14 December 2007

i'm the worst

and have been gone oh-too-long. but, here is a great article released yesterday:

Published on Thursday, December 13, 2007 by Earth Policy Institute
Bottled Water Boycotts: Back-to-the-Tap Movement Gains Momentum
by Janet Larsen


From San Francisco to New York to Paris, city governments, high-class restaurants, schools, and religious groups are ditching bottled water in favor of what comes out of the faucet. With people no longer content to pay 1,000 times as much for bottled water, a product no better than water from the tap, a backlash against bottled water is growing.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents some 1,100 American cities, discussed at its June 2007 meeting the irony of purchasing bottled water for city employees and for city functions while at the same time touting the quality of municipal water. The group passed a resolution sponsored by Mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, and R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis that called for the examination of bottled water’s environmental impact. The resolution noted that with $43 billion a year going to provide clean drinking water in cities across the country, “the United States’ municipal water systems are among the finest in the world.”

While the Mayors Conference fell short of moving to stop taxpayer money from filling the coffers of water bottlers, a growing number of cities are heading in that direction. Los Angeles, which has restricted the purchase of bottled water with city funds since 1987, now has more company. By the end of 2007, purchasing bottled water will be off-limits for San Francisco’s departments and agencies, saving a half-million dollars each year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. St. Louis is poised to ban bottled water purchases for city employees in early 2008.

At the launch of Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign in October, Mayor Anderson of Salt Lake City described the “total absurdity and irresponsibility, both economic and environmental, of purchasing and using bottled water when we have perfectly good and safe municipal sources of tap water.” He urged city government departments and restaurants to stop buying bottled water.

In November, the city council of Chicago, beleaguered by swelling landfills and a stretched budget, placed a landmark tax of 5¢ on every bottle of water sold in the city in order to discourage consumption. That same month, Illinois state agencies were banned from purchasing bottled water with government funds. With 86 percent of used water bottles in the United States ending up as garbage or litter instead of being recycled, switching from the bottle to the tap helps to alleviate the trash burden.

New York City is urging residents to drink tap water, which is naturally filtered in the protected Catskill forest region. In Kentucky, the Louisville water utility hands out free bottles for residents to fill with “Pure Tap.” Dozens of other local governments are talking up tap water and are looking into banning the bottle. (See list of other cities and initiatives.)

Tap water promotional campaigns would have seemed quaint a few decades ago, when water in bottles was a rarity. Now such endeavors are needed to counteract the pervasive marketing that has caused consumers to lose faith in the faucet. In fact, more than a quarter of bottled water is just processed tap water, including top-selling Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani. When Pepsi announced in July that it would clearly label its Aquafina water as from a “public water source,” it no doubt shocked everyone who believed that bottles with labels depicting pristine mountains or glaciers delivered a superior product.

Despite the less-frequent quality testing and sometimes commonplace origin of the product, bottled water consumption has soared. Annual consumption in the United States in 1976 was less than 2 gallons for every man, woman, and child; some 30 years later, Americans on average each now drink about 30 gallons of bottled water a year. (See data.)

All this hydration costs Americans more than $15 billion a year. The price of individual bottles of water ranges up to several dollars a gallon (and more for designer brands), while tap water is delivered directly to homes and offices for less than a penny a gallon. People complaining about $3-a-gallon gasoline may start to wonder why they are paying even more per gallon for bottled water.

With sales growing by 10 percent each year, far faster than any other beverage, bottled water now appears to be the drink of choice for many Americans-they swallow more of it than milk, juice, beer, coffee, or tea. (See data.) While some industry analysts are counting on bottled water to beat out carbonated soft drinks to top the charts in the near future, the burgeoning back-to-the-tap movement may reverse the trend.

In contrast to tap water, which is delivered through an energy-efficient infrastructure, bottled water is an incredibly wasteful product. It is usually packaged in single-serving plastic bottles made with fossil fuels. Just manufacturing the 29 billion plastic bottles used for water in the United States each year requires the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of crude oil.

After being filled, the bottles may travel far. Nearly one quarter of bottled water crosses national borders before reaching consumers, and part of the cachet of certain bottled water brands is their remote origin. Adding in the Pacific Institute’s estimates for the energy used for pumping and processing, transportation, and refrigeration, brings the annual fossil fuel footprint of bottled water consumption in the United States to over 50 million barrels of oil equivalent-enough to run 3 million cars for one year. If everyone drank as much bottled water as Americans do, the world would need the equivalent of more than 1 billion barrels of oil to produce close to 650 billion individual bottles.

Concerns about this high energy use and the associated contribution to climate change, along with worries about waste, are driving many groups back to tap water. The United Church of Canada is one of the religious groups abandoning bottled water for moral reasons. The Berkeley school district no longer offers bottled water. And after watching 3,000 empty bottles pile up each week, the Nashville law firm Bass, Berry, & Sims has stopped stocking bottled water.

Europeans have long led the world in per person consumption of bottled water. Italy tops the list worldwide, with Italians drinking 54 gallons per person in 2006. Italy is closely trailed in per capita consumption by the United Arab Emirates and Mexico, followed by France, Belgium, Germany, and Spain. (See data.)

Yet even in Western Europe the bottle is starting to lose clout. Rome, a city of many historic fountains, is promoting its tap water. Florence’s city council, schools, and other public offices offer only city water. In the United Kingdom, the Treasury and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have ceased offering bottled water at official functions. Bottled water sales in Scandinavia are projected to fall because of growing environmental concerns.

Even France, home to Evian, is seeing a sales slowdown. During a 2005 tap water promotion campaign in Paris, the water utility handed out refillable glass carafes. Now Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoƫ serves only tap water at official events and encourages others to do the same. Total bottled water sales in France fell in 2004 and 2005, but rebounded in 2006.

Slowing sales may be the wave of the future as the bottle boycott movement picks up speed. With more than 1 billion people around the globe still lacking access to a safe and reliable source of water, the $100 billion the world spends on bottled water every year could certainly be put to better use creating and maintaining safe public water infrastructure everywhere.

29 August 2007

two years

so, it's been two years since katrina hit, and, it seems like new orleans is still in shambles. i've been looking on the internet and have found some interesting sites to review.

check out:
common ground collective wish-list
nola
emergency communities

just a few things to look at! i'd love to hear of more...
a

01 August 2007

26 July 2007

holy cow

24 July 2007


lovely.

23 July 2007

done and done


what can i say but "action packed"?

03 July 2007

Buying into the Green Movement

check out this article. then, go to see greenfeet. excellent.

02 July 2007

22 June 2007

wow

i was reading an article in the nyt today, and i happened across this. all i can say is wow.

18 June 2007

01 June 2007

The 'tute made the PPH

here are a few bullets from the whole story, read it here. (it's about Maine, of course!)

ACCESS TO THE COAST

-Within the Maine coast's 142 towns and 5,300 miles, there are 1,555 access points, from public boat landings to private fishing docks.

-Of these, 888 support commercial fishing activities. But more than half of these are privately owned and vulnerable to conversion to other uses.

-Only 81 of the 1,555 access points qualify as "prime working waterfront," and only 62 of these support commercial fishing.

-Only 446 of the 1,555 saltwater access points in 45 of Maine's 142 coastal towns are protected under some type of water-dependent use zoning.

29 May 2007

design for the other 90%


here is a really interesting show at the cooper-hewitt. i certainly wish that i was in the city so i could visit it. i guess a trip may be in order!
in other news, the clapboards are off the house! construction is beginning!

11 May 2007

um?

look at this, folks.

10 May 2007

5 second rule, from today's NYT

May 9, 2007
The Curious Cook
The Five-Second Rule Explored, or How Dirty Is That Bologna?
By HAROLD McGEE
A COUPLE of weeks ago I saw a new scientific paper from Clemson University that struck me as both pioneering and hilarious.

Accompanied by six graphs, two tables and equations whose terms include “bologna” and “carpet,” it’s a thorough microbiological study of the five-second rule: the idea that if you pick up a dropped piece of food before you can count to five, it’s O.K. to eat it.

I first heard about the rule from my then-young children and thought it was just a way of having fun at snack time and lunch. My daughter now tells me that fun was part of it, but they knew they were playing with “germs.”

We’re reminded about germs on food whenever there’s an outbreak of E. coli or salmonella, and whenever we read the labels on packages of uncooked meat. But we don’t have much occasion to think about the everyday practice of retrieving and eating dropped pieces of food.

Microbes are everywhere around us, not just on floors. They thrive in wet kitchen sponges and end up on freshly wiped countertops.

As I write this column, on an airplane, I realize that I have removed a chicken sandwich from its protective plastic sleeve and put it down repeatedly on the sleeve’s outer surface, which was meant to protect the sandwich by blocking microbes. What’s on the outer surface? Without the five-second rule on my mind I wouldn’t have thought to wonder.

I learned from the Clemson study that the true pioneer of five-second research was Jillian Clarke, a high-school intern at the University of Illinois in 2003. Ms. Clarke conducted a survey and found that slightly more than half of the men and 70 percent of the women knew of the five-second rule, and many said they followed it.

She did an experiment by contaminating ceramic tiles with E. coli, placing gummy bears and cookies on the tiles for the statutory five seconds, and then analyzing the foods. They had become contaminated with bacteria.

For performing this first test of the five-second rule, Ms. Clarke was recognized by the Annals of Improbable Research with the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize in public health.

It’s not surprising that food dropped onto bacteria would collect some bacteria. But how many? Does it collect more as the seconds tick by? Enough to make you sick?

Prof. Paul L. Dawson and his colleagues at Clemson have now put some numbers on floor-to-food contamination.

Their bacterium of choice was salmonella; the test surfaces were tile, wood flooring and nylon carpet; and the test foods were slices of bread and bologna.

First the researchers measured how long bacteria could survive on the surfaces. They applied salmonella broth in doses of several million bacteria per square centimeter, a number typical of badly contaminated food.

I had thought that most bacteria were sensitive to drying out, but after 24 hours of exposure to the air, thousands of bacteria per square centimeter had survived on the tile and wood, and tens of thousands on the carpet. Hundreds of salmonella were still alive after 28 days.

Professor Dawson and colleagues then placed test food slices onto salmonella-painted surfaces for varying lengths of time, and counted how many live bacteria were transferred to the food.

On surfaces that had been contaminated eight hours earlier, slices of bologna and bread left for five seconds took up from 150 to 8,000 bacteria. Left for a full minute, slices collected about 10 times more than that from the tile and carpet, though a lower number from the wood.

What do these numbers tell us about the five-second rule? Quick retrieval does mean fewer bacteria, but it’s no guarantee of safety. True, Jillian Clarke found that the number of bacteria on the floor at the University of Illinois was so low it couldn’t be measured, and the Clemson researchers resorted to extremely high contamination levels for their tests. But even if a floor — or a countertop, or wrapper — carried only a thousandth the number of bacteria applied by the researchers, the piece of food would be likely to pick up several bacteria.

The infectious dose, the smallest number of bacteria that can actually cause illness, is as few as 10 for some salmonellas, fewer than 100 for the deadly strain of E. coli.

Of course we can never know for sure how many harmful microbes there are on any surface. But we know enough now to formulate the five-second rule, version 2.0: If you drop a piece of food, pick it up quickly, take five seconds to recall that just a few bacteria can make you sick, then take a few more to think about where you dropped it and whether or not it’s worth eating.

08 May 2007

i encourage you all to buy things here.

04 May 2007

Wowza!


take a closer look here.

03 May 2007

yes, it's true



now that i get to see him every sunday night, my love for dan harris has returned. when i was in high school, we were both at the pizzeria uno at the same time. this is unbelievable. plus, he is just so dreamy and smart.

01 May 2007

workers of the world unite!





according to everyone's favorite source, wikipedia...
International Workers' Day
International Workers' Day (a name used interchangeably with May Day) is a celebration of the social and economic achievements of the international labour movement. May Day commonly sees organized street demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of working people and their labour unions throughout Europe and most of the rest of the world — though, as noted below, in neither the United States nor Canada. More-radical groups such as communists and anarchists are also given to widespread street protest on this day as well.

May Day was originally the commemoration of the Haymarket protests in Chicago in 1886: in 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle (1889), following a proposal by Raymond Lavigne, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. These were so successful that May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International's second congress in 1891. The May Day Riots of 1894 and May Day Riots of 1919 occurred subsequently.

In 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called on "all Social-Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace." As the most effective way of demonstrating was by striking, the congress made it "mandatory upon the proletarian organizations of all countries to stop work on May 1, wherever it is possible without injury to the workers."

May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations by various socialist, communist, and anarchist groups. In some circles, bonfires are lit in commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs, usually right as the first day of May begins [1].

Due to its status as a celebration of the efforts of workers and the socialist movement, May Day is an important official holiday in Communist countries such as the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union. May Day celebrations typically feature elaborate popular and military parades in these countries.

In countries other than the United States and Canada, resident working classes fought hard to make May Day an official holiday[citation needed], efforts which largely succeeded. For this reason, in most of the world today, May Day is marked by massive street rallies led by workers, their trade unions, anarchists and various socialist and communist parties.

Due to its importance in Communist countries, the First and Second Red Scare periods ended May Day as a mass holiday in the United States, which has celebrated Labor Day on the first Monday of September since 1880.

25 April 2007

the organic prince


Farmer, Cookie Maker, Ecologist and, Yes, the Future King

By KIM SEVERSON
Published: April 25, 2007
Tetbury, England

WHEN Prince Charles gazes from the upstairs windows at Highgrove, his home near this tiny town in the English countryside, he can see a tree planted by the Dalai Lama. It grows near a field of rare British wildflowers, which fade into a row of box hedges trimmed to frame four small busts of the prince’s head. Tigga, his late, beloved Jack Russell terrier, is immortalized in a relief sculpture on a nearby garden wall, behind which a longtime gardener prepares the ground for the prince’s favorite vegetables, potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

Read the rest here.

23 April 2007

remember when i had my birthday at the roxy?


well, look at this article from today's times. i mean, aren't you so happy that we went?


Crown Heights
The Last Lace-Up
Kelly Shimoda for The New York Times
THE GOODBYE GLIDE The 66-year-old Empire Roller Skating Center in Crown Heights, one of the city’s last roller rinks, will close Sunday.
By JENNIFER BLEYER
Published: April 22, 2007

ON Tuesday night, a blurry mass of people could be seen flying and shimmying around the 150-foot-long “miracle maple” rink of the Empire Roller Skating Center in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The bass thumped and the lights were dimmed. Boys wearing baggy jeans and Yankee caps in every color of the rainbow whizzed along the curves. Gamine girls in halter tops and dangling earrings careened backward on the straightaways.

Empire, as the beloved 66-year-old roller rink is known, sits on Empire Boulevard east of Bedford Avenue on a bleak strip of gas stations, Laundromats and storefront churches. A single-story brick building painted canary yellow and lime green on the outside and decorated with neon palm trees and kitschy murals of dragons and volcanoes inside, it will hold its last day of skating today.

When news of its closing, which followed months of “will it or won’t it?” speculation, was confirmed last month, the announcement rocked the city’s sprawling roller skating community, a mixed-age crowd that revels in a wholesome good time. After the Skate Key rink in Mott Haven in the Bronx shut its doors last year and the Roxy on West 18th Street in Manhattan, a legendary gay nightclub with skating every Wednesday night, closed last month, Empire was the city’s only remaining indoor wooden-floor rink. Its distinction was bolstered by its history as a place where generations of Brooklynites have skated since it opened in 1941 in a former Ebbets Field garage.

The rink, which could accommodate 2,500 skaters, was often so crowded that “if you fell, you couldn’t fall,” said Chester Fried, a former competitive roller skater who grew up skating at Empire.

Attendance dropped in the 1950s with the arrival of television, but it bounced back in the 1970s with the creation of roller disco, said to have originated at Empire. The rink’s traditional organ was replaced with a booming sound system over which a D.J. played the likes of Donna Summer and Stephanie Mills.

In recent years, as young people discovered the thrills of dance skating and speed skating, Empire became a favorite of the hip-hop generation. Young men routinely transformed the rink into something of a human autobahn, linking arms to create a centipede of bodies zipping around the rink.

For many of them, it provided a safe alternative to the wildness of the streets. “I would be in jail if it weren’t for this place,” said Darryl Tyler, a 31-year-old, bucktoothed chef from Bedford-Stuyvesant, who was wearing diamond stud earrings. He had been going there for long so long, he added, “I practically skated out of my mother.”

Although Empire’s building is unremarkable, some regulars tried to save it by having it considered for landmark status, and last month, 200 skaters gathered for a rally outside the rink. But by the time the rink’s fans mobilized, its closing was a done deal. The building had been sold for $4.5 million and was to become a storage facility.

Resigned to Empire’s fate, thousands of people have been circling the maple floor during the past few weeks, including many who had skated there for decades. On Tuesday, Kevon Johnson, a 46-year-old communications supervisor, showed up early to get in when the rink opened at 9 p.m., along with scores of others waiting in a line that snaked down the street. Tying on his custom $800 skates, a high-end pair with black leather boots and Snyder plates, Mr. Johnson recalled when he started going to Empire in 1977 as a teenager.

TOO poor to afford his own skates, he rented pair No. 877 every night. Then, in 1978, Mr. Johnson’s godfather, Marcellus Williams, a skate-dancing choreographer who was known as the poet laureate of Empire, bought him his own pair.

“They were royal blue suede with blue wheels, a blue stopper and blue laces,” Mr. Johnson said with a smile. “When the D.J. saw me, he yelled out, ‘Oh, I see some new skates out there!’ I was in heaven.”

During those years, celebrities like Cher and Ben Vereen made appearances, along with virtuosos on wheels known by their skating nicknames: Pat the Cat. Virgo Black. Ultra Freak. Puerto Rican Mike. Miss Mean Wheels. Roller Rocker Kid.

“From seeing Slinky do a spin and Rap do the first 360, those were the two things I wanted to do,” said Mr. Johnson. “Now I can do a 360 real well. In fact, I can do a 540 and I’m working on a 720.”

As the clock ticked past midnight on Tuesday, many skaters took a moment to mull their options once Empire closed. Some planned to trek out to rinks in New Jersey and Long Island. Some murmured about a new rink that may open as soon as next month in Richmond Valley on Staten Island. Others simply skated, enjoying their last rapturous turns on Empire’s floor.

16 April 2007

miss k's surprise bachelorette party


it was drag queen themed!

08 April 2007

moving right along


so, i'm officially on the road. i spent the last two nights with my mom in portland, visited grammie, the whole nine. in a few hours, i'm off to boston for a week of computer training. huerpa. this is going to be, at the very least, a change of pace from my island-lifestyle.
and, surprises may be lurking on the horizon! stay tuned!

01 April 2007

Maple tree tapping, North Haven style

today the big gq, his mother, and i went to tap trees to make syrup.
kate, his mother, says that last year she got 5 gallons of sap, and she got 1/2 a cup of syrup. isn't that amazing?







29 March 2007

more on a theme

From today's NYT:

Bare-Knuckle Enforcement for Wal-Mart’s Rules

By MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: March 29, 2007

The investigator flew to Guatemala in April 2002 with a delicate mission: trail a Wal-Mart manager around the country to prove he was sleeping with a lower-level employee, a violation of company policy.

The apparent smoking gun? “Moans and sighs” heard as the investigator, a Wal-Mart employee, pressed his ear against a hotel room door inside a Holiday Inn, according to legal documents. Soon after, the company fired the manager for what it said was improper fraternization with a subordinate.

Wal-Mart, renowned to outsiders for its elbows-out business tactics, is known internally for its bare-knuckled no-expense-spared investigations of employees who break its ironclad ethics rules.

Over the last five years, Wal-Mart has assembled a team of former officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Justice Department whose elaborate, at times globetrotting, investigations have led to the ouster of a high-profile board member who used company funds to buy hunting equipment, two senior advertising executives who took expensive gifts from a potential supplier and a computer technician who taped a reporter’s telephone calls.

Read the rest here.

28 March 2007

Wowza! Fantastic news from the NYT!



Wal-Mart Chief Writes Off New York

By MICHAEL BARBARO and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: March 28, 2007
Wal-Mart to New York: fuhgeddaboudit.

An ad in Wal-Mart’s campaign to open a store in New York City.
Frustrated by a bruising, and so far unsuccessful battle to open its first discount store in the nation’s largest city, Wal-Mart’s chief executive said yesterday, “I don’t care if we are ever here.”

H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive of the nation’s largest retailer, said that trying to conduct business in New York was so expensive — and exasperating — that “I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”

see the whole article here.

25 March 2007

baby sheep










photos of my trip to the farm today, and from some recent commutes.

23 March 2007

keep your fingers crossed


look what i applied for!

22 March 2007

no impact man

today i read the article, The Year Without Toilet Paper, in the New York Times. it is fascinating. this family is living in new york, on the ninth floor of their apartment building, and they are trying to leave no impact on the world for one year. this is very interesting, as most tree-hugging environmentalists live in rural areas. check out his blog here. definitely go and read the full article here.

19 March 2007

14 March 2007

a new favorite


bridgewater bird mugs. i am pretty much obsessed. i want them all. to view the collection, please visit this fine website.

07 March 2007

the homesteading lifestyle?

as i am now living more rurally than ever before, i thought that i might take this time to reflect upon three new things that have happened to me over the winter of 2006-2007.

1. cooking on a wood stove.
i have never lived somewhere where you buy gas by the tank, and therefore, can run out. luckily, we have a wood stove, otherwise, we couldn't have cooked anything. this happened in december, i think, and i made a delicious roasted chicken and baked potato feast. lemons to lemonade anyone?

2. chimney fire.
one night a month-or-so-ago, our chimney started to shoot flames like a torch. it sounded like a jet engine. i mean, it was nighttime, so, you could really really see how high the flames were. and sparks. lots of sparks. but, a chimney is a fairly contained space, so fires go out quickly. by the time the volunteer fire department showed up, it was mostly just sparks. they went through the motions, though, and put up spot lights and climbed onto the roof, and scraped down the inside with this fancy brush, and looked at the chimney through an infrared camera so that they could tell if there were any hot spots, and wore these fancy yellow outfits, and fell down on the ice. i was preoccupied, because i was in charge of getting the littles out of harm's way, and i could only find piggy. bingo knows to hide when the cat carriers come out of the closet. but, the big gq got his guitar. so, we were 2 for 3 of important things getting out in case the house went down. or, up in flames, i guess is a better phrase. maybe we should take Chas Tenenbaums' lead and start having safety drills. and wearing matching track suits.

3. no running water.
this morning, the big gq woke me up by saying that the pipes were frozen. i couldn't pee, brush my teeth, or shower. it was a little bit shocking. then, he had to chip all this ice off of the window into the space under the house, which isn't quite a basement, but he couldn't fit through the window. he is big. so then, he went to find his sister, to make her go under the house, and i was all, i'm little, i can go. but he thought that it would take hours and hours to thaw the pipes with a little heat gun (technically my embosser for rubber stamping), and i have to go on the boat in order to go to work. (the boat waits for no man.) so, then his sister came with a super-duper hot gun-thing, and the big gq wedged himself into the hole, and heated the pipes. he was wearing a head lamp. presto-changeo the water came back on full force. i mean, running everywhere, so we had to adjust the faucets so that they continued to trickle down the pipes and hopefully prevent freezing. so, gq is focused on hooking up a heater under the house today, and running a fire in the wood-stove at full blast to keep our little house as warm as possible.

can you believe it?

02 March 2007

28 February 2007

deep-fried collard greens just seems like a publicity stunt

From Phobia to Fame: A Southern Cook’s Memoir

By JULIA MOSKIN
Published: February 28, 2007

IS mayonnaise the food lover’s Botox?

One look at Paula Deen, the Food Network’s face of Southern food, and you have to wonder. Ms. Deen may be best known for drinking straight melted butter on television, but she also soaks Krispy Kreme doughnuts with custard, deep-fries refrigerator biscuits, and isn’t above digging her diamond-crusted fingers into a bowl of pimento cheese to make sure the cream cheese is blending in smoothly. In one afternoon last week, making the Southern lunch classics that started her cooking career — ham salad, pimento cheese, and an irresistible egg salad mixed with saltines — she went through two full jars of mayonnaise.

27 February 2007

23 February 2007

89%

You are 89% Mainah!
 

BORN RAISED AND LOVIN IT!!!!You are all Mainah and wouldn't have it any other way. You are the rare breed of Mainer that would never leave (even if you won them there megabucks!)

How Mainer are you?
Make a Quiz

14 February 2007

Just FYI

yesterday the thorofare started to freeze over and today we have lots of snow. i am working from home, and enjoying the winter. once i have some photos, i'll share. hopefully we still get to go out for dinner! fingers crossed...

09 February 2007

how beautiful are these?

you can get them here.

05 February 2007

ballon

meggy.
michael.

01 February 2007

check-check-it

miss ariana- now in color!
more katie jane w. look at those boots (and moves!)

30 January 2007

mas

anne.
r.t.

28 January 2007

winter photos

island kids love the ferry.
boats and vinalhaven.
downtown #1

downtown #2
in other news, i received my secret pal package, and it's awesome. i don't have a camera right now, so i can't photograph the goodies. let's just say that i'm not that only person who is really really excited by the insides of the cardboard box. the littles have re-discovered their love of catnip! yeah! there are two books, including one skein, which is fantastic. and, a bunch of really nice soft yarns, including a white angora blend that is almost good enough to eat. thanks tina! i do have to say, though, that this SP9 experience has been a challenge, on my end and tina's, i think. turns out the holiday season is not conducive to me being successful at this, so, i learned a Big Lesson from this, too. it has been really fun, though! thanks again, chemical pink....

15 January 2007

13 January 2007

cheer up charlie

patrick.
pam.
katie jane w.
junio.