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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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!), [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]