my little music man

i love this picture and thought it was worthy of its own post.

uncle mark will teach him the piano, uncle jordan the drums, uncle scott the guitar and aaron an assortment of brass and woodwinds with a little help from uncle steve...

He blogs!

Or at least I aspire to.  More often I'm reading other peoples' blogging handywork as I scroll through my Google Reader feed (highly recommended for those of you who enjoy information overload).  So where do I go for updates on the world when work affords a window of opportunity?  Some favorites and recommendations:


(1) Above the Law - awesome if you're a lawyer, law student, or know someone who is and can't quite make sense of why they are the way they are.  Essentially, ATL is a legal tabloid and go-to source for hilarious anecdotes about life as lawyer


(2) Tuned In - Time magazine's James Poniewozik represents a classier take on entertainment (mainly TV) news.  I enjoy the occasional "Morning After" reviews as well as his take on current events in the media





(3) Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball - less of a blog and more of a weekly commentary for us proud political junkies.  As the title would suggest, Sabato, a political science professor at UVa, has a penchant for accurately forecasting the outcomes of elections.  The site also offers the occasional regression analysis of voting behavior, for those so inclined.  I also enjoy the "Tweets of the Week"--it's rare to get pithy political insight from a PhD. 


On the lighter side...


(4) Pearls Before Swine - a somewhat irreverent comic strip that frequently "out funnys" Dilbert, Non Sequitur and the like.  



Of course, you have to be able to handle absurd characterizations (a gun-toting sea anemone) and outrageously horrible puns.

(5) Today's Big Thing - never at work, always at home.  Sometimes hilarious (see: icy hill in San Francisco), other times best left unwatched.  Still, worth a look every so often.  Case in point? These guys:


Tack on a mass of news feeds (CNN, NPR, WSJ, etc) and blogs from friends and family, and I'd say my online diversions pretty well sum me up.  Strange how that happens.

healthy by accident

Not too long ago I signed up for something called Green B.E.A.N delivery. Available to Northern Kentucky, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Columbus Green B.E.A.N delivers organic produce from local farmers right to your door. Every other Wednesday I find $35 worth of fresh organic fruits and vegetables waiting for me on my front porch and I love it.

I particularly like the vegetables. When I'm in the grocery store I frequently become frustrated with the desire to eat healthier greener things but hardly ever buying any because of how it looks or feeling lost as to how to incorporate it into dinner. But for some reason when all those beautiful vegetables show up at my door I have no trouble not only adding them to our diet but structuring our meals around them. 


It's also a great way to try new things. Every week a couple of days before delivery my order is put together and made available on line for me to see, then if I choose I can sub out things for produce that better suits our family (read "it's harder for some of us to eat vegetables than others..."). Well last week I forgot to check and edit so when we opened our box we found this:

It's red chard though it looks a lot like rhubarb and we had no idea what to do with it. So what do we do when we don't know? We google! It turns out that the green leaves are the part you eat and they taste like a more delicate spinach. We did some more googling and found a recipe that was surprisingly delicious. It was accidentally the healthiest, and the yummiest, meal we had all week.