door-shopping, healthy snacks

re: photo on the right. On the way to the house this past weekend, we saw this Starbucks sign. Is it just me, or is a "REMEMBER SUMMER" ad in June a bit odd?

Just over one month until we actually move into our New House. One of the rooms we're renovating is the master bedroom, which currently is open to the rest of the house. We're putting in a wall and a door for privacy and soundproofing, mainly at my insistence; I tend to wake up earlier than Jeff in the mornings, and want to be able to actually use the rest of the house without worrying about waking him up.

So on the weekend we went door-shopping (our friend Ray helped). Decisions to be made: number of doors (we went with double), type of wood, stain (decision to be made later), style of door, type of glass panels, number of glass panels, type of handle bla bla bla augh.

Both of us have been feeling pretty overwhelmed by the number of decisions to be made during this whole process. Started out with the Big Decision, of course (which house), but now the zillions of little decisions are gradually being whittled down.

I *SO* cannot wait until all the decisions have been made, at least enough that we can finally move in.



I'm very much into leftovers these days; Jeff's had to work late quite a bit these days so I'm on my own for meals. I tend to cook something big at the beginning of the week and live on the leftovers the rest of the week. Last week, I made a roast chicken and a big batch of Turkish kisir (bulghur salad).

My favourite drink recently is iced tea. I like herbal teas in general and have been experimenting with brewing tea then chilling it, sometimes combining different types. So far my favourites are licorice-mint, green iced tea and ginger-peach iced tea. I don't add sugar, just drink it straight, and I try to limit how much caffeinated iced tea I make.

My favourite snack these days is slices of cucumber, each with a dab of white miso. Yum. I'm a heavy snacker, by the way, grazing throughout the day, keeping meals small. The challenge is to keep snacks healthy and interesting (yes, baby carrots are healthy but if I eat too many of them, I want to chew my own head off), especially since I work at home.

So here's a survey:

What are your favourite healthy snacks?
I'll compile a list of results and post it in an upcoming Blatherings.

Some reader feedback from recent Blatherings:

Sherman:

"Pollination gets a bit complicated, Debbie. Some plants are self-pollinating, so you don't really need insects to do the fun stuff. For those who need pollinators, until recently you could generally count on bees, wasps, and other pollinators to do the job, though you could help by hand-pollinating. (In our yard, very few of the pollinators are hive bees. Most appear to be wasps and non-hive bees.)

Recently, though, there's been a vicious mite population that's been destroying hundreds of commercial hives in North America and will probably make a bunch of produce much more expensive in the next year or two. That's rather scary because, yes, flowers that are not in self-propagating plants will not germinate unless pollinated."

Margaret:

"If a particular flower doesn't get pollinated, it just dries up and falls off and doesn't make seeds. Which may be why lots of plants make clusters of flowers. If every flower in the cluster got pollinated, the clump of fruit would break off the branch-end. So there's slack in the system to allow for the bees missing some flowers."

Scott S.:

"Wow, great pictures of the barbeque. I sure wish I was Debbie Ohi's friend so I could hang out with such cool people. :-)"

Funny guy, that Scott Snyder.

;-)

By the way, congrats to Scott & Amanda on their recent babynews!

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