounds lost in two weeks, and a total of 24 inches over all. I dropped my use of insulin from 36 units to 20 units, and my blood pressure has dropped 28 points - 16 points of systolic/and 12 points diastolic, and my pulse is down to 58.

I went through a spot last week when I felt very weak upon any exertion, but that has cleared up and I now am full of energy and very productive. Mentally, I see a great improvement. I am sleeping eight hours at night for the first time in three years. I wake up full of life and motivation.

It is a straightforward diet and after the first week when you are learning to prepare all of the proteins and vegies and fruits and take all of the supplements, it becomes second nature and very simple to fix meals.

It is an elimination diet: no sugar or sugar substitutes; no flour; no prepared foods; no preservatives; no soda; no caffeine; no dairy. Instead you eat proteins from meat, fish, eggs, beans and nuts, plenty of non-starchy vegetables, and dark berries. For a beverage you have plenty of water and green tea..

It took me a week to psyche myself into giving up all of those goodie foods. But I am white-hot determined to change my life into this way of managing food, my weight, and my health. It is simple, but tough, but it WORKS.

If you would be interested in this diet, read, The Blood Sugar Solution, by Dr. Mark Hyman, MD; Little Brown Publishers. Or, you can hear about his diet on Public Television right now.

What is really groovy is putting on a dress and having it fall into its proper place and then having it feel loose on you.

Another side-light is that I am keeping kosher because I do not eat meat at all, but rather use a lot of tofu. I am also pretty much eating vegetarian except that I do eat eggs. Goals I've had for years.

Besides the diet itself, and the nutritional supplements (you can buy these in a supermarket), you exercise daily, walk in the sun for half an hour a day, do yoga or other relaxation techniques, deep breathing, use a sauna if you have one available, and drink filtered water.

Best of good fortune on any diet you are working on; may you have complete success.

COLOR: A Fable for Our Time

As I am sure you know by now, I have 13 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. 16 grandchildren: Six of my grandchildren are white, and 10 are black. We have an interracial family. Today is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Day and in honor of this great human being I offer you, COLOR: A Fable for Our Time, which I wrote on a long past Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Day. I wrote the story for my grandchildren when they began to ask me why people are born in different colors; "why can't we all be the same color?"

One day the Master of the Universe looked down upon the Earth. Everywhere He looked, He saw His children fighting and hating each other because of the different colors of their skin.

"How is it," thought God, "that my children still fight over differences between them? Have they never noticed that I purposely created all things differently? It delights me to look upon Earth and see thousands of subtle shadings of each color in birds, animals, trees, flowers, fish, everything; including man. In all these years, why have they never understood this?

Now the Master of the Universe, being all wise, decided to teach His children to see the beauty in each other.

When the children of Earth awoke the next morning, they found everything the color grey; a flat, dull, humorless GREY. The sky, grass, water, trees, flowers, birds, animals, houses, cars-everything-was grey; except for God's children themselves.  They had remained the beautiful colors they had been born with: shiny blacks; warm chocolate browns; rosy reds; sunset yellows; creamy ivory's; gardenia whites; and every possible nuance of shading in between.

The world was in shock! At first no one realized the significance that they alone had color; they were too busy adjusting to the horror their world had become.

People stepped on their pets because they blended right into the floor and furniture; books were useless because print and page were one color. Eating became a repugnant chore which some people could barely stomach: grey vegetables and fruits; grey ice cream and pies; grey meat and fish; grey bread and butter; grey milk and coffee; even soft drinks were grey-like the sludge rumored to be laying at the bottom of the soda bottle ready to plop into your mouth when you drain the last drop.

All across the world, people ceased to function as their private worlds fell apart. Businesses went bankrupt overnight; whole industries were destroyed. The fashion industry was the first to go-along with interior decorating and cosmetics. Restaurants folded; no one was willing to eat grey food prepared by another person.

And then one morning, when the world had all but died of inertia, an elderly woman made a mind-boggling discovery. Boarding a city bus behind a young Indian boy, she suddenly exclaimed, "How beautiful you are! Your skin reminds me of the color of the walls of the Grand Canyon-at least how they used to look!"

Then, suddenly, mental blinders dropped from the eyes of all the passengers on that bus; they all saw that the Indian boy's skin was indeed the dusky rose-brown of the Grand Canyon at sunrise. With great cries of joy, they began to actually look at their neighbors, and when they did, they saw for the first time, the true beauty of color. They found in the beauty of each person's skin, the remembrance of a loved vision that once had existed before the world was grey. This joy and inner vision had spread across the entire world before the next day began.

People rushed to visit a different-colored person than themselves. They clasped hands and became vibrant art; the neighbors on one New York block joined hands and created a living rainbow. And then people began to speak to one another; actually to express feelings, and find that those feelings were shared exactly by someone whom they had thought were very different.

Many years passed by, but the Earth remained grey. Then one day, the Master of the Universe looked into the hearts of His children and found that they also took delight in differences, and had come to treasure their neighbor's different colors, ideas, and cultures. Some people had even wondered aloud why God had not created blue, green or purple people; a common hope was that if Earth ever received extra-terrestrial visitors, perhaps the color of their skins would add those hues to Earth's human family.

The Master of the Universe saw all this and was pleased with His children. When dawn of the next day broke, the children of Earth found their world reborn in vivid, rapturous colors. The color grey was remembered from that day forward, only in the wings of the Dove of Discernment.

THE THOUGHT-PROCESS OF SUICIDE

I thought that I had concluded my story yesterday on the subject of suicide, but I realize after re-reading it this morning that I never explained what my mind was doing at the time nor what my gut feelings were.

My mind was totally locked and closed to all around me. My mind hid from my conscious self the fact that I had determined to stop living. I began to put names of my children on all of my possessions and prepare a will and living will so there would be no fighting over things after I had gone. I wrote letters to each of my children and grandchildren and wrote down my most important thoughts and ideas so they would have them in future years. Although these are reasonable things to do in normal times, I was doing it as part of a plan of escape. You may never fully realize that you are planning to commit suicide until the time of the final snap, when you loose total control of your rational mind. Usually there is a final trigger.

My heart was consumed in pain from some unknown source berating me for all of my faults and stupid moves. I could conceive of my family members but didn't feel as if they were really there. My heart screamed to punish such an evil, worthless person as I was.

At first I had not formulated a specific plan to end my life, I was just fixated on my death and preparing for it. In my psychosis I judged that I was beyond a mere light punishment like stabbing myself. I had given up all hope and saw death as an inviting rest and surcease of pain and struggles. I yearn to just "let go."

Then, one day, things tilted a little more out of control. I took a bad fall one morning; there was no one around to help; the boys had torn up the house and disappeared; and there was no food for breakfast. A simple, easy, plan sprung full-blown into my mind. A simple, easy way to just let go.

I lined up all of my psychiatric drugs on my bed, pill by pill, got a large glass of water and began to swallow the pills, one by one. Resting after each tenth one. When I had ingested about 30 pills and was getting drowsy, my cell phone began to ring. I automatically picked it up and it was my worker from Jewish Family Services. I answered her greeting, but she was a trained psychologist and immediately picked up on a problem. She told me she was going to call right back, hung up, and called 911. I did not answer when she tried to call back. She left her work and drove to my house, ran up the stairs, and broke down my door. Then the EMTs arrived and I was taken off to have my stomach pumped. I was hospitalized for six weeks and grew up a lot. I have never tried suicide since; nor will I ever.

During the "suicidal mood" I laughed at people's jokes, talked as if everything were all right, and went about doing my usual daily chores. But it was as if I had a juicy secret from all the world and no one could understand me. I didn't want people to understand me, I just wanted to be left alone to carrying out my death.

In short, my mind was frozen in a land where there is no logic, all that you have is twisted logic; by which logic you were totally sane and doing the most natural thing in the world. My feelings were blunted and all that really registered was the constant pain in the depth of my being. I wanted to stab that pain, but I knew that soon I would have victory over it. I was calm and decisive and "matter-of-fact" about the whole situation.

It is impossible to understand, or comply with, other people talking to you. You just kind of shine people on until they either go away or get tired of watching you. Then, when you are alone, you finish doing what you had started to do...even if it takes months of waiting until the perfect moment comes.

If you see any of these symptoms in someone you love, or meet, then sooth the person until you can safely leave their presence for a moment, and then get on the phone to 911, or a psychiatrist or mental health worker. If you can't get a psychiatrist or mental health worker to aid you, then go to your local police where they generally have a great deal of experience in these matters, or will at least know whom to call. Most police departments have at least one person trained in dealing with mental health issues.


Thank you for listening to all of these hard subjects, we will now move on. Monday will be a surprise and on a different note.

SUICIDE

I am so happy with President Obama's speech on gun control and mental health yesterday. I have strong feelings about both, as you might imagine. I have seen and lived both sides of both issues.

I lived in the wilderness for 14 years of my life; the 14 years when my mental illness was in its most psychotic phase. My husband, Bruce, was a gold miner in the mountains of Julian, California, and we lived on a millsite claim-on BLM land-in a shack that we had built out of discarded lumber. Bruce was also a gun collector and had 32 weapons in our home; some of them locked up-all of them loaded.

We were raising four children at the time and taught all of them how to use weapons, load ammunition, and clean and care-for their guns. They were also exposed to a great deal of gunpowder since we did load our own ammo. Bruce kept a great amount on hand because he also used to make his own sticks of dynamite out of the centers of paper-towel rolls, a fuse, and packed gunpowder. I just realized that I would be holding the paper tube while he was tamping the gunpowder down. I must have had a very big death wish.

We were very active NRA members and all had hunting licenses. Guns were a necessity in the mountains because of armed claim-jumpers that would descend on us occasionally; we lived in an area teaming with rattlesnakes, bobcats, mountain lions, and the occasional bear; and because we lived on the Pacific Crest Trail, and were thus on the route of immigrants coming into America, and also bandits. It was kind of dicey living out there, but the rewards were tremendous as it was a great training ground for the children who learned to build a home and maintain it, how to weld, and how to work on machinery-oh, and of course, how to survive in the wilderness and hard-rock mine.

Now all of this was well and good, but as I said, I was also having patches of psychosis during this time period. These were periods of time when I would have hallucinations and become suicidal. Suicidal, in my case, was short instances of time when I might think I had heard that one of my children had died, or were in serious trouble, and I would be distraught and desperately want to die. I would run out into the wilderness, unarmed, and not care about the consequences. I just wanted not to feel the pain.

One day I did not run into the wilderness; I had become crafty in my psychosis. I merely took out my own weapon from the gun safe, which of course I had the key to, loaded it with .22 ammo, and snuck away to my bedroom where I locked the door and huddled in a corner. Soon there would be no more pain. Because I was psychotic (defective, or lost contact with, reality) I did not understand how my actions would affect my children. The very children that I was so psychotically distraught about. I know it doesn't make sense, but you don't make sense when you are suicidal.

I had a .22 Colt Revolver, usually loaded with snake loads-shot in a bullet form that is used to fend off poisonous snakes. I pulled the hammer back and put my finger on the trigger, which had a light pull. I put the gun barrel against my temple and as I began to pull on the trigger, Bruce sailed over the bed and knocked the gun out of my hand. I came instantly back into reality and was terrified at what I had almost done. I still shake inside, for a long time, after thinking about this incident.

After that incident it was years before I became suicidal again and I have only had one other attempt since that day, in 2006, when I tried to take an overdose after the death of my husband and best friend. That was also my last hospitalization. I have had no psychosis since that date. Thank God!

In my experience there does need to be better enforcement of current gun laws, and a tightening of control over assault weapons. And maybe add an assessment by mental health workers of a mentally ill person's home surroundings and access to weapons. In my case, everyone-including doctors and mental health workers-knew that weapons were an issue in my home, but no one ever suggested to me to move away from them or report misuse of weapons to authorities. Of course the authorities also knew about Bruce's gun collection and hoarding of gun powder, and knew about my illness, but they never seemed to make a connection about my possible misuse of the weapons.

I am so excited that President Obama has made mental health an issue again. Thank you so much for increasing help to the mentally ill and those that treat them. This powerful two-pronged program is a start to correct obvious deficiencies in the mental health and gun control programs that now exist.

Suicide disrupts families for several generations and, of course, is fatal to the person who is so troubled. Do not waste any time if you feel that a friend or family member is suicidal. Interject yourself into their lives and make sure that they receive psychiatric help immediately. The person is not thinking rationally and cannot understand your reasoning until they are in a better space. Mental health workers are generally compassionate and caring individuals who are doing their best in a world that is receiving less and less support from government and private insurance. Doing an almost impossible task with very little funding for their effort.

Please speak out, or vote for, your own opinions on this situation and thank you so much for listening to these discussions of mental illness and its affect upon a person, their families, and the society at large.

ABOUT SELF-MUTILATION; one experience

Today we reach an issue that is going to take some painful recollections to write. I am mortally ashamed at this chapter in my life and have yet to reconcile my actions with the logical part of my brain.

The first time I hurt myself was in 1977. I had 5 children, one of whom was 18 months old, and my husband was overseas in the Navy. I was still suffering from clinical depression after having a tough bout with Post-Partum Depression when my son had been born in 1975.

On this particular day, I was energetically berating myself for all of my perceived weaknesses. I felt like a lousy mother: the house was all torn up; there was not enough money for food; and I didn't know how I was going to buy the children shoes. I felt worthless as a mother and I hated myself. I felt that I was an evil person who needed to be punished for being so bad. Punished; that was the answer. If I could be punished for my sins then God would forgive me.

I was not thinking about killing myself; I did not want to die, just feel better. The pain was so great and I became fixated on one thought: If I could feel "real" pain then I would get what I deserved and maybe God would forgive me for being so bad; for treating His little children so badly. I forgot about the time of day; the children were in school and the baby was asleep.

I went to the kitchen and got a "chicken-turning" fork out of one of the drawers, then I went into my bedroom and began to think how wonderful it would feel if I just hurt myself a little bit. Somehow my gut was telling me that there was a connection between physical pain and emotional pain. I had this overwhelming thought that it would feel good to hurt myself a little. I raised the fork above my head and stabbed myself on the forearms and thighs. I couldn't stop once I started.

Suddenly, I heard a child screaming in the distance, then one of my neighbors came running. She grabbed the fork out of my hand and immediately called my Bishop for help in what to do (there was no 911 then). The police and ambulance arrived and I was headed for my first psychiatric hospital admission.

One of my sons had come home from Kindergarten and found me and couldn't get my attention. He ran for my sister-friend next door and she comforted him and got help for me.

My mind had shut down, but in my heart I felt wonderful and pain-free for the first time in months. I didn't realize then what I had done to my poor son but when I learned how badly I had hurt and frightened him, I was devastated. I am still apologizing to him to this day.

Anyway, self-mutilation was never about suicide for me, it was done in a frantic attempt to stem the tide of pain and guilt that was racking my soul. I now have met hundreds of other people, in-hospital and out, who have resorted to self-mutilation to be able to survive their mind's constant barragement of believed evilness and worthlessness. Sometimes it seemed the only way to be able to survive without committing suicide.

When hurting myself I felt calm and happy; I had punished the evil one that was me and now God would forgive me my sins. These feelings and emotions reinforced the thoughts that punishing yourself would save you from sin.

Because of my family and the growth I made in mental hospitals, I now have a solid sense of self-worth and self-love. I no longer would even consider hurting myself and have not for over 20 years. But every once in a while a thought will flit across my mind that hurting makes you feel good. I promptly squash such thoughts with the hammer of logic.

God bless anyone who is having these thoughts about your inherent evilness and need to be punished. You are a child of God and He loves you just the way you are right now. He works through love, not punishment.


Tomorrow we will discuss the subject of suicide.

IN-LIGHTENMENT

I feel a need to pause for a moment in my recital of my mental health issues to lighten this up a bit.

I am a very fortunate person in that although I have had some horrific experiences in life they have simply helped me to grow up. My mind is clear and my thought processes are cogent, but more than that, my heart is filled with the joy of life and I am forever grateful to God that I came through in one piece, and have a sense of humor about the past.

Because you have allowed me to voice my experiences and feelings about the past, I have been able to find peace from the memories of how rotten I handled life when I was very ill. I made huge mistakes and hurt people as I went along but have come to a place where I can earnestly make amends and express a heart that is filled with love. Writing this blog and communicating with you makes every experience seem worthwhile. Maybe you have a loved one, or yourself maybe, who has struggled with the mental and emotional issues of life and feel a heavy weight of guilt over all of their actions. It may be comforting to know that 98% of the people that I met in my hospitalizations were absolutely lovely people who were suffering from a bio-chemical imbalance. Most were kind and generous of heart but suffered under a load of guilt because they had mental or emotional problems, and may have done things they were embarrassed to talk about. In the hospital you learn to confront your emotions and past actions and learn how to deal with those problems in a positive manner. You learn to cope with, and understand, your own mental issues. It is really not a "down" experience at all.

Why I am writing about this subject is to help other people, who also address these issues in their private lives or in the lives of their loved ones, understand more about the truths of a mental hospitalization, or a mental illness, and how it really affects your life. I would like to in-lighten people in regards to the truth about having a mental illness, or staying in an institution. I will say that there have always been "incidents" when I have been in the hospital. Someone looses control and gets in a fight with another patient or begins to hurt the property, but there is an immediate response from the nurses and staff and that patient is placed in the locked unit of the ward where they are generally restrained and kept in separate rooms, then medicated until they are back in control. I felt afraid a couple of times, but usually it was over before it properly began.

And like I said: the food is great; group therapy helps you to understand yourself and talk your problems out; classes teach you about your medication and diagnosis and how to succeed in your personal life; and recreational, game, and art therapy let you express your feelings creatively while you learn how to better socialize. It is almost a "vacation" from life because everyone around you understands what you're going through and feeling, and you can concentrate on improving yourself.

I'm not saying that everyone that goes to a mental hospital has my experience of it. Some people's experience might be much more traumatic; especially if it is a first hospitalization and you do not understand how the programs work. But I encourage anyone in the situation to give the process some time and try to get out of the program what will help you to grow and develop. It took me years of work to get better and I still am on medication-only not nearly as much-and expect to be for the rest of my life unless a truly remarkable discovery is made in metal health.

Tomorrow we will handle self-mutilation-as opposed to suicide-and then move on to the subject of suicide itself. When these subjects are covered, we will get back to the fun of stories again. Thank you for your continued patience and understanding.

ELECTRIC SHOCK

I think that the most feared procedure that they carried out in my mental hospitals was E.C.T.-ElectroConvulsantTherapy-also referred to by its older name of Electric Shock treatments.

All of us had seen, or read, One Flew over the Cookoo's Nest, and had indelibly imprinted on our psyche the scenes of Electric Shock Therapy from the movie. We also have the vivid picture of Jack Nicholson, after having an emotion-stiffling, personality-deadening, lobotomy. We all understood that this was the final step if Electric Shock didn't work. Lobotomies; that was the greatest fear.

E.C.T. still has its uses in psychiatry, but is done infrequently and I believe they no longer do lobotomies; thank God!

E.C.T. was very different for me than the process shown in "Cookoo's Nest." I had a wonderful Psychiatrist who specialized in E.C.T., named Dr. Albala. While you were in your regular mental hospital, you got up in the morning-early-and did not eat or drink, but were given a sedative to make you drowsy. It was a very strong sedative and my only recollection of the procedure was of Dr. Albala's gentle eyes looking into mine as I slipped under the sedative. Once under the sedation they would put you in an ambulance and drive you to the one hospital in town that did E.C.T. There they would prepare as if you were going to have an operation and then rub a contact-gel on your temples and apply electric stimulus to one side of your brain. They usually did not do both sides at once, but gave you a greater number of treatments, on one side and then the other. As you can imagine, I had to be in the hospital for some time to complete all the treatments as they only did one or two treatments a week. When I opened my eyes, after they had taken me back to my hospital, I would always be looking into the compassionate eyes of Dr. Albala again. I'll never forget his eyes and the care and dignity with which he treated me. He made me feel like a human being of worth; not like an inmate who was crazy.

I had been given E.C.T. because I had become catatonically depressed-I lay on a bed and could not move, or eat, I was so depressed. With the E.C.T. I slowly came out of my depression and started to live again. I was discharged after my treatments and went back home to the mountains. There were side-effects. I lost three years of memories; of my children growing up and of some of my hospitalizations, and of some of my life experiences. They have not come back even after 25 years. Fortunately, I had taken a lot of pictures of my children during that period so I was able to build some new memories from looking at them.

I have always been grateful for the E.C.T. and the way that it was administered to me by my psychiatrists. I grew up a lot from the experience and started writing a book about living in an inter-racial family, and also some poetry. E.C.T. was a life-altering experience and certainly one to seriously consider if ever needed. The theory was that E.C.T. changed the brain chemistry in a positive manner; it did for me.

Tomorrow I will discuss self-mutilation: what causes this behavior; how it feels; and why you are under compulsion to do it when you reach a certain level of guilt and self-anger.

INSIDE MENTAL HOSPITALS

I have been in so many mental hospitals over the years of my life that I cannot tell you exactly how many times I have been hospitalized. Something inside of me says 22 times but that may not be correct; a lot of times.

Each episode was brought about by extreme anxiety and self-hatred leading to self-mutilation to assuage excessive feelings of guilt. I intend to write about self-mutilation in an upcoming blog and want to stay on subject, so I will not go into self-mutilation any further at this point except to say that I was not suicidal, but wished to just lie down and die and rid the world of one crazy, evil, person.

My first hospitalization was in 1976, and my last in 2006. Each hospitalization lasted about 6-8 weeks. During this time the psychiatrists tried different medications to see if they helped my symptoms. Usually the drug of choice would be the latest thing on the market; the one the pharmaceutical companies were pushing at the time. There is no doubt that I have been a guinea pig over the years, but I have steadily improved up to my current level of functioning so I cannot complain too loudly and thank God that scientists have found solutions to formerly untreatable mental illnesses. My current level of treatment is a 15 minute visit with my excellent psychiatrist, every third month of the year, to obtain prescriptions for Abilify, which he is decreasing, and Zoloft. He also evaluates my mental and emotional condition and tells me what our next step is in medication and treatment.

While our bodies adjust to the new medication "cocktail" we receive at the hospital, we go through many therapies such as Occupational, Physical, Recreational and Group Therapy. They kept us busy all of the time and I really enjoyed all of the classes and groups I was in. The most important thing they taught us was how to live with our mental illness; coping skills, medication and diagnosis instruction. We did crafts and art therapy every day and sometimes music classes. The food was excellent and everyone puts on weight during their stay.

When you are admitted to the hospital-no matter what condition your are in-you must give up your belt and shoelaces and you are placed in a closed unit until they can evaluate you and see if you are stable enough to be on the open unit. All of your bags and purses are searched for contraband-a lot of patients try to sneak in street drugs or paraphernalia-and you are then instructed to take off your clothes and let the mental health worker check your body for bumps, bruises, and other bodily markings. After you are given a bed-usually you share a room with one other person-they interview you to see what your current diagnosis is and assess your condition. Usually the intake worker is very gentle and supportive but if you are there for a fight then you can have one and end up in a locked, sometimes padded, room and usually are strapped down to a bed. Frequently the new inmate has arrived from County Jail, and often is violent, which is why they were sent here. Violent patients are given strong medication-often Thorazine or Mellaril-and usually sleep the first few days they are in the hospital. Usually violent patients are kept segregated from non-violent patients, but there were times when a violent person would fool the staff and get put on the open unit and then go off on one of the other patients. There were times that there were fights between patients or between patients and mental health workers and the rest of us would be very much afraid. But I was never hurt in all of my hospitalizations.

I grew a lot in the hospitals. I was looking to get well and I was given much extra help and was able to study about my diagnosis and learn different ways to cope with my illness and be able to have a normal and enriching life. Because of the skills I was taught I have been able to recover from the pit of mental illness and have a happy and peaceful heart. I turned to God for help and support and He has given me a loving and positive outlook on life.

The most frightening thing about the hospital was when another patient on your unit would lose control and attempt to commit suicide or self-mutilation. Usually it would be some person you really liked and they just couldn't bear the weight of their problems. 95% of the mentally ill are not violent except to their own selves, and almost everyone works to get on top of their problems and be supportive to the other patients around them.

Tomorrow I will write about my experience with in-hospital Electro Convulsent Therapy (ECT) or better known as Electric Shock Therapy and how it saved and affected my life.

Update on my Blood Sugar Solution Diet. I lost 7 pounds this week and 15 and 1/2 inches in total of all my measurements. My blood pressure dropped, my blood sugar levels dropped, and I have not had cravings. On to the second week; I can hardly wait.

MENTAL ILLNESS & DEPRESSION

Now that I have brought up the subject of my own mental illness, let me start a continuing dialogue about my own experiences with mental illness and its treatment in our country (USA).

Depression strikes so many of us. NOW it is o.k. to take mood stabilizers (such as Prozac and its relatives) and a great percentage of us do, but when I was diagnosed, in 1962, there were no such popular medications and I was stabilized on Thorazine and Mellaril. Then, depression was considered a grave mental defect and you were considered "crazy" and locked up in mental hospitals, or kept emotionally straight-jacketed by powerful psychiatric drugs.

Now society has opened its mind a tad and come to realize that depression is a bio-chemical imbalance that can be corrected by Prozac or one of the other amazing anti-depressants, and not a symptom that you have lost control of your mind or emotions.

I am not a doctor in any sense of the word and do not want to contradict anything that your Psychiatrist has told you, or asked you to do, but I have been in the mental health system since 1962 and would like to relate some of my experiences in the hope that you will come to understand the inner workings of mental illness and its treatment in the U.S.A.

I have received four slightly different diagnosis over my life time as Psychiatrists and Scientists have made huge discoveries about the nature and proper treatment of mental illness and changed the wordings and labels in the DMS-4, a text book that defines the parameters of each mental illness and the correct treatment of the patients particular disorder. In 1962 I was diagnosed with Ambulatory Paranoid Schitzophrenia after failing a series of tests that I had answered truthfully, but to the doctors, unbelievably and psychotically (it was in regards to severe abuse in my childhood).

In 1979, I was diagnosed with Schitzo-Affective Disorder/Manic-Depression. This was a less-severe mental illness and was understood to be caused by a bio-chemical imbalance in my brain chemistry exacerbated by rough life experiences.

In 2004, my psychiatrist, after treating me for 22 years, told me one day that I did not have Schito-Affective Disorder, only Bi-Polar Disorder, Rapid-Cycling (I can go from depression to elation in a single day, or less). My brain lit up with joy when he told me those words. I was not crazy, only disheveled emotionally when my brain chemistry gets out of whack. You see, I knew intellectually that my illness was caused by a disorder in my brain chemistry, but in my sub-conscious I still believed the words of the first psychiatrist and secretly accepted that I was indeed crazy. I must say that even as I write this blog, I can feel the branding of the word "mental" on my emotional forehead. And it still makes me feel very uncomfortable and I go to see my psychiatrist every three months so he can give me his opinion as to my "craziness", or not; I am that insecure. I have a great doctor who is slowly decreasing my psychiatric meds as he sees my level state of mind and emotion.

Finally, in 2006, I had my final hospitalization and my psychiatrist in the hospital after much testing and therapy told me that my final diagnosis is Traumatic Shock Disorder and Bi-Polar/rapid cycling. He had found deeply hidden experiences in my childhood and helped me to face them and work them out in a special program. I no longer have the fear and anxiety that my childhood experiences caused me, but have accepted the truth and made peace with all concerned. I believe that this part of my mental illness has been opened up and cured.

Tomorrow I will talk about my mental hospitalizations and how I found the physical hospital and their particular therapies.

PANIC ATTACKS - WHAT ARE THEY & WHY

As we have discussed before, I have a mental illness described as Rapid-Cyclying Bi-Polar Disorder. This disorder has markedly changed my life, mostly for the positive, but also to the negative when I have let it take over my life and cloud my judgements. Bi-Polar Disorder has given me the insight to see the truth of my own self and increased my productivity and ability to create; particularly in its manic state. Bi-Polar describes a mental illness where you range between two states of being, depression and mania. It is somewhat controlled by psychiatric medications, and the rest must be controlled by your own inner strength and self-knowledge.

In the struggle to maintain a balance in my moods I have often chosen negative thoughts and impulses to take over and I have spent money foolishly and made poor judgements in the friends I have chosen. People who scammed me as so many of us elderly, disabled persons are, as we are rather naive and fundamentally are disposed to trust other human beings. I choose to give everyone trust until they have disappointed me, or stolen from me. This stance has often failed me and I am known as a sucker for sad stories, and as an easy mark for users. Since moving into The Ritz in October, I have managed to stay away from the users and bilkerers, and I am so happy and intend to keep my guard up against fake friends. But I digress, this is supposed to be a blog about Panic Attacks.

Almost every person I have met that has a mental illness, and many that do not have a mental disorder, have occasional (or in some cases daily) Panic Attacks. In a panic attack you become overcome by a sense of dread, and often it develops into a passionate, overwhelming sense that one of your loved ones is dying, or that you, yourself, are dying in the very instant of an attack. You become frantic in your pain and fearful thoughts and suddenly have great trouble breathing. You are absolutely consumed with the thoughts of a million tragedies all happening at once, and you go into an emotional overload that is both physical and psychological. Physically, you cannot breathe properly and are consumed by the fear of dying. You collapse on the floor (often) clawing at your throat and chest trying to get a breath of air, at the same time psychologically you are consumed with the fear that you or your loved one is in eminent danger of death. The fear and pain you are consumed with are very difficult to deal with and cause literal bodily and mental pain.

Most mental health workers do not like dealing with panic attacks because they seem so irrational to them. They seem to think that we choose to have panic attacks, but anyone who has ever had one spends the rest of their life dreading another occurrence and we try to rationalize what has just caused the last one we were in. Many times we are in public or semi-public places when they occur and that causes a fear of being in that place again. We start to avoid any place that is like the place we had our last attack. Some people elect to stay at home and never leave again so as to avoid the triggers that set off panic attacks. Unfortunately we do not know how panic attacks are triggered. They come out of nowhere and strike when you least expect it. You can be very relaxed when suddenly the discomforting thoughts begin to plague your mind and heart. In an instant you are in the middle of a panic attack and your breathing ability seems to vanish.

A seasoned mental health worker will bring you a paper bag to breath into, and will sooth and comfort you past the demons that are plaguing your mind and heart. After 15-30 minutes of an attack that mental health worker will have been able to lead you through the attack to a safe place beyond your irrational fears. However, most attacks do not occur around any mental health workers so the people around you also begin to freak out and are worried about your condition and sometimes call for emergency services. They are well-intentioned, but it is totally embarrassing to have an attack in public-another reason to stay at home where you can have your attack in private.

The driving force for panic attacks is an extremely high level of anxiety. In this present time, with so many out of work and starving, and with those so afraid for the futures of their families and friends, there has been a significant rise in panic attacks among folks that never thought of themselves as having emotional problems.

There is an answer to panic attacks and that is a daily dose of an anti-anxiety medication such as Klonopin or Valium, but most psychiatrists will not prescribe it for their patients as they view panic attacks as self-controllable and anti-anxiety drugs too dangerous for their health. Some doctors think that their patients will misuse the drug. Now they do not hesitate to prescribe anti-psychotic or mood-stabilizing drugs such as Abilify or Zoloft, or a string of other pharmaseuticals that all have virulent side-effects.  But because the proper medications often tend to make you feel comfortable in your own skin, and panic attacks avoided, most psychiatrists or other medical doctors think that all you want is the positive feelings of the drug and are prejudiced against giving you a drug that "merely" makes you feel comfortable and able to be in control of your feelings. Attitudes like this often lead the poor patient to self-mutilation in order to rid themselves of the guilt and bad feelings that come about after a panic attack.

Panic attacks wreck havoc in your life and are the worst symptoms to bear. I am hoping by writing this article that more people's eyes will be opened to the pain and disability of panic attacks and when they meet a person in the midst of an attack will know to offer them comfort and a paper bag if the need arises. I would also wish to place the thought into any doctor's mind that might be reading this article, to re-think their stance on prescribing anti-anxiety medication to their patients who are often locked in a world of crippling pain and agoraphobia (fear of being outside of your home or safe place). The pain is very real and the fear that at any moment the next panic attack will start. You are in a state of constant anxiety and your dealings with life are stunted. Life without the help of anti-anxiety medication is pure hell and fear paralyzes your ability to have a productive life if you have any panic attacks at all.

Panic attacks create real, and long-lasting pain, and a disabling fear of recurrence of the symptoms. Please pass along the ideas in this article and perhaps one day soon the doctor's who prescribe anti-anxiety medication will do so without getting hung up on their fear of a patient misusing the drug and make the determination to prescribe by the level of fear and disability in their patient. Fortunately I have found such a wonderful doctor and I have been panic-attack free for several years now. Being free of panic attacks gives me the ability to lead a creative and productive life and I have come to love this practitioner of nurturing medicine. 

PASSIONS OF THE MIND, BODY, & SPIRIT

We usually talk of passion as the physical expression of love; and it is. Love making can be one of the greatest passions that we experience on earth. Another of the physical passions we can experience is in caring for a newborn child; their total dependence on us is what stirs the passion to protect and nourish this new child. The person who records her first song, writes his first book, or makes a great scientific discovery knows of the great passion that comes from creativity.

Learning new knowledge is an unfolding joy and understanding of beingness that creates a new level of passion in our mind. From the first spark of knowledge that we recognize in our brain we develop a listening for the next piece of the puzzle so we can feel the passionate feelings of discovery again.

We are passionate about our politics and about our spiritual path. We are free to choose what we want to do in life and it is this freedom that fills our hearts with the passion of joy. Love for your soul-mate or love for He Who Spoke and The World Came Into Being, brings us the height of spiritual joy. Our lives are full of passion, coming from all directions, physical, mental, and spiritual. If you feel that your life is bereft of passion, then perhaps you are lonely and feeling misunderstood. We all feel a lack of passion when our troubles in life overwhelm us, but we do not have to stay in such a hole. We can think about all that we have been blessed with, or how many times we were picked up by a sudden influx of passion that left us in a better place in life, and reminds us that Joy is the key to a happy life and the armor that protects us from Satan's  temptations.

Satan despises the fact that we have freedom of choice and so can turn ourselves away from negative practices. The only passion he can afford us is anger and negativity which leaves us apart from our goals in life to be happy and enjoy the life that we are leading. Rethink your position in life if the passion you feel is to hurt others or take joy in others downfalls and sorrows. You cannot be truly happy if your happiness comes at the cost of pain to others

So, go for passion in all that you do, and wish the world and all you meet the joy of passion. Then you will be struck by how fortunate your life will become and how much passion you can pass on to the other people that you come into contact with. The entire Cosmos is a rapture of joy; rise up and take your share. And if your life is in the pits force yourself to find joy in another's happiness and you will feel an upsurge in your own passion.

Wishing you the greatest passion and joy in all areas of your life, and may you discover how easy it is to know passion if we think positive thoughts and demonstrate a loving spirit.

On another note: my diet is going great. The food makes me full and leaves me with no cravings-and I am a sugar addict who is not using any sugar at all. My blood pressure has dropped 20 points, and my blood sugar is coming into control, I have been able to drop from 36 units of insulin per night to a mere 20 units per night and it has only been 5 days into the diet. I am truly dazzled by the Blood Sugar Solution Diet and will keep you updated. I will know Friday if I have lost any weight this week.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            .