Randominity

I’m making up my own word. Cuz it’s my blog and I can.

 Random statement Numero Uno: When you have become accustomed to having your large fabulous breakfast made to order at work because while you may hate your actual job position and feel like quiting at least twice a week, at least they bring in someone to cook your meals and let you payroll deduct it so it seems free instead of 5 bucks a meal and they give you all the free starbucks coffee in the morning that you can hoard in a big thermos and carry back to your desk  3 days a week (FRESH mushrooms and cheese omelet, hash-browns with ketchup, salty-greasy-fabulously crisp-porkfat-bacon, and buttered toast), a bowl of Cookie Crisp scarfed down before waking the children on the 2 days you are in charge of feeding yourself  will not keep your tummy happy until you go home for lunch. You forget this every time. You sit at your desk drinking bad coffee and water and look repeatedly in the fridge for a morsel of food left over from Sunday. Lunch cannot come soon enough. I think I will go home and eat a whole pizza. Healthy eating out the window.

Random statement Numero Dos: There are not enough hours in the day. I have insane amonts of things piling up on my to-do list - yet I am deeply dissapointed when there are not new long blog entries on my favorite blogs. I counteract this by deciding to hop to random blogs on linked on other people’s blogs when I should be doing work. I maybe should just shoot myself in the foot! ha!

 Random Statement Numero Tres: Go Here. Play the game. Feed People. My average level was 36. I can’t believe how many times I guessed and got the words right!

 Random Statment Numbero Quatro: It’s time to go home for lunch -before I pass out, or eat my own arm. Thanks for stopping by and letting me waste a few minutes of your day!

Black Tuesday

Today is one of the saddest days ever in the life of a Packer fan.

We’ll miss you terribly, Brett!

Now excuse me while I go to wallow at my desk and maybe talk about jumping off the roof with my co-workers…

(ya’ll know we won’t actually jump, yes? But, we’ll talk about it)

Eco-Hunk: David Suzuki

David Suzuki is a Canadian hero, one of our top 10 Canadians even. He is best known for his television show The Nature Of Things airing across the world. He is a scientists and avid environmentalist. In 1990 he founded the David Suzuki Foundation which as the mission of finding a balance in the environment around us in our everyday lives.

Dr. Suzuki has his PhD in Zoology from the University of Chicago. He worked as a professor at the University of British Columbia for over 40 years until his retirement, but can still be found doing a packed lecture every now and then. He has been awarded 22 honorary degrees. Due to his love for the environment he isn’t found in too many different places. Although he purchases carbon credits his touring puts him tonnes over his carbon footprint. Thus he has stopped vacationing and attempts to appear by video conference as often as possible. His university tour of 2008 comprised of UBC and McGill.

He has been a very vocal in the fight against climate change. He has claimed that Canada should be international outlaws for reneging on Kyoto and that scientists who deny climate change are funded by big corporations. Suzuki is disgusted by these scientists who are funded from inappropriate sources because it is these skeptics and deniers that aren’t allowing the public to be convinced that climate change is an extremely pressing issue of our days.

Suzuki’s most recent big news campaign is his Nature Challenge, which I urge you all to take a look at and join. What is the challenge? It’s all pretty simple. The way you travel, what you eat, the energy you use and public action. Way to implement the challenge into your life are outlined here. Most of the thing are things that a lot of us will already do - but it’s good to reevaluate your life and see where you can improve. I for one and shutting the computer off at night, and turning the heat in the house down a couple degrees. Sure - it takes longer for me to check my email in the morning because the CP isn’t just on, and I’m slightly colder but it’s not doing me any harm.

Check the nature challenge out! David Suzuki is someone I look up to so much. He has devoted his entire life to spreading the word about climate change. He lived a hard life as a prisoner of war in Canada, but has moved on to become one of the greatest environmentalists of our time. Love!

Beautiful Art for an Important Cause

I received a letter from my friend Andrew Thornton (artist, curator, jeweler, art collector) announcing that he is holding an auction 4 of his gorgeous handmade necklaces to support his friend Rachel participating in the 3-day journey benefiting the Susan G. Komen for the Cure and National Philanthropic Trust (Breast Cancer Fund).

The necklaces were featured in Stringing Magazine. The one pictured here is made from coral among other beautiful materials and is my personal favorite. This is a great opportunity to score a beautiful piece of Andrew's art and support a really important cause, working for a cure to a cancer that has become epidemic in the U.S.

Go to Andrew's blog to find out more about it and find links to the auction pages.

A ray of sunshine at HCC (updated)?

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County OKs more disclosure, schools not so sure

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Leitner's DA choice is lightning quick

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Sublet: Subtly Sexy

Sublet’s mellow-sexy bamboo and organic cotton tops and dresses make dressing sustainable downright simple.

The genesis of the label is a reflection of how the designers of the line met-cute:

After responding to a Craigslist sublet posting during college, Inessah found herself dragging two suitcases up three flights of stairs to meet her new roommate, Tara. Finding themselves with a lot in common such as Inessah being unable to find a more permanent place, and Tara living her motto,
"The more the merrier," the initial two weeks turned into three months.

Two years later, after having worked traditional careers, Tara and Inessah missed the spontaneous community, independence and creativity they felt when subletting. So over lunch one day, they decided they would create their own permanent sublet through Sublet Clothing.

Ultimate MidWinter Cocktail

Acai berries and wheat in their native habitats

As much as I adore the four seasons, I am getting a little tired of grey skies and damp weather. Since I can’t take a Spring Break this year due to being totally overworked there’s nothing to do but chase the winter blues away with good old fashioned alcohol.

Just kidding! But for real, I recently discovered two great new organic liquors and decided to make a coconutty cocktail with them.

VeeV is the new liquor that’s made from organic acai berries. Besides it’s organicness, it’s carbon neutral as certified by Climate Clean. Antioxidant-rich acai is wild harvested (which means it’s picked from the rainforest in a sustainable way while still preserving the surrounding ecosystem). On top of all that, the distillery that makes VeeV uses wind power. And goodness me, this stuff is yummy- mildly sweet and berry-like, but with a kick, it’s great over rocks or mixed into drinks like the one below.

At the Greener Gadgets conference cocktail party, I tried Purus vodka, which is the latest organic vodka (made from 100% organic Italian wheat) to hit the market. It’s nice and smooth and makes a perfect mixer. So I did!

Cocoberry Winter Cocktail

1 shot of VeeV
1 shot Purus vodka
1/2 cup organic coconut sorbet (softened, but not melted)
juice of two blood oranges (I found organic at Trader Joe’s)

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with 2-3 cubes of ice. Shake vigorously and pour into chilled martini glasses. Garnish with orange slices. Drink immediately!

Makes two stiff drinks.

The combination of the mild, sweet flavor of the acai berry, the bite of the vodka, the sweet-tart of the blood orange juice and the rich, creaminess of the coconut made this a winner- an uber creamy martini that avoids the unhealthy fats in milk products.

If you try this, let me know what you think!

Hurricanes in Europe?

Two years ago, my husband and I were invited to a presentation by one of Germany’s top Climate Change Researchers at The Wuppertal Institute in Berlin. I forget the presenter’s name now but remember bits and pieces of what he said … mainly those things I’d never heard before.

Like that the way the climate has been changing over the last century - carbon emissions related or not (he was being diplomatic because the audience was strictly American and this was before global warming became a topic the Administration talked about) - would result first in an intense warm weather cycle throughout Europe that would occur for about a decade. The hot weather would result in fires, deadly heat waves, and devastated crops.

It sounded exactly like what happened during the summer of 2003, when I’d first lived on the continent. In Portugal, forest fires raged and in France, hundreds died from heat stroke. Though the weather hasn’t been exactly deadly warm here in Germany since then, last summer proved murderous in Italy, Croatia, Spain, and Greece, with temps over 100 degrees for days on end which produced forest fires and droughts. An early spring and mild winter meant a potato shortage (!) up here though and some seriously confused birds who returned from their southern migration early.

This expert presenter then said that the heat would be followed by an intense cold weather cycle that would prove equally, if not more devastating, as the Gulf Stream changed and pushed Arctic air down into Germany. And I’ve got to say - after a winter visit to Wisconsin, where temps dipped to -20 with a much lower wind chill, I’m so hoping that this prediction doesn’t prove true…

What’s a bit eerie, though, is that a third prediction he made, one I thought impossible, has proven twice in the last two years to be true. Prior to 2005, Europe had never seen nor experienced a hurricane. But as part of the warmer weather, Germany’s just lived through its second in two years (the first ever to make landfall on Europe was in 2005, a Category 1 that hit the Azores Islands).

Hurricane Emma started on Friday and with winds of up to 120 km/hour (that’s about 70 mph), it’s not nearly as bad as those that make landfall in the US annually. And Germany’s Baltic and North Sea coasts, including the port city of Hamburg, are barricaded against sea storms nicely, with storm walls and a series of locks and floodplains that have been successful in preventing surge damage. But the rest of the country certainly isn’t prepared for storms like this, as was shown Saturday. The country kept up business as usual - Cologners visiting the daily vegetable market, where veggies were literally flying off the shelves and travelers hopping high-speed trains that were hit by falling trees.

As someone who evacuated Hurricane Andrew just a day before it hit, I realize that Germany’s been pretty lucky to not have incurred the serious damages Florida faces every year. But if this is a sign of things to come (and if it proves Mr. Wuppertal Institute’s predictions true), I may be in need of a new home soon….

Sweet Pepita Clothing

Shannon Kline is the creator of Sweet Pepita Clothing. Using recycled fabrics from old, funky tee’s and 100% organic cotton, Sweet Pepita blends sustainability with hip, retro style. You can send Shannon a favorite old tee-shirt that you don’t want to get rid of and she will give it new life as a baby-tee. I have requested she make duds for us adult folk also but for now its just for the wee ones.

I love to sew custom baby tees. Customers send me their old favorite adult sized t-shirts and I transform them into clothing for their babies. I just read that Americans throw away an unspeakable amount of clothing every year. And I know that we all have t-shirts we’re holding on to that we’re never going to wear again. Sewing them into baby tees feels really good! We’re recycling and giving a child a piece of her parent’s history.

Olson connects the dot.coms

After the GOP primary votes were counted last week, yielding a runoff between Pete Olson and Shelley Sekula Gibbs, Olson said, "We are going to have a positive campaign with a positive message." Now, in addition to his campaign Web...