Gothic Granola

...Without moving to a tropical climate.  I live in the Rocky Mountains at 9,000 feet above sea level and I like living here.  Even when it's 13 degrees Fahrenheit outside during the day and especially when it's snowing.  [caption id="attachment_5333" align="aligncenter" width="287"] Wanna go for a swim?[/caption]

This is the first ever guest post hosted on my blog, by Ela Mirowski, the creator of the naturally-scented, biodegradable Ticklepaks shoe deodorizers. Check out her site: Ticklepaks.com . [caption id="attachment_2892" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Chia seeds in oatmeal[/caption]

Finally, finally, I have been able to rescue some pictures from my broken WD MyBook external hard drive, and I've reposted several posts from 2012 with pictures this time. I'm not buying WD products anymore due to lack of durability; Seagate HQ is a few miles away, so I can get "local" hard drives from Best Try, LOL. Enough meta-discussion. This is another no-recipe post. Lately, I've been making other people's recipes, and I guess it's a derivative work if I veganise/deglutenise them, but I'm not going to post the full recipes. I made peanut butter cookies and chai shortbread from  Vegan Cookies Invade your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. The PB cookies were for TC and I gave away most of the chai shortbread.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPY5P0TaC4k     "Just walk away...and there will be an end to the horror."

What you put in your body is important, no doubt. From avoiding foods treated with pesticides to minimizing added sugars , and instead cooking whole grains and leafy greens, we can choose to fuel our bodies with foods that will prolong our lives.   Generalities aside, the motivation behind this post is two-fold: one, cosmetics for cosmetic purposes, and two, cosmetics for compassionate purposes. When I became vegan in 2010, I wore makeup: eyeliner, eyeshadow, nail polish, sunscreen, and lipstick.  

Cake and smoothies, cake and smoothies...they're all I seem to have posted about lately, and they are amongst what I eat, pretty much every day.  Let's get real about energy drinks. While all the B vitamins, taurine, caffeine, and sugar in Monster give you a temporary boost (and a serious crash), energy drinks don't address the real issue(s) underlying fatigue. Don't want to go to sleep? Or do you just not want to wake up because of X, Y, Z happening the next day? Feeling powerless to solve a problem and so you can't sleep but lie awake worrying about it? Daily tasks not challenging enough so you have excess energy? Think about that the next time you find yourself reaching for that fourth cup of coffee or that Red Bull. Constricting your blood vessels with caffeine probably isn't the long-term solution to why you're feeling tired. I'm not you, so I don't know what's going on in your life. You know your life best; you have the power to adjust thin...

My gifts to others were a gift to myself this year for Solstice/Chanukkah/Christmas. I turned my writing time into beading time for the last two weeks in December. Focusing on beading let my mind wander and work out plot issues with my writings and meditate on other matters.  

Going gluten-free is not a magic bullet to health, contrary to this article from Paleo Magazine . If you have, in fact, experienced real intestinal damage at the hands of bread, pizza, cake, and beer, then your health is going to take a nosedive even after becoming gluten-free. Why? The body doesn't heal overnight.   Mmm, cake... Eww, beer...

I was right about a rant brewing, but my prescient vision was off by a week. Yes, I finally finished reading Frank Herbert's  Dune .  

“I am my own leader” read one of the affirmations I received this week from  The Virtues Project .   On Sunday when I arrived home from my walk, my aunt’s copy of  Watchmen , the graphic novel by  Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons , caught my eye.  I began to read it, knowing that it’s one of those comics I should probably have read because of the gaming/sci-fi/geek/artistic circles in which I rotate.  One slogan graffitied on a wall in an early frame stuck out: “Who will watch the Watchmen?”