Obviously I haven’t blogged in months, and haven’t blogged consistently in almost a year. It’s been an interesting year, in some ways a scary year, on the whole, an important and good year. It’s been a year of changes, and one of them includes a change to ChezArtz.

From now on, I will be blogging family-related stuff, updates, pictures, movies, etc., here on ChezArtz. Most of my other interests (gardening, the environment, politics, cooking, technology, books, exercise, and anything else that comes to mind) will be explored on my new blog, Terminal Verbosity.

To my valued subscribers, thank you for hanging with me through all these (mostly unexplained) changes. Family members may prefer to keep their subscription here. Friends, blog stalkers loyal readers, and anyone who is not likely to be offended by the occasional liberal tirade, may prefer to go visit Terminal Verbosity. I’m still working the kinks out of the design, but I’ve migrated a lot of back posts there and will be deleting them from here over time.

The good news is, due to some of the changes to which I’ve been alluding, I have some more time to blog now. And I’ve already got a few posts lined up for this week over at Terminal Verbosity. So go take a look already!

This morning I stepped on the scale five times and each time I wrote down a different number on my white board. What, you might ask, was I doing? No, not weighing myself after each Krispy Kreme doughnut… Weighing my garbage and recycling.

Ever since reading about the lady who carried all of her trash around with her for two weeks to see how much she could reduce her waste, I had been tempted to start weighing our trash. Matt totally put the kabosh on the idea, feeling like we were doing enough for the environment without going to this extreme. But then we signed up for the Lyons Greenheart Institute initiative–a grant our town received to see if we could, as a community, reduce our carbon footprint by 25%–and one of the things you track is your trash and recycling. And I had no idea how much to put down. Continue reading »

This weekend, I attended a talk by Kip Nash, a Boulder man who has turned many of the front yards in his neighborhood into farm plots as part of the Boulder Community Roots project. If the endless gorgeous seed catalogs, warm weather, and the kohlrabi, sorrel, kale, garlic, onions, garlic chives, and strawberries sprouting in my garden didn’t do it already, spring garden fever set in with a vengeance after his inspiring talk.

At one point, he referenced Richard Heinberg–a peak oil guy– Continue reading »

As you know from yesterday’s post describing my family’s own experience with Multiple Sclerosis, this week is MS Awareness Week. I won’t repeat what I’ve already said (except to plug Team Dave, of course!), but I wanted to share with you what training for this type of event is like.

I am basically as out of shape as I’ve ever been, or at least I was on New Year’s Day of this year. Continue reading »

Approximately 200 people are diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) each week–that’s about one person every hour of every day. In 2001, one of those people was my father-in-law, Dave (pictured here with his wife, my mother-in-law, Patty, and their four grandchildren). After 11 years of on-again, off-again symptoms (very typical for his “course” or type of MS–the most common–Relapsing-Remitting) and visits to many different doctors, he was finally diagnosed, but only after irreparable damage had been done to his nervous system.

Life expectancy is not necessarily affected by an MS diagnosis, but quality of life certainly is. That’s why Matt & I have created Team Dave with a few friends and are planning to ride the MS150 in late June: we want to raise awareness and hopefully help fund research that will find a cure. This week is MS Awareness week, so it seemed like a good time to announce our plans and tell you a little bit more about the disease. Continue reading »

After months of holding Matt at bay, I finally caved and let him retrofit my old lap top for the kids. They’ve got a couple of talking books and pinball on the old machine and if it survives Lily’s penchant for keyboard evisceration, they might even get a few more.

Tonight, Matt found a really cool site for anyone who is looking for something entertaining and relatively educational for the young children: Poisson Rouge. This French site has everything from matching games to a keyboard that records the notes you click on and plays them back to you. I found it oddly addictive and all the games are ones that a beginning mouser could figure out–lots of colorful and cute click and drag type things.

I’m still on the fence about preschoolers having a computer (I guess I’m old-fashioned), but if they’re going to be on it, I love that this site is 100% character and advertisement free. Check it out!

OK, I admit I have control issues. That is to say, I must be in control. And why not? My way is the best way, right? Right!

But something has been off for these past couple of years. I have not been in control of my clutter. I’ve cluttered up my house, my mind, and my body with all kinds of “stuff.” This weekend, I decided enough was enough and, euphorically, Matt handed me a copy of Getting Things Done.

For those of you who are not familiar, GTD has achieved a sort of cult following among what author David Allen likes to call “knowledge workers” and I like to call “geeks like me.” The premise of the book is that all of us geeks have so many projects going at once and so much information coming in at all times that it would literally be impossible for our even our hyper-drive minds to hold on to the details of it all all the time. Continue reading »

So many people have asked me for my sandwich bread recipe that I decided I’d better blog it

When we started to evaluate our grocery expenses, I realized I was spending $10-15 per week on organic bread. I can make it myself for pennies a loaf (especially now that I’m buying flour in bulk!), so I thought this was a good way to cut down our grocery bill. However, my husband is anal particular about his sandwich bread. It took me quite a few tries to get this right and I still change it occasionally, but this is a recipe good enough to pass the Matthew Artz Grilled Cheese test and I think it’s pretty tasty too!

OK, as with so many of my recipes, there are a million subsititutions you can make to this. Here are a few that I’ve tried:

• Replace the 10-grain flour with whole-grain flour.
• Add a little yogurt instead of the milk.
• Use a 1/2 cup of sourdough starter in addition to other ingredients.
• Try molasses instead of honey.

Continue reading »

In the run up to the Super Bowl, I have to admit to spending more time thinking about the ads (or, more specifically, how anyone can afford the exorbitant Super Bowl ad pricing in this economy!) than about the game itself. So I was delighted to see this ad on both Salon and Huffington Post today.

Yes, it’s true, PETA, in a take off of the “Vegetarians Taste Better” bumper sticker that has been around since I first got my license 1,000 years ago, tried to get an ad portraying women in lingerie getting Continue reading »

In mid-September, our family began what has turned out to be a fun and educational adventure in local eating. After months of canning, drying, and freezing every fruit and vegetable we could get our hands on, after many talks with other local folks committed to eating Colorado-grown food, after many, many trips to the Farmer’s Markets, we thought we were ready.

We quit buying bananas, veggie burgers, avocados, and most other packaged foods (I have ended up letting my children pick one non-local item on each grocery story run. Most often that’s Pirate Booty or Fig Newmans and I can live with that!). We continued to make our own Continue reading »