Saw this today at the mildly upscale grocery store near my house:
It’s just what you might think: a fancy, not-self-serve way to buy nuts. Nuts of all kinds. Loose, uncanned, free from can-dom. Just in case you might not want EXACTLY 3.75 ounces of dry roasted peanuts, or unsalted cashews, for example, but in fact you’d rather have 6.2 ounces, thank you very much. Well now you can.

I’m trying to visualize the marketing meeting where they came up with the name. Classic. “What shall we call it?” “Whaddya mean, ‘what shall we call it?’? We’re gonna call it the Nut Bar!”

And so they did.

An original post by Sarah Auerswald.

Albert Hofmann, the self-described “father of LSD,” has died at the age of 102. I heard about it on NPR this morning.

The man discovered it and had strong opinions about its use and abuse. And he used it himself.

And dude, he lived to 102!

Need I say it? Do the math.

An original post by Sarah Auerswald.

Dictionary.com says “…environmental design of residential and park land using various methods for minimizing the need for water use.”

Pronounced “Zere Escape”.

My OWN definition: “Gardening Escape”.

This is our front yard.

We bought our house in 1996 (12 years ago for you math fans), before we had kids, and went berserk fixing it up and landscaping it ourselves. My husband didn’t want to mow a lawn and I didn’t want to water one. (And yes, it’s very water-use friendly, but mostly I’m just lazy.)

Anyway, we were novices at the whole gardening thing, so we just went to the nursery and bought stuff and put it in the ground. We didn’t really check every time to make sure each plant was “drought-tolerant”, so inevitably, we brought home things that were too delicate for our plan of action. They might have been plants that actually needed frequent watering. Oops.

So our motto was, if it dies, don’t buy it again. Because, except for starting each plant out, we have never watered our yard. So if the plant couldn’t make it through a Los Angeles Spring, Summer and Fall before it would get a drink of water in Winter, well it just wasn’t going to live with us.

See, Los Angeles is a desert, in case you haven’t noticed – or don’t live here. (Sorry.) It’s hot and dry, and was so even in the good old pre-global-warming days. So putting in putting greens goes against nature.

Chill out, I’m not going into an anti-golfing rant here. But I for sure don’t think they belong in our front yards.

Just LOOK at the average rainfall for LA. When was the last time it rained here? I can’t remember. January? Must have happened in February… But I wouldn’t swear to it.

Anyway, here’s the picture of our house that was on the info flyer the real estate broker had out front in 1996:

And the very start of our yard work in 1997:

And here’s another shot of it today:

No watering! No mowing!

An original post by Sarah Auerswald.

I’ve been in a mortal mode lately, what with the death of an old friend, and all. So I’ve done some dwelling on it (my OWN mortality, that is), and on life in general. I do dwell occasionally.

But I also like to take action, not just dwell. So I started some long-range planning for my life. A look into the Future. Where do you see yourself in 10 years? That kind of stuff.

(Although I knew people in college –a couple who did that and I used to think they were just about the lamest. I just could even see that far into my own future, couldn’t imagine it. But they could. They actually had a 5-year plan. With steps to be taken each year. At 22 years old, don’t forget.)

But I digress.

Anyway, I was doing my long-range planning (about time, you might say, since I’m 45!), and I did the math, as they say. My oldest son will graduate from high school in 2017. My youngest son will do the same in 2021.

Holy crap. (Pardon my French.)

You want to know how old I’ll be that year? Well, I say, do the math.

An original post by Sarah Auerswald.