Good and Bad

Good: popcorn and chocolate after dinner snack- that's popcorn and a bite of chocolate to quickly follow. Repeat. Rearranging successfully! Growing into super stinking cute clothes that are so so snuggly! (Fiona, not me) New season of Fringe. *Was ok with it.

Bad: New season of Grey's Anatomy. Max under my feet constantly! Getting needier every day. But I am not walking him twice a day like he's used to. Bad bad Mom. Growing out of clothes already. (Fiona, not me). Got a bad grade but... go above to *

Vegan Pesto

Ever heard of nutritional yeast? Yes? Well, not me, but that's because I am a really unadventurous cook. Wish I wasn't but I'm working on it. So that is all you need differently to make vegan pesto and believe you me, it tastes exactly the same as regular pesto! Everyone is all down on vegan diets because it is so scary to imagine life without cheese-and yes, cheese substitutes rarely make the grade. But get some nutritional yeast at the store-I got it from Tidal Creek in their bulk bins. Any major grocery likely has it I guess. I've never looked. Anyway, so make pesto just like usual but add the yeast in place of cheese and voila! It's so yum and has no animal products in it. That's my dinner tonight that I will share with my friend Hole. And I plan on making a bunch to freeze. Apparently with upcoming baby I should have frozen dinner stuff ready...that's what they say anyway.

Get on Twitter!

Family and and friends,

David will be using Twitter to communicate updates and photos for Harley's entrance to the world. You don't have to be tech savvy to use Twitter-and it's free-and you can cancel it whenever if you are anti-social networking. But it's super easy to get info out to everyone this way.

So go to twitter.com and sign up. Then do a peoplesearch for David Grace and emilyrosegrace and click on the follow button for each of us.

If you have a smart phone, get the twitter app and it'll automatically tell you when you have a new posting. If not, go to twitter.com to see our postings.

It's also a cool way to get updates on what's going on in your community, in the arts scene and in the news and weather. But whatever. It's what my internship is about this summer, so I am totally engrossed in all things Twitter.

Let me know if you have any problems!

Official Food, Inc. Movie Site - Hungry For Change? - Trailer and Photos

Official Food, Inc. Movie Site - Hungry For Change? - Trailer and Photos

I became a totally vegetarian on 7-7-07 after watching Fast Food Nation on the Live Earth Day. I hadn't eaten much meat anyway before that, but what little I did eat was just disgusting to me after seeing that movie. Not so much the animal torture and cows standing in ankle deep feces, but the images of meat packaging plant employees getting seriously injured on the job and even being killed by the dangerous machinery in the plants kept replaying in my mind. It's just not worth it. And the environmental impact of meat for consumption is unbelievable.

I live 2 hours from the largest slaughterhouse in the WORLD-Smithfield Corp. It's pretty much where everyone in the world gets bacon and pork products. And it is a poor poor community with horrific pollution from animal waste runoff. Good ol' NC.

So I am trying to lessen my carbon footprint in the biggest way possible by not supporting the meat industry at all. Some of my friends say they just can't imagine life without bacon. So be it. Eat bacon, but cut out something else. Anything. Even a little bit can collectively make a huge difference. I went to see Food Inc. last night with two of our meat eating friends who are gradually starting good environmental habits like planting a vegetable garden and using their own grocery bags. They are so cute and tell us every time they realize they can do something else and how it's actually pretty easy and fun. These are two of the bacon people who announced to me after the movie last night that yes, they actually do want to lessen their meat consumption and will stop complaining about how much it costs to eat locally and organically-it is worth the cost. Amazing.

The thing is that this movie was not like Fast Food Nation-it wasn't scare tactics and shocking images. (There were some very sad clips of chicks getting handled pretty harshly though). It was educational and talked about not just meat but about agriculture of all kinds and how huge corporations have their hands in politicians pockets (and are often the same people-CEOs and Senators and heads of the FDA) so deep that there is zero oversight and such a conflict of interest in what is best for citizens. We are kept ignorant about what is in food and where it comes from in order to protect the profits of these multinational food corps who have long since closed down family farms all over the world.

So I feel smarter, a little more empowered and pretty dang hopeful by the large turnout at this movie last night. I have a feeling the farmer's market will be a madhouse this weekend but I will most definitely be there.

It's only 90 minutes. Go see it. Or put it in your Netflix queue.

Jon and Kate Sighting in Wilmington

David saw Jon and Kate plus all 8 walking down third street in Wilmington yesterday! Next time you see him, you can touch him and feel special :)

Atlantis, here I come...

My doctoral classes ended last week and we started a new session this week. So much for a summer break! Two classes, one about technology, one about poverty-very cool but holy workload! They end in 4 weeks so major assignments are due constantly with a ton of reading and online videos.

I thought I had smartly planned out the assignments for this week so I would escape to Atlantis this weekend for our babymoon without the overhanging dread of having something due. I worked every day this week to prepare. I even scambled during commercial breaks of Grey's last night to finish a web posting. I slept soundly last night...

To only be welcomed with an email from one professor this morning asking where my assignment was that was due last night. Yup, I turned in the wrong one early. The one I finished wasn't due till Monday. Ugh. So I am already behind. But I just buckled down, focused little at work and just finished part of it.

Why am I doing this to myself? Why must I always be in school? I don't know. It's like saying why I run. It's frustrating, dreadful sometimes and I always feel great when I accomplish something. And it will give me a little pay raise when it's over. And I will be a doctor-that's just too cool. But I hope I can get it all done before 3:00 so we do nothing but relax this weekend.

David keeps sending me text messages every hour with a countdown to departure. :) This picture below says it all. It is really that beautiful there. Send us some sunshine and warmth! I can't wait to try on my maternity bathing suit! Oh, good news, speaking of my thunder thighs-no weight gain this week and I am where I should be weight wise now and measurement wise-just like my big sister...awwww.

Not Worth It!

I was so proud last week to have grocery shopped last week for $99 with LOTS of stuff. I focused on the buy one get one free things-which really means buy one for half off and you don't have to get two (just learned this wonderful news from a friend and apparently everyone already knows this but whatever). So despite the fact that I have put on some baby weight a tad faster than recommended, I was eager to see what ice cream was on sale. Breyers? Edy's? Maybe some B&J's? Nope to all. The only one was Mayfield ice cream. Never heard of it? Yeah, me neither but they had a huge selection so thought it can't be all that bad. So I got some coffee ice cream, because how do you screw that up?

Later...

<---- fake flavor fine print

I took out my Mayfield coffee ice cream after dinner when I noticed some fine print on the lid-artificial flavors added---what? Why would anyone need to add artificial flavors to coffee ice cream? But whatever. So with the first taste I realized what a dreadful error I had made. It tasted like saccharine and radiation poisoning and coffee. So so sad! I would have done anything at that moment for some Breyer's coffee-and I felt foolish thinking that Mayfield would compare. So I did some research and here's the next thing I will try when I see it: Five by Haagan Dazs-every flavor has only 5 ingredients and it is all natural baby!

So, lesson learned- it was not so much the money I wasted on this BARGAIN but the major let down of being in my pjs with my mug and towel of nasty ice cream.