Smoke tea 2026

Photo of 3 large mason jars containing different leaves, and one smaller jar containing pale yellow powder. First jar is unlabelled, then "plantain 2023", "anise hyssop 2023", "marshmallow root"

First noticeably smoky day here for a couple of years (lucky us), so I am busting out some smoke tea herbs. Dates on jar lids are not accurate — I moved to a paper inventory.

It has been smoky so often here in the PNW the past 10 years that I grow specific plants just for this purpose, mainly mullein. I guess that is a #ClimateDiary entry

I keep dried plants as whole as possible for storage (less surface area to oxidize or for oils to evaporate), so now I get to witch out with the mortar and pestle to smash them up for tea.

Photo looking down at a blue bowl of dried herbs, a black mortar and pestle with ground herbs in it, and an empty white teapot with the lid off

Anyway I am not a clinical herbalist but here is my method for formulating herbs (choosing which ones to mix):

  • pick a main one (mullein)
  • add one herb to enhance the action you’re interested in (in this case expectorant, so I am adding plantain as another drawing-out herb that is more soothing/moistening)
  • if needed, add one herb to counterbalance or do something else (anise hyssop to make it taste good, and to have one mildly warming herb against the two mildly cooling ones)

Going to steep one cup and taste it, then maybe adjust and make a big batch for the fam

Lol this tea came out so bland– mullein and plantain teas both taste like brown water, so I suppose it takes more than 1/3 anise hyssop to make it delicious. I like tea with some bitterness and body so I tried adding burdock root– closer. (Never hurts to add a liver tonic anyway.) Little touch of lemon verbena syrup that was in the fridge from making mocktails and this has become quite pleasant 💚

I don’t think it needs the marshmallow root that I pulled out in case it was too astringent. Mullein and plantain are both pretty balanced– tannins plus mucilage

Having had my smoke tea, I am sitting at the stove stirring a pot for dinner and going “ahem” a lot. Expectorant tea doing its thing 💚

Coffee for liver health?

I hold all research about economically important commodities really lightly, but this report does make me curious because Western herbalists talk about coffee and liver health a lot. A warm, bitter, carminative drink every morning? Serious liver tonic.

I wish any other bitter plant was consumed enough to get a 13-year prospective study on 350,000+ people.

Re: @digyoursoul https://universeodon.com/@digyoursoul/116947484891480708

Mending Monday

I’m trying to make Mending Monday a habit instead of letting things pile up, and I have gotten off to a strong start by absolutely butchering this kids anthology 😂

At least the pages are in the right order?

Photo of my pale hand holding a closed handcover book, with the top edge visible to show a section of lumpy and uneven pages where they have been taped back in unevenly

An OT (of course) recently introduced me to phase change cooling clothing and the tech is so interesting!

Unlike water ice packs that take forever to freeze and then are so cold that you can only safely touch them for 10 minutes at a time, some genius made gel packs that freeze at 15C. So you can freeze them in the fridge and then wear them continuously for hours without frostbite.

They are pricey but there aren’t many other options for people who need to be outside in the heat.

One example of PCM/phase change material cooling clothes.

Promotional photo with several people standing in front of a neon sign that says EZ Cool Down: a cosplayer, a person in jeans, someone in motorcycle gear with a helmet, a construction worker, an older woman with a husky dog, a worker in a hi-viz vest, a fursuiter fox, and someone in athletic gear

I love that their product photos go construction worker, road worker, fursuiter.

A warm infusion method

Photo looking down into a speckled black canning pot containing a wire rack and 3 mason jars with old labels on the lids.

Feeling very pleased with my setup for warm-infusing herbal oils today. I find double boilers tedious and messy, and I wanted to do multiple jars at once. Glad I remembered the gadget I keep around specifically for heating up jars in a water bath.

The jars are not full and I’m not trying to seal them, so they are only submerged about halfway in water.

These are chickweed, calendula, and plantain oils, if you want to guess what I’m making.

(It’s the first test salve of my new area of curiosity — itch relief. Bug bites, autoimmune conditions, drug side effects… turns out once you start talking about it, a lot of people have itches. Including me this week, so i figured i could do some testing)

Backing out of self-hosting Mastodon

People love to mention how easy it is to host your own fediverse server, with one of the easiest options being a Masto.host subscription for around $8/month. What people usually don’t mention is that Mastodon, being pretty janky software, has a problem with rapidly escalating storage use because of the way its caching is designed (or like… not very designed). Even a single-user instance that is not particularly active will need to keep leveling up to more expensive subscription tiers forever purely due to this passive cache accumulation. There is no real way to solve it without manually removing things from the database, which you don’t have access to do through managed hosting and which also sounds way too much like IT maintenance for me to enjoy.

So although it was fun for a year or two, I’m working towards winding down little friendhole.social before I find myself at some diamond elite level of monthly hosting plans. I’ll migrate my account somewhere else; the fediverse is janky but it’s also such a relief to chat with actual humans without algorithms and ads everywhere.

Since there is no way to migrate Mastodon posts to a different server (again with the jankiness), I’m going to start posting some old faves here with their original posting dates, just for my own archival enjoyment. The tag to find them is toots.

Zootopia

They should stop trying to make Zootopia movies about race and class, which goes very badly, and start focusing on utopian disability accommodations which the Zootopia movies absolutely rule at.

(Not really tho, because movies that try to be about disability almost always trigger weird ableist reflexes in the filmmakers.)

Zootopia public transit accommodates dolphins. We are dreaming too small.

Sometimes I want to make a bot

Sometimes I want to make a bot that just posts news stories about police with the added link to the matching press release from the relevant police department

“News” : https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/stolen-vehicle…

Press release: https://saanichpolice.ca/2026/05/28/su…

I wonder whether police media liaison officers take it personally when their press releases get edited for style.

“News”: https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/fleeing-motorcycle…

Press release: https://www.cspolice.ca/news/media-release…

Posting news stories that are just police press releases would be so high volume it would feel like spam… perhaps a better bot would be posting news about police that does NOT appear to have a matching press release from the cops.

E.g., no press release from VicPD about their deputy chief retiring on Monday, one day after someone leaked his text messages colluding with the Deputy Minister of Education to depose the local school board.

News: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/audio/9.7216054

Valerian <3

shout out to the valerian root tincture i optimistically made several months ago for when i was ready to ease off gabapentinoids for pain. solved the jitters/adrenaline feeling really well.

(valerian is strong and has contraindications– don’t take it without talking someone knowledgeable)

In praise of group appointments

One last thought from my pacing webinar tonight — group healthcare appointments are awesome and I don’t think most people realize that until they try one.

The Long Covid Clinic and the BC-CLMF both use group appointments and they have really won me over. You get everything you need, PLUS other people ask questions you didn’t think of, forgot, or were too shy to ask. People also ask about things that haven’t happened to you yet so you can be prepared. You usually get 60+ minutes too! Big fan

Party decor x occupational therapy

Gosh i love occupational therapists. I’m at a webinar about pacing through summertime, and this OT just shared a “success story” from a client who got a banner for a party they hosted. Instead of saying “happy birthday” the banner said “please leave by 9pm”.

This is the same OT who apologized for not being able to put someone in a coma to reset their pain responses. A queen.

Little free library

An idea came to me during a conversation about World Goth Day (May 22) and now I can’t stop thinking about how fun and funny it would be to set up a little free library for goth nonsense in a secret location in a cemetery. Swap your unwanted candles, black nail polish, horror novels, goblets, etc.

Feels inappropriate to do in real life because all the local cemeteries are still active and i don’t want to intrude on the recently bereaved.

But i daydream (classic goth pastime).