Blog – Misc. Tidbits
We get, on a daily basis, people trying to spam our blog.
I will tell you right now that we have safeguards in place that will not allow comments to be automatically posted. I have to manually approve each and every one before it will show up here.
If you sign up as a subscriber and your email bounces back (I get a report) then you will automatically be deleted from our blog.

I run a clean ship here and I will not allow spam posts on my blog!

I went through and checked out every link under our Favorite Vendor catagory. There was a handful or so websites that for whatever reason are no more so I’ve deleted them from our blog.

Is This Real?
U3-x
Mobility Prototype
Just how frigging cool (and a little on the weird side!) is this???!!!

Have You Voted Yet?
Seamless in Seattle
At the moment I’m torn between two contestants.
Waiting to hear back from designer graduate daughter to get her views!

Body Spray
I was in the store the other day and was looking to add to my small collection of body sprays.

Even though I knew better I picked up and smelled the Vanilla Cupcake one.
REALLY!??
You really think I want to smell like a vanilla cupcake!!!
NOT!
I have a bad enough sweet tooth as it is without smelling like a bakery all damn day.
I chose a cucumber/melon and a floral something-or-other.
Who decides on these scents anyway!

Puppy Update
We have had our new puppy for a week now and he has settled in nicely!

We decided on naming him Brodie (he looks like a Brodie doesn’t he!) and are still working on his AKC registered name. I have also signed up for a puppy headstart class that will begin next month.

Maggie (English Bull Terrier) is our extremely alpha female and we had to watch her very closely the first few days to make sure she was ok with Brodie. She tends to be a little (ok..a lot!) overbearing but he is learning to read her quite well. She is more relaxed now than in the beginning and is actually playing with him and allowing him to lay with her! We don’t leave them alone unsupervised and put Brodie in his (huge) crate (that he will grow into) when we aren’t home. This also is supposed to help with potty training.

In the past we fed one type of dog food (adult) and bought the 50 lb. size. We just left the bag standing in the corner and both dogs would (suprisingly) leave it alone.

Now we have two types of dog food..the adult and now puppy chow (our vet highly/strongly recommended feeding puppy chow the first year as it has stuff in it a puppy needs to grow properly) and yes, we bought the bigger bags!

I just had both bags (open) sitting in a corner until Maggie knocked over the puppy chow bag spewing puppy food everywhere! I could tell this was not going to work! I went to the pet store to find dog food containers big enough for 50 lbs. of food and they were over $35.00 apiece and since we needed two that would have been over $70.00!

Thinking I could find a cheaper alternative I went to the local FM and found very nice stacking bin type containers for only….
get this….
$12.00 apiece!

Ya hear that hubs???
I saved us $46.00!!!

Here are a few pictures that I took this week.
More will be coming…I promise!

Brodie - April 2010

Brodie & Maggie

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

China’s famed Pearl River under denim threat
By Emily Chang, CNN

Guangzhou, China (CNN) — On the banks of the Pearl River, vendors set up shop daily at the Luwei village market. Mr. Liu wanders through the stalls at dusk, selecting vegetables and fish from the local fishmonger for dinner. As the sun sets on the murky river, he marvels at the disturbing transformation of the waterway he calls home.

“The water has turned dark and black,” he says.

“People used to swim in it,” a cabbage hawker says across the market. “We know it’s polluted, but what can we do?”

The Pearl River has sustained Chinese civilization for ages, but over the last few decades, civilization has not been kind to the river. It has become a dumping ground for debris, floating among massive algae blooms and even pig carcasses. Agricultural runoff is one of the river’s biggest threats, next to industrial pollution.

The river is the lifeblood of the “world’s factory floor,” thousands of factories that produce the world’s toys, mobile phones, computers, textiles and more.

It is also the blue jean capital of the world.

The township of Xintang, nestled in the northeastern part of the river delta, is an amalgamation of textile, denim and dyeing facilities. Inside, workers snap buttons on jeans so fast you can barely see their hands move.

The Chinese government estimates Xintang produces 200 million pairs of jeans per year including 60 different foreign brands. That is just under half of the 450 million pairs of jeans sold annually in the United States.

But what blue-jean clad consumers everywhere probably don’t realize is the process by which denim is made may be poisoning China’s water supply.

Satellite images reveal the part of the Pearl River adjacent to Xintang’s blue jean factories indeed runs black. The nearby riverbank is piled with trash, including denim scraps.

Like most textiles, denim-making starts with plain white cotton. At the Jinxin Dyeing Plant, bales of it are piled up, then lowered into boiling vats of dye. The cotton emerges steaming, doused in that deep indigo blue color we all know well.

But the process releases tons of wastewater, a cocktail of dye, bleach and detergent. Foamy blue wastewater pools in a channel that winds around Jinxin factory property.

According to the factory boss, Li Zhongquan, most of the water is recycled. “If we didn’t pay attention to the environment, the Communist Party would shut us down,” Li said.

He later admits some of the wastewater is not recycled, but discharged, and claims he does not know where it goes.

You don’t have to look far for a clue. Pipes at the edge of factory property lead directly into the Pearl River.

“The problem with those pipes is that they don’t have labeling,” said Greenpeace’s China country manager, Edward Chan. “You don’t know what is coming out from them. Some of it might be domestic discharge from the dormitories, but it could also include industrial waste.”

Greenpeace’s recent report “Poisoning the Pearl,” indicates a fair share of factories may be flagrantly dumping their wastewater into the river.

The organization surveyed the contents of pipes from five different factories, including a textile factory and found that all five contained excessive amounts of heavy metals, organic pollutants and chemicals.

According to Dr. Tony Lu, Chief Medical Officer at Guangzhou’s International SOS Clinic, these kind of toxins can be seriously hazardous to human health.

“If there are a lot of heavy metals, they are neurotoxic, carcinogenic, they disrupt the endocrine system,” Lu said. “They cause cancer of different organs.”

Greenpeace reported it discovered heavy metals like manganese, which can also be associated with brain damage.

But Lu said it was difficult to link industrial pollution to adverse health conditions along the Pearl River. The area has never had a documented outbreak of illness along the lines of “cancer villages” that have been discovered in other parts of China.

However, experts insist water pollution is a major challenge China has to confront — or risk a massive threat to its water supply in the future.

“The number one problem (China) face(s) is water pollution,” said Deborah Seligsohn of the World Resources Institute. “The textile industry is one of China’s larger industries and one that uses a lot of water so it’s traditionally had a lot of wastewater problems.”

The Chinese government acknowledges it has a lot of work to do to clean it up. In February, the government revealed a detailed survey of water pollution indicating that it was twice as bad in 2007 as official figures suggested.

The Guangzhou Water Resources Bureau says it plans to spend $5 billion to improve wastewater treatment ahead of the Asian Games that will be held there this year.

In response to allegations of water pollution among denim producers, deputy director Wu Xuewei said: “If they’re violating standards, we’ll treat them as criminals and they’ll be punished.”

He added that the water department intends to implement and enforce a series of regulations, requiring companies to pass wastewater tests and imposing random inspections. He vowed factories will be fined, prosecuted or shut down if they exceed pollution limits.

But, when pressed, he claimed that regulation could be difficult due to the sheer volume of factories in the Pearl River delta.

“Of course we know what’s in the pipes, every factory is supposed to register, but there are so many,” he said. “What’s exactly in the wastewater, I don’t know.”

Environmentalists say the biggest problem is that industrial pollution in a river as big as the Pearl can poison the entire ecosystem and put the people who live in it at risk.

In a fishing village along the Pearl River, a villager wades through a dirty pond and catches fish with his bare hands.

“It is a very good fish,” he said. “I eat fish every day.”

If he doesn’t eat the fish for dinner tonight, he says he will send it to a local market where residents like Mr. Liu might buy it, not knowing whether or not it’s contaminated.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Acidic oceans worsening, experts warn
CO2 impact coming faster than seas can adapt, they say

Manmade emissions of carbon dioxide are making our oceans more acidic — and thus threatening corals and shellfish — at a rate unseen in at least 800,000 years, a blue-ribbon panel of scientists reported Thursday.

“Ocean acidification is a growing global problem that will intensify with continued CO2 emissions and has the potential to change marine ecosystems and affect benefits to society,” the panel warned in its report for the National Research Council and Congress.

Oceans absorb about a third of manmade CO2, a process that reduces CO2′s impact on temperatures but which also decreases the pH of the seas, thus making them more acidic. pH is a measure of how alkaline or acidic something is. A pH of 7 is neutral, while higher numbers are more alkaline and lower numbers are more acidic.

“The average pH of ocean surface waters has decreased by about 0.1 unit — from about 8.2 to 8.1 — since the beginning of the industrial revolution,” the scientists said in noting earlier research. Moreover, models project “an additional 0.2-0.3 drop by the end of the century, even under optimistic scenarios,” they added.

“It is important to note that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is rising too rapidly for natural … processes to maintain the pH of the ocean,” the experts stated. “As a consequence, the average pH of the ocean will continue to decrease as the surface ocean absorbs more atmospheric CO2.”

Congress recently passed a law to fund federal research into acidification but the panel said more needs to be done, and more quickly, because specific impacts on specific species are still not well understood.

“Despite the potential for socioeconomic impacts to occur in coral reef systems, aquaculture, fisheries, and other sectors, there is not currently enough information to assess these impacts, much less develop plans to mitigate or adapt to them,” the experts wrote.

“A global network of robust and sustained chemical and biological observations will be necessary to establish a baseline and to detect and predict changes attributable to acidification,” they added.

Shrinking oysters
Testing done so far is not hopeful. One of the most recent studies has been on oysters along the West Coast.

Brian Gaylord, a biological oceanographer at the Bodega Marine Laboratory of the University of California at Davis, looked at the impact of more acidic oceans on larval and juvenile Olympia oysters.

Even with small changes in acidity, seawater becomes corrosive to the shells of marine organisms. “Similar to what happens in carbonated soda, increasing carbon dioxide in seawater makes it more acidic,” he said in a statement summarizing his research,

His testing used lab seawater with present-day CO2 ocean concentrations, as well as lab seawater that used higher CO2 levels that scientists say could occur by 2100.

In the higher CO2 environment, the larval shells at day 9 of their growth were 16 percent smaller than those reared in the present-day seawater conditions.

A week later, the difference was 41 percent and the smaller oysters never caught up.

“One and a half months after being transferred back to normal seawater, juveniles that had come from the high carbon dioxide environment were still 28 percent smaller than oysters reared for the entire experiment in control conditions,” Gaylord said.

Worldwide, oysters have already been impacted by development along coastlines — 85 percent of shellfish reefs have been lost, taking with them valuable services like filtering water and creating natural buffers from storms and even boat wakes.

“Oysters have gone extinct in many areas, especially in North America, Australia and Europe,” said David Garrison, director of the National Science Foundation’s biological oceanography program, which funds Gaylord’s research.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

18 Homemade Chocolate Cake Recipes

Whether you’re making a special-occasion cake from scratch or an after-dinner treat, these easy chocolate recipes look seriously impressive. We’ve got German chocolate cake, no-fail fudge frosting, simple decorating tips, and more.

This one is for me!

Deep Dark Chocolate Cake
From Country Living

So intensely chocolaty, a small slice will satisfy your sweet cravings.

Ingredients

2 cup(s) all-purpose flour
1 cup(s) cocoa
2 cup(s) granulated sugar
1 teaspoon(s) baking soda
1 teaspoon(s) baking powder
1 teaspoon(s) salt
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon(s) pure vanilla extract
1 cup(s) sour cream
1/2 cup(s) canola oil
1 teaspoon(s) white vinegar
1 cup(s) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup(s) raspberry jam, strained and seeds discarded
1 1/2 cup(s) confectioners’ sugar

Directions

Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter two 8-inch-round cake pans and line bottoms with parchment paper. Combine flour, cocoa, granulated sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together in a large bowl.

Add eggs, vanilla, sour cream, oil, vinegar (for leavening and a more tender cake), and 1 cup hot water and mix with a wooden spoon until batter is smooth.

Pour batter into prepared pans and bake until a wooden skewer, inserted into cake center, comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes. Cool cakes in pans 20 minutes; release from pans and cool completely on wire racks.

Beat butter and jam together using an electric mixer set on medium speed until fluffy. Add confectioners’ sugar and beat until smooth.

Spread filling between 2 cake layers and frost with Superquick Chocolate Buttercream.

Chocolate Cake

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Cocoa Powder

Always on a quest for entertaining (and cheap!) toys to keep our Umbrella Cockatoo happy I came across Premium Pinecones Ltd. for a safe, clean source of …what else….Pinecones!

I had no idea how many Lemon would go through so I bought two bags. So far he still has the original three still in his cage.

Lemon can be quite picky and so far has shown little interest in the pinecones even though I stuffed them full of crackers, nuts and dried fruit.

I know however it is just a matter of time before he really discovers them resulting in total destruction!

While you’re ordering your pinecones you might want to order some Pinon Pine Nuts as well (Lemon loves these!).

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Yea, Ok….
So it’s not like we REALLY need another ‘collection’ right?

But how fun is this!!!!!

Beverage-type scented soap!

HA!
(I admit I couldn’t resist this scent line and believe it or not I have two more scent lines in mind!)

First up in our new Spirits Collection….

Cola Float!

Can’t really say much more than that!

A carbonated cola (think Coke) scented soap.
You can actually smell the carbonation!

We are in the testing phase for the Gin Martini and the Southern Comfort all of which are nose-tingling!

Cola Float Soap

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

If you are friends with me on my personal Facebook page then you know I have a secret that I was going to reveal tomorrow.

However, it’s Friday Free For All which means I can post anything I want…not to mention that I find it very difficult to keep secrets!

So without further ado…
I would like to do a mini-introduction of our soon-to-be new member of the family!

(breeder’s picture)

Ok…Let’s hear it….
AWWWWWW……How cute is that!!!

This weekend we will be bringing ‘Joey’ (temporary name) home. He is a 2 month old American Staffordshire Terrier from champion bloodlines.

It’s been a long time since we have had a puppy so hubs and I have a lot of shopping to do:

Puppy Food
Crate (for crate training)
Puppy Toys (and lots of them!)
(and anything else I can talk hubby into buying!)

We will also need to come up with a suitable name for such a beautiful dog. I’m not sure if there is a protocol to follow using past names in his pedigree (will have to ask the breeder about that!) but I’m sure we can come up with something wonderful!

He will be micro-chipped and neutered.

Major training is being planned and I already have a training academy picked out for:
Puppy Training
Obedience Training
Canine Good Citizens Training
Agility (maybe!)

So that’s it for now.
Needless to say our entire weekend is going to be busy!

And I can assure you…
I fully plan on boring you to tears with cute puppy pictures as he grows and matures!

(We recently had a very painful family loss which I am not currently able to talk about. I’m 100% certain that ‘Joey’ will fill the huge void our family has been and still is going through.)

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Reaping the Urban Harvest: Saving Wasted Fruit & Eating Well

Written by Michael Ricciardi

Seattle’s Community Fruit Tree Harvest organizes to gather and share the city’s annual bounty of free fruit.

Seattle’s long-standing nickname is ‘The Emerald City’ due primarily to its abundance of urban trees and assorted foliage, much of which remains green all year round. A large percentage of the seasonal greenery is comprised of fruit trees like cherry, plum, pear and apple. And sadly, whether on private land or public, a huge volume of this perfectly edible food falls to the ground and rots…

Local Seattle organizations team up to prevent wasted food and to share the bounty.

In many cases, the fallen fruit is so plentiful that sidewalks and streets become covered with the soon-to-be-mashed-up fruit.

This wasted harvest has prompted many local residents to organize and harvest these abundant urban “crops”. The Community Fruit Tree Harvest was created to put an end to the massive waste of fruit food, providing central gathering places for urban harvesters to drop of their fruit surplus, and even distributing the food to food banks and homeless shelters.

The harvest is coordinated by several local orgs including Solid Ground, City Fruit, and Community Harvest of Southwest Seattle
The community effort matches willing harvesters with folks who have unpicked fruit trees.

And there is no shortage of local fruit trees to pick. In my neighborhood alone (Wallingford), we have a plentiful supply of cheery trees, plum trees and pear trees. Each fruit season, since moving here in 2000, I have gathered up a bag or two of delicious dwarf plums and red cherries–always regretting not gathering more, knowing that so many would end up rotting on the ground. And each fall, I also gather pears from my neighbor’s pear tree, which conveniently over-hangs into our yard.

Information on all aspects of urban harvesting, including growing organic food, can be found at Urban Farm Hub which covers the urban agriculture movement in the Puget Sound region.

Of course, many folks harvest the fruit independently for their own needs. This works fine for fruit trees and berry bushes on public land, but as far as private land (like your neighbor’s unharvested pear tree), it is recommended that you get permission first.

If you are concerned about this wasted bounty of fruit, and even herbs and vegetables, but, there is no local organization in your town or city, consider contacting Neighborhoodfruit, which is a ‘growing” national movement that advises and supports urban harvesting.

Alternately, if you are motivated to start up your own urban harvest, Seattle’s Solid Ground has a free handbook for you called GATHER IT! How to Organize an Urban Fruit Tree Harvest (compiled by Gail Savina).
For local folks, Solid Ground also publishes a PDF formatted newsletter ‘Lettuce Link’ which contains a map of prime urban harvesting areas in Seattle.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Pizza Plenty! 8 Easy Homemade Pie Recipes from Martha Stewart

Pizza pies made in your own kitchen will almost always cost you less dough and be more healthful than their pizzeria-born brethren. Most of these easy pizza recipes call for ready-made dough, which can be found either in the refrigerated or frozen section of your supermarket. Add tomato sauce, the toppings of your choice, and a little oven time, and you’ll be adopting a new pizza motto: Down with delivery, up with homemade!

I love barbecued chicken pizza but I have never tried to make my own.

Check out this recipe!

Barbecued Chicken Pizza

If you have a pizza stone, place it in the preheating oven; after assembling the pie on the baking sheet, slide it onto the stone, and bake as directed. Look for ready-made pizza dough in your grocery’s freezer section; it is usually sold in packages of two one-pound balls. Or, ask your local pizzeria for a pound of fresh dough.

Ingredients

Olive oil, for baking sheet
All-purpose flour, for dusting
1 pound(s) store-bought frozen pizza dough, thawed
2 cup(s) shredded cooked chicken
1/2 cup(s) store-bought barbecue sauce
2 cup(s) shredded Monterey Jack cheese
1 large zucchini, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced
1 small onion, halved and thinly sliced
Coarse salt
Ground pepper

Directions

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Lightly oil a large baking sheet; set aside.
On a lightly floured work surface, use a rolling pin and your hands to roll and stretch dough to a 15-by-10-inch oval (if dough becomes too elastic to work with, let rest a few minutes). Transfer to prepared baking sheet.
In a medium bowl, combine chicken and barbecue sauce. Leaving a 1-inch border, scatter chicken mixture evenly over dough; sprinkle with cheese, then zucchini and onion. Season with salt and pepper.
Bake until crust is golden and cheese is melted, about 20 minutes. Serve immediately.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Pizza Stone

Soap making involves (in basic terms) mixing oils/fats with an alkali (sodium hydroxide – otherwise known as lye) resulting in a saponification process that turns the above mixture into a nice, hard bar of soap.

Fragrance oils, essential oils as well as colorant (natural & synthetic) can be added for eye and nose appeal.

During the first 24 hours the raw soap will heat up..just how hot will depend on whether fragrance oils or essential oils are used. It has been my experience that fragrance oils heat up much quicker and hotter than fragrance oils.

Sometimes the entire soap block will heat up completely and other times the heat does not quite reach to the outer edges of the soap.

This heating is also known as gelling….
Sometimes you get a good gel….
And sometimes you don’t!

You can mix the ingredients at a low temperature and then not insulate the molds resulting in not gelling at all.

Or you can force the gel by putting your filled soap mold in an oven at a low temperature.

We chose to do what comes naturally to the soap in any specific scent. Most of the time our batches gel completely but other times (again depending on the fragrance used) we will have a partial gel.

Gelling or not gelling does not effect the soap in any way, shape or form other than what it looks like. It is still soap and performs like soap!

Below you will see two different soaps both of which have a partial gel. The lighter area in the corners did not gel.

Gel Vs Ungel

Gel Vs Ungel Soap

Again, whether the soap gels or not has no effect on the smell or performance of the soap!

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com