we pause for this commercial message...

This Liquid Logic water bottle (click the photo for a link) is 40 percent off today at Amazon. We have one of these and love it. It even survived an unfortunate encounter with the steel jaws of a car door -- scarred but still fully functional.

byob (of the water variety)

Going green? Bring your own water bottle... (Ignore the goofy picture of me. I must get that updated.)

color my world

I completely ripped off this recycled crayon project from this site. However, I found that 350 degrees was too much for our bunch of broken crayons. Maybe my oven is off kilter? In any event, 250 degrees for 10 minutes was plenty. We made ours in muffin tins and the kids decided they look a little like mutant Reese's peanut butter cups. As such, you should probably monitor little ones carefully.

We first discovered these homemade rainbow crayons during a homeschool class at our local art museum last spring. The kids used these on black paper and the effect was incredible.

Go scrounge under the car seats and you will probably find enough broken crayon pieces to make your own batch. Or maybe that's just us...

the reports of blogger's death have been greatly exaggerated

Many blogger sites are currently inaccessible, and mine was included in that group until a few minutes ago. If you hit a friend's site and you get the "Internet explorer is unable to open" error, please email them and let them know that this is not related to the current "blogger sites as spam" issue (that's a different can of worms that the folks at blogger are working to fix). This is related to Sitemeter. Sitemeter html needs to be removed until the issue is fixed or the site will not load.

That's all I know about html. Really.

Edited to add: OK, I know less than nothing, so don't take my word for this, but I think it has to do with Internet Explorer interacting with Sitemeter. I don't know if Microsoft is fixing this or Sitemeter or both or neither. :) And I could be wrong.

a new venture

My Ed Begley, Jr. ways are well known among my friends and family. Around our house, we are always looking for ways to reduce our negative impact on the environment, but we do have a budget. And because we have two children, my husband works full-time and I work part-time and homeschool, time is also a very limited resource.

My goal with this site is to share ideas on living deliberately -- choosing to resuse, thrift, create, recycle and reduce consumption -- and to do so with regard to the time and money involved in the process. I also consider the realties involved in this: we want a hybrid vehicle but 1. there are no hybrid vehicles available right now where we live, and 2. (ack) they are expensive. Before we replaced our upstairs heating/AC unit, we inquired about a geothermal system. We live in a neighborhood and that would require the system to be installed vertically (journey to the center of the earth-style), at a price that was prohibitively expensive. And as much as my husband wants solar panels and net metering, it is just becoming available in our state, beginning with the HGTV Green Home.

Join me in sharing ideas and greening our homes a bit at a time.